“Integral Education” is a video made by Mónica de Felipe, a law graduate who is also a therapist and an expert in Communication from the University of Granada, and who proposes a reflection on what is really the role of parents and educators in The development of children.
It invites us to think about children and our role in their education, understanding them not as glasses to fill with knowledge, but as trees to help in their growth, discovering the mistakes we can make in their upbringing.
And is that "nobody tells a tree how to grow and yet ..."
Life makes its way through them and they need to smell, touch, suck, look, hear ... In the first years of life, the child relates to the world through the senses. We put the children in a school and, in a thirty-meter classroom, we tell them what happens outside, in life. We explain to them what trees are like and force them to paint trees and write their parts in a notebook, but we don't allow them to have the direct experience of feeling a tree: touch it, contemplate it, smell it, suck it, hear the wind in its branches ... But the Life makes its way through them. And they need to experience reality for themselves. Then we tell them what red and blue make purple; that yellow and red together make orange ... and we do not allow them to try, we snatch one of the greatest satisfactions this life has: check, try, experience for yourself.
By teaching marking what is right or wrong we deprive them of the vital experience of error and self-discovery. However, if we allow them to rehearse and make mistakes on their own, they will learn in a natural and experiential way.
Today's parents and educators can change the paradigm, also learning from the mistakes of our elders and our own experience, letting our children, like trees, discover for themselves. It is a model of Integral education that expresses all the wealth of experience and human learning. Worth it.
