“In nature, formal schooling has no function.”
As all the other kids in our school district race to a plethora of after school activities from sports to violin to Kumon, my sons sit in the park and play with sand. My older son was the slowest reader in his second grade class–some of the kids were reading books that my mom used to read to me when I was in second grade. like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
One father told me that if I didn’t get my sons in a well-coached sports program before they were eight years old, then they would have no chance of a college scholarship.
I felt like I was inhibiting my sons’ growth and potential until I came across this passage in Masanobu Fukuoka’s One-Straw Revolution:
…to the extent human society separates itself from a life close to nature, schooling becomes necessary. In nature, formal schooling has no function.
In raising children, many parents make the same mistake I made in the orchard at first. For example, teaching music to children is as unnecessary as pruning orchard trees. A child’s ear catches the music. The murmuring of a stream, the sound of frogs croaking by the riverbank, the rustling of leaves in the forest, all these natural sounds are music–true music. But when a variety of disturbing noises enter and confuse the ear, the child’s pure, direct appreciation of music degenerates. If left to continue along that path, the child will be unable to hear the call of a bird or the sound of the wind as songs. That is why music education is thought to be beneficial to the child’s development.
The child who is raised with an ear pure and clear may not be able to play the popular tunes on the violin or piano, but I do not think this has anything to do with the ability to hear true music or to sing. It is when the heart is filled with song that the child can be said to be musically gifted.
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One of the effects I see of separating children from nature and putting them in the stress-filled containers of academics and athletics is a lack of attunement with their natural feelings of compassion and kindness. For this reason, I choose to fill my sons’ hearts with song, even if it means they will be the bottom of the class or never get an athletic scholarship.
Photo:Makala Kozo
Thank you for this article: You make me feel like a normal parent. We have two kids ages 6 & 8 and we do not over schedule their lives. Yet we are asked a lot by other parents, what do your kids do for clubs, sports etc. right now they play, we go for walks and in the Summer they are swim lessons and in the winter we ski as a family. That is when we are asked about how are kids are going to find out what they want to do? I respond that they are kids and they… Read more »