we will be touching on areas we have hit before but with a slightly
different ending…
there are schools of thought in regards to whether we
have innate idea’s or do we gain knowledge via experience…
I stand with the experience group…if you think about it,
we gain all our knowledge with experience…
look at children… they must be taught everything…
from what is heat and cold to learning to separate
themselves from other people… experience teaches children
they are separate entities from other people…and we must teach children
1 + 1 = 2… and basic point of language… now some have made the argument
that children learning language is “innate”… now that depends on how you
define innate…I believe that language is only innate in a the sense
that a million years of speaking has rewritten the code within the brain
and thus has allowed speaking… but, I have heard it said that children learn
to speak language “perfectly” and that is clearly not true…if that were
true, we wouldn’t need to have children take years and years of English, for
example… we spend time with children learning such things as the, to be verb…
I am, you are, he/she/it is, we are, you are, they are… if language with innate,
why must we spend so much time learning such basic things as I am and you are…
and if math were innate, then why do we spend years teaching math?
I recall my youth of 1 + 1 =2 and 1 + 2 = 3 and 1 + 3 = 4… if this is innate, we wouldn’t
have spent years, YEARS, learning this stuff…
what I think happens is this… people forget their childhood, forget the years spent
learning all the crap we need to know to become adults…
it is easy to claim we have innate idea’s when we are adults because
we have forgotten our long youth of learning such things as language
and math… a child has to be taught everything… what are fingers,
what is colors, what is 1, what is hot, what is mom, what is grandpa,
what is light, why do you think children have so many questions about
things… why do birds fly? where do children come from? why is the sky blue?
they don’t know anything, anything at all… and it must be taught to them…
now some things are instinct such as the flight or fight instinct we have or
our natural fear of falling…
now for example, people might bring up this idea of children having
dreams or nightmares of monsters under the bed… but like everything
monsters under the bed is learn, try reading a children’s book, it is full of
terrors and monsters and creatures… no wonder children have fears of
the monster under the bed… they learn that from children’s books or
on TV or in the movies… think about children’s movies… they are full
of monsters and terrors…
would a child that hasn’t read a children’s book or seen a children movie,
would that child still have monsters under the bed? I don’t think so…
the children experienced the monster and then by imagination, put that monster
under the bed or in the closet… the child cannot create a monster
from just the thoughts in their head… the monster needs to be experienced
for the child to put it under the bed…
now if you want to create different people, then you must change the
experiences of children… we become who we are by experiences
and by having different experiences we can change people…
for the most part, we know that those people who engage in violence,
either domestic violence or random violence were exposed to violence as
children… they experienced violence and they return to that violence
they experienced…mass killers were quite often as children exposed
to violence, they were mistreated as children, they experienced violence
and they return to violence as they return to something they know…
how we are treated as children, will tell us how we act and interact
as adults…the experience of a child repeats itself in adulthood…
does this cover absolutely everyone? no, of course not…
there is always an exception to every rule…and to make the exception
the deal breaker of my saying, that the experiences of a child repeats
itself, doesn’t negate my saying it… the exceptions, they don’t disprove
what I said about childhood being repeated in adulthood…
we are who we are by the experiences we have as children and as
teenagers and as adults… it is the experiences we have that
determine who we are…
so with this, we can begin to understand that to create a better society,
we must have better experiences for children…if we have children
have bad experiences as children, that damages them and that damage
lingers into adulthood… it creates who we are…
if you wonder why life is so cheap, it is because we treat children
lives as cheap…if we deny them food, shelter, education, clothing,
then we are treating their lives as cheap and meaningless… we reap what
we sow and into adulthood and that is what we shall see from those children…
Kropotkin