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The Culture of Childhood
Everywhere in the world the minds of children emerge into the world as pure as mountain rain and in this way the "culture of childhood" is universally the same. Any nation that doesn't make a great effort to keep this culture pure are defining a source of a future river that will affect the world. In recent writing I mentioned that the task of helping western children experience the love and security that Korean children are lavish with, would be a task far more impossible than could be imagined. I now stand at the beginning of my third week of teaching all the wonderful children of my home in the arctic as the sun light decreases by 10 minutes a day; a children whose birthday was in the year of 2001 and the September 11th event. I was over whelmed by the enormity of the task and knew only God could begin to affect any change but now that I breath in the various little clouds of death that surrounds me I find I'm over come by an exhaustion which is inexplicable, being compelled into deep sleeps where I die and give up my last breath as a gasp filled with ashes. Later my eyes open again and find that I am alive once more and my burden is gone; my life is renewed with the strength only God can give and my life goes on through an unending series of deaths and resurrections; a mystery that only the Son of Man knows.
More to write as I live and die daily. The story that comes to mind relates to the women who touched the hem of the garment that Jesus wore as He moved through the masses that thronged Him. He said, "Who touched me for I perceive that virtue has gone out of me." September 15, 2009
I'm finding that my days at the public schools in the US are ending in a way that leaves me in a state of total mental exhaustion. This experience stands in contrasts to my time teaching in Korea when the day ended with a sense of being energized and empowered to the point of wanting to spend extra time with children playing in the playground.
Life in Korea did have children going to school almost 12 hours a day but they were children who were loved and nurtured by their families and society. In brief analysis, the single thing that Korean children lose through the process of over education is the capacity to be creative; compared to children in the US who are living lives in a society that is hazardous to their mental and spiritual growth and lose more than creativity, they lose the most precious thing in life and that is love and a chance to experience childhood safely. It is heart breaking and mind boggling to realize that children in the earliest grades of US schools are battling with demons that make the classroom a dangerous and unproductive place for other students to learn.
Schools and society in the west are so full of intervention programs for damaged children that educators and society just take it for granted that many children are mentally and emotionally damaged beyond the ability to repair; only parents have access to their own children and are thus the only ones who could affect repair of the damage but many parents in the west don't love their children in the way that Koreans love their children. It is now becoming clear that parents in the west are frequently a serious hazard to their children; I honestly do not understand why they have children if they treat them like unwanted furniture.
Western educators stand in the gap between parents and their children with only a few precious hours to affects the lives of so many children who are quite literally "walking wounded" souls. In Korea educators are simply an asset to parents efforts to further love their children.
In Korea I used to teach students up to the second year of middle school safely but here in the US I'm finding children even in the pre-school category who have behavior and language that is harmful to other students and even their teachers. Ever since I returned to the US it is a full time job trying to guard my mind against the barrage of morally compromised information that fills the media and establishes an ambient emotional noise level not much different than living life on a mental 12 lane freeway filled with garbage trucks at rush hour. Korea has a massive population but their rock solid foundation of family love offers a buffer against the moral decadence that western people take as simple everyday life.
I have been shocked to find that some educators find the occasional interruption of morally questionable material to be humorous when every Korean would find it shocking at the street level let alone anywhere near their children.
I'm exhausted and will reevaluate this observation at a later hour. Not sure what the future hold I only know Who holds the future.
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(Click Image For Main Page History)It Begins In Light
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Gotta Have Happy Memories
My E-mail: al7mi@yahoo.com
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