| From: | Antonio Rossin <rossin(at)tin.it> |
|---|---|
| Date: | Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:46:59 +0200 |
| Subject: | [Fwd: Conflict Resolution Network and preventive acculturation] - a poetry |
--- Begin Message ---Dear Stella and CRN directors,
From: Doug Everingham <dnevrghm(at)powerup.com.au> Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:46:51 +1000 Subject: Conflict Resolution Network and preventive acculturation
The Conflict Resolution Network provides strategies for self-training and other resources in communication, negotiation, mediation etc.
Perhaps it could support or link with strategies for Primary Prevention
of the authoritarian global cultural epidemics and some of the resulting
failures of conflict resolution.
Insightful early parenting.
My submission to the NHHR (the early 2008 forum for public submissions for the Commission to shape Australia’s future health system) urged governments and concerned groups to launch a campaign for voluntary studies, with a view to pilot projects applying and evaluating Rossin's “Dialectic Education” theory. Parents, mothers most of all, have to be well informed about their critical parenting chances. Everyone should know about the lately recognized brief 'window of opportnity' in each child's first three years of relationship development. This window is where we consolidate basic cultural principles as postulated by Rossin at
http://www.flexible-learning.org and in his PowerPoint presentation
http://www.world-wide-democracy.net/common/Antonio.Lucknow.ppt
This should promote an "insightful early parenting" movement as a major innovation of Australian, Western and global culture. Such a movement is developing in Europe.
This preventive approach should reduce the cost and delay of failing remedies for growing social pandemics.These range from child abuse and teenage alienation to global financial, military and cultural bias, exploitation, deception and destruction.
Dr Antonio Rossin's “Dialectic Education” theory arose from his experience in family medicine with a special interest in child psychology. This theory has become identified as the “Objective Flexibility” project, a part of the European project Socrates Grundtvig 2 “A New Chance”. It is at everyone’s disposal, without copyright.
Rossin deplores that modern "Humanistic Pedagogy" speaks of
child-centered education of personal values. But they too often
do not specify whether the targeted child is to be freed to develop
her personality in a democratic context, or to be filled-in with the
pre-set values of the (pedagogic) establishment.
In the first case, the child is active; in the latter case, she is passive.
Rossin laments this in what I've roughly versified in English thus:
A pedagogic shame
Shame on purblind pedagogues
who still don't comprehend
for all their learned dialogue
how children's lives they bend.
With drugs and militancy choked
the world we give them reeks.
Defensive means should be invoked
as thoughtful parents seek.
Each child needs critical and sane
autonomy in thought,
with confidence learned in the main
from home example taught.
The dialectic learning mode's
constructive confrontation
must ease didactic schooling's load
and speed habilitation.
Dogmatic 'wisdom', smug tradition
makes some problems worse.
Insightful parents' intuition
rather the reverse.
Below is my (DE's] summary of the cultural impasse:
Rationally critical, ethically confidant, emotionally mature adults can build democratic, just, sustainable communities only where most parents are encouraged to help toddlers share such traits. Modern global technologies are enabling rival cults, parties, teams, communities to merge in the global human family – but also to clash ever more . These clashes produce growing social pandemics ranging from child abuse and teenage alienation to global financial, military and cultural bias, exploitation, deception and destruction.
Health and education experts are not immune, and need alliances with skeptics, whistle-blowers and other critics to develop remedies.
In 1946 the first Director General of the World Health Organisation, G. Brock Chisholm, called for general schooling for teachers and students to understand poor emotional and social reactions in all of us. These are recognzed by psychologists but too often 'explained' to others in over-technical words. He put much of the blame for damaging prejudices on common cultural pressures, including dogmatic interpretations of original sin and militant nationalism.
The brain 'scaffolding' stage, mostly unknown to parents
Italian family doctor and child psychology pioneer Antonio Rossin, in 2007 noted that the age zero to three may be crucial in building a
child's psycho-social skills. Parents have usually not been called to
pay much attention to the logical reasoning, communicating,
negotiating and consensus-seeking mechanisms that set later
behaviour patterns. Traditional education has kept largely aloof
from helping families know enough about irreplaceable educative
task.
This crucial “imprinting” mechanism may determine absolute
obedience to a physical person, a custom, collective agreement.
doctrine or book. We need to help families to prefer autonomous, responsible and critical attitudes of the child in the critical cultural
years of attitude and communication development before 'pre-school'.
Rossin notes that discovery of the Nerve Growth Factor earned the Nobel prize for Rita Levi-Montalcini. In the human brain, at about two years after birth, there is an explosive overgrowth of connections among the nerve cells. From then on, there is re-absorption (withering away) of the less used of the super-abundant connections. There is conservation of those connections that turned out to be more useful ones for survival
This is “imprinting”, to some extent irreversible, including features of one's "mother tongue". In those earliest years. A trend's survival relies on the parents’ agreement. There will be suppressed the nerve connections that lead to behaviours unwanted – or punished - by the family leader.
The first and basic communication model that a child learns is the mother/child hierarchy, the original authority that the child recognizes as having an “all or nothing ” status. Very soon, a second authority enters the child’s world: the father. Now the mother-father communicating patterns become crucial.
If the mother submits to the male parent’s authority, the child learns that there is a further, over-ruling authority.
This influences the language-mediated hierarchic relationship that the child is embodying / imprinting. We see two contending educational trends:
1. With the “fundamentalist” model, the mother submits her own opinions and her personality to the male parent’s higher authority – in an extreme case without questioning.
Such children, venturing beyond their families and being entrusted to the dogmatic schools demanded by some cults and cultures, may learn by heart the laws of a dogmatic creed. They will be disposed to exert absolute obedience to the authority’s suggestions, with no autonomous criticism.
2. With the second model, “Dialectic Education” (“democratic” in antithesis to the first one), the two parents negotiate in a peer-to-peer relationship, seeking reciprocal respect for any divergence of opinions. They discuss in front of the child their eventually different personal opinions, and encourage the child to initiate or take part, within their maturing capacities, in family decision making.
Without any obligation of consent in the dialogue between the two family authorities, every time the parents confront and question each other, each one’s authority will have a decreasing effect on the other’s authority, so that the intensity of the child's family hierarchy ('peck order') imprinting will be decreased as well.
Such “Dialectic Education” favours transparency of every critical confrontation between parents, and the child will develop her / his own critical and constructive thinking, autonomous, self-conscious and socially responsible behaviours; and will become more resistant to the risk of drug addiction.
These two contrasting educative models are tied together in each of us in varying proportions. We each tend towards either one. Mostly the mothe tends to prevent or anticipate every smallest need of the child and so conditions the latter to an excessive psycho-dependence in what is called “seduction by love”. If she asks the other parent for consent, she submits herself and the child to the super-authority of the male parent. The educative model commonly adopted in our western civilization tends towards this “fundamentalist” pole, although it is mostly far from the extreme of kamikaze or other religious fundamentalism.
Parents are traditionally led to believe that concealing any confrontation from children makes them stronger, and that removing responsibilities from them is a sign of love. However, the voluntary sacrifice of women’s autonomy in the fundamentalist model has proven counterproductive. Some of the youth of today have become more and more intolerant of any parental and social hierarchic communication.
The mother can put an end to the sufferings of the fundamentalist psycho-dependence if she can show autonomy parity within the family.
The Democracy which the world craves is unlikely to be dropped in bombs or any authority from the top down onto the people. Therefore we need to make it spring and flourish from children and the family and community grassroots – from the bottom up. We can hardly tell others to abandon their fundamentalist educative model, if we can't get rid of it - or even denounce it - at home,
Australia like Italy could lead among governments fostering a global culture reconciling all sections of humanity, more constructive than the current rival world divisions. Insightful early parenting may be the most effective principle in fostering such a trend.
– Doug Everingham.
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