The gravest problem of public education is not the students of primary or secondary schools, or academies, but the parents and teachers: if parents and teachers do not know themselves, if they are not capable of comprehending a boy or girl, if they do not know how to deeply understand their relationship with these creatures who are starting to live their life, if they are only concerned with cultivating the intellect of their students, then how can we create a new type of education?
The child, the student, goes to school to receive conscious guidance, but if the teachers are of narrow criteria, conservative, reactionary, regressive, this is how the student will be.
Educators must re-educate themselves, they must know themselves, they must review all their knowledge and com-prehend that we are entering into a new age; by transforming the educators public education will be transformed.
To educate the educators is the most difficult enterprise, because each one of them has read a lot, each one of them has a title, each one of them has to teach, each one of them works as a schoolteacher and they already have their way of being; their mind is bottled up in fifty thousand theories that they have studied and they do not change, not even with cannon shots.
Teachers should teach how to think but unfortunately they are only concerned with teaching their students what to think.
Parents and teachers live filled with terrible financial, social, and emotional preoccupations, etc. Parents and teachers are mostly occupied with their own conflicts and sorrows. Indeed, they are not seriously concerned in studying and solving the problems that boys and girls of new generations propose to them.
A tremendous mental, moral, and social degeneration presently exists; nevertheless, parents and teachers are filled with anxiety and personal concerns, hence they only have time to think of the economic aspect of children, in giving them a profession so that they will not die of hunger, and that is all.
Contrary to popular belief, the majority of parents do not truly love their children. If they loved them, they would struggle for their common interest, they would be concerned with the problems of public education with the purpose of achieving a true change.
If parents truly loved their children, there would be no wars; the family and nation would not stand in opposition to the totality of the world, which creates the problems, wars, harmful divisions, and infernal situations that our sons and daughters must live in.
People study, they prepare themselves to become doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc., yet, regrettably they do not prepare themselves for the most critical and most difficult task: that is, to be parents.
That policy of family isolation is one hundred percent absurd, because the selfishness of the family is transformed into a lack of love for our fellowmen, which becomes a factor of deterioration and constant social degeneration.
True progress and true revolution are only possible by knocking down those mental walls, which—like the famous Wall of China—separate and isolate us from the rest of the world. All of us are one family, and it is absurd for us to torture one another and only consider as family the few people that live with us. Yes, the selfish exclusivism of “family” stops social progress, it divides the populace, creates wars, privileged castes, economical problems, etc.
When parents truly love their children, walls and the abominable barricades of isolation will crumble into dust; then the family will cease to be an egotistical and absurd circle.
Once the selfish family walls crumble away, then the fraternal communion with all the others fathers and mothers, with teachers, and with the whole of society will be born.
The outcome of a true fraternity, an authentic revolution of the educational branch, is a true social transformation for a better world.
The educator must be more conscientious; the educator must gather all the parents, together with the PTA, and speak to them clearly.
It is necessary for the parents to comprehend that the task of education must be performed on a solid basis of mutual cooperation between parents and teachers.
It is essential to tell parents that a fundamental education is necessary to raise new generations. It is also indispensable to tell parents that intellectual instruction is necessary, but that it is not everything. Something more is needed: it is necessary to teach boys and girls how to know themselves, how to get to know their own errors, their own psychological defects.
Likewise, it is necessary to tell the parents that children must be conceived out of love, and not out of animal passion. It is cruel and merciless to project our animal desires, our violent sexual passions, our morbid sentimentalism and our bestial emotions, upon our descendants.
Understand: sons and daughters are impregnated with our own projections, thus it is criminal to infect the world with our bestial projections.
Teachers of schools, colleges, and universities must gather all the parents in a meeting room with the firm purpose of teaching them the path of moral responsibility towards their children, towards society, and the world.
Therefore, educators have the duty of re-educating themselves in order to guide parents.
Indeed, we need to truly love in order to transform the world. We need to unite in order to raise amongst us all the wonderful temple of the new era, which in these moments is being initiated amidst the august thunder of thought.
Samael Aun Weor
