A Different Spin on ‘Bounce’ (2/3): education, creativity & equality

The Old Bridge: Clare College

Daughters and sons must follow the same curriculum of study, thereby promoting unity of the sexes. When all mankind shall receive the same opportunity of education and the equality of men and women be realized, the foundations of war will be utterly destroyed. Without equality this will be impossible because all differences and distinction are conducive to discord and strife. Equality between men and women is conducive to the abolition of warfare for the reason that women will never be willing to sanction it. Mothers will not give their sons as sacrifices upon the battlefield after twenty years of anxiety and loving devotion in rearing them from infancy, no matter what cause they are called upon to defend. There is no doubt that when women obtain equality of rights, war will entirely cease among mankind.

(Compilation on Education)

As I explained in the earlier post, it is not the debate about the exact relationship between effort and excellence that provides me with the main interest of the book Gifted Lives. It is in the other areas I listed, some of which I will attempt to explore further.

The easiest place to start is with education. Education has an uneasy relationship with creativity and can therefore be a challenging situation for anyone who stands out from the crowd as a result of special abilities. We’ve been here before of course with Ken Robinson‘s talk on education and creativity which I include at the end of this post (see an earlier post for a different presentation of much the same material).

At one point Freeman links these considerations with insight in general not just gifts in particular (page 121):

Insight is not only the gift of creative people, though. It is a common everyday experience . . . [T]he more insight is used, the more frequent and better it becomes. Alternatively, when it is squashed, as when schoolchildren are forced to think in straight lines, the less easy it is to think intuitively.

To be an artist calls for tenacity in exploring light and colour and combinations of shapes and styles in the search for aesthetic satisfaction. Western education, though, encourages the more linear, rule-bound, left side of the brain to the detriment of the more creative right side from where insights originate.

This can pose problems for everyone as they grow up. It may be worse for women, even now. The link ‘Abdu’l-Bahá makes between intuition and women has interesting implications for the whole way our educational system works:

In some respects woman is superior to man. She is more tender-hearted, more receptive, her intuition is more intense.

(Paris Talks)

Sidelining their capacities will prove costly for us all. Freeman picks up a profoundly important aspect of this, which relates to the Bahá’í teaching on the equality of men and women, and why it is so important to bring the qualities we most associate with women into the field of governance in our society (page 138):

Looking at moral behaviour over the millenia, the evidence is unquestionable. Women rarely start wars, torture people or behave in other highly destructive ways; they are traditionally carers.

There is now no space to go more deeply into this or into the whole related area of morality that she raises. I may come back to it in a later post.

In terms of Freeman’s picture of a typical education, this was all an unwelcome reminder of my early working life as a teacher of English which was tainted by a stifling sense of prose trumping poetry almost every time.

I had been recruited to Tottenham Grammar School by the then Head of English, who appeared at the door of my pokey bedsit near Bush Hill Park dressed in an RAF uniform (he also ran the cadets’ Air Training Corps) and parading a bushy white moustache that matched it well.

‘D’you need a job?’ he asked crisply, after explaining who he was and what he wanted. As I was working in a cemetery at the time for very little money, it was a no brainer. Uniform or no uniform, this seemed better than working for a pittance among gravestones.

I got a strong sense of what was in store when I used the same classroom immediately after his lesson in the first week I was there. The entire blackboard was covered in clause analysis examples which displayed huge numbers of every kind of subordinate clause in different coloured chalk – red for adverbial, green for adjectival and blue for noun clauses. (How many people reading this post can honestly say they have an intense desire to know more about this? For those few who do, please see link.) I began to realise that death comes in many disguises.

The final straw came three years later when I was marking the mid-year English essay exam (that’s an adverbial clause, by the way!). There were two essays that became the litmus paper that detected the exact extent of my discontent.

One was written by the boy with the neatly parted hair and the smart blazer with his hand in the air to every question, who always came top. It was exactly the right number of words on two sides of paper, the handwriting was beautifully legible and the content completely predictable. I gave it 11 out of 20.

The other essay was written by the classroom rebel, forever slouching in his seat with an unkempt shock of hair, crumpled uniform and a scowl on his face. The essay covered eight sheets in straggling barely legible script and was so utterly original and compelling that by the time I finished reading it I didn’t even notice  the scrawl it was written in. I gave it 19 out of 20: I took one mark off for the poor handwriting.

Steeped as I was in Dylan’s music and only a year or so away from enthusiastically joining in the widespread spirit of protest in 1968, I realise now I was a touch biased, but what followed was not a balanced and correct response, replacing as it did a mild injustice with a greater one.

I think the parents of the first boy must have appealed against my mark. The Head of English insisted on re-marking all the essays but the only marks I remember his changing were for these two essays. He gave the first boy full marks and failed the second one because of his poor handwriting. This was one of the main reasons I left the school at the end of that year and moved to a college of further education (and that was not without its challenges, of course). It is interesting how, after all these years, this incident has stayed with me so vividly.

It’s not only at school that these effects impact upon a life.

In words that echo McGilchrist’s concerns, Jeremy, now a jazz pianist, looked back at his life, having for over a decade studied medicine and trained as a child psychiatrist, a career he subsequently abandoned in spite of the respect and affection with which he was regarded (page 52):

‘I over-used my memory and the left side of my brain, instead of using my imagination.’

And David, an architect who emerged from his education relatively unscathed, gives a vivid insight into the experience of intuition (page 122):

I have an intuitive intelligence which I can rely on to take me towards a solution for a problem. After working in the usual way, I stop and then ideas suddenly come to me. Starting a new project, I collect all the information and just put it to one side, so it’s kind of around. Then after a few days, my mind has passively chewed over it for a bit and I’m ready to start. If I start designing straight away, I might miss exciting possibilities.

In my limited experience, this works for writing too. Meditation, such as I have described earlier, can lead to floods of ideas coming into my mind unbidden once my thinking on a topic has been primed in some way. It begins to seem as if I am taking dictation from within.

So, Gifted Lives is a rich and rewarding read. As I’ve written far more than I intended on this theme, I’ll have to leave the other aspects that intrigued me to a later date.

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A Different Spin on ‘Bounce’ (1/3): Gift or Graft?

We’ve been here before with Bounce. Joan Freeman‘s book, Gifted Lives, is a delightful perspective on the same issue as Matthew Syed explored: she followed 210 gifted and/or talented people closely over many decades, publishing her data as she went, but here she focuses in detail on twenty representative lives. One of the great values of the book is that these life stories are supported by a good knowledge of the baseline background data and of the findings generated by strong research.

Freeman couldn’t have chosen a more compelling story to draw me in than the life and death of Rachel Wallace. Her mother’s reaction to Rachel’s giftedness warped her life and it was only in its closing months, after her diagnosis of cancer at the age of 38, that she found peace in a deep spirituality that seemed miles away from the field of mathematics that had been the arena of all her triumphs and disasters (page 42):

Spiritual intelligence means being open to a kaleidoscope of ways of knowing which blur distinctions between the physical and psychic worlds. Truly spiritual people, as Rachel had become, have special abilities to meditate and visualise different ways of being while tapping their own inner knowledge. Her spiritual gifts meant she had an awareness of unity between herself and others, feeling herself part of the human community and the cosmos.

Not surprisingly, her ‘awareness of unity‘ resonated strongly with me because of its central place in the Bahá’í vision of the world.

Freeman draws a distinction between gifts and talents (page 6):

. . . I’ve used the word ‘gifted’ to mean outstandingly high mental ability and ‘talented’ to mean outstandingly high artistic ability, though the two overlap.

She unpacks some of the implications of  what she means by ‘gifted,’ for example (page 14):

Gifted thinking is not just hard work, dealing with deep problems or being inspired by startling flashes of insight, it often means a big leap in mental efficiency, which means the gifted can do more with what they have. The gifted can keep competing ideas and interpretations active within working memory till they sort out a way of co-ordinating them.

Her preamble about it not being just hard work shows where her take on this all diverges from the basic thesis of Bounce. She has case studies in her book that she feels point in that direction fairly unequivocally – the story of Margaret Sweeting for instance (page 196):

After four years in that highly selective music school, it became clear to her teachers, as well as to Margaret, that her aspiring classmates had far more talent than her. All those years of dedicated practice had got her through the auditions; . . . . . Chetham’s had taken a chance giving her a place; but not all chances pay off. Her talent was looking a little threadbare.

Practice very definitely does not always make perfect, Freeman feels (page 204):

Margaret obviously had talent. . . . But her talent was not in the top bracket. . . . . In spite of those 10,000 hours of practice which are said to make latent ability into expertise, it was clear in Margaret’s case it did not lead her to a life as a famous pianist.

Syed of course does not claim that it is practice and only practice that makes perfect. Other factors need to be added to the mix such as mindset and the quality of practice, the latter creating the ability to hold in mind a massive aggregate of data as though it were one single chunk. I’ve explored all these ideas in previous posts.

Great Hall, Clare College, Cambridge

It is not in this debate, though, that the main interest of this book lies for me.

First of all, it is in the many different challenges that being gifted or talented throws up for people, often from a very young age. Among the factors which these life stories illuminate are the attitudes of parents who see their child as gifted and don’t cope well with that idea, the response of the educational system to giftedness and how schools tend to exploit it to boost their ratings at the expense of the child’s emotional and social development, how moral awareness and giftedness do or do not relate, and the way that gifted women can be denied recognition in a most damaging way particularly if their gifts, as far as peers and teachers are concerned, lie where women are not supposed to shine, i.e. in the sciences or mathematics,.

Secondly it’s in the resonances the book evokes of experiences in my own life, not though in the sense of being particularly gifted. It’s in terms of being whisked at the age of 18 out of an ordinary environment in the north west of England to Clare College and the heady and elitist milieu of Cambridge University in the early 60s, a dislocation of the kind which many of the people in this book experienced and found very hard to handle, as did I.  Or in terms of teaching in a stiffly traditional grammar school in Tottenham in the mid-60s and seeing how creativity was stifled and rule-driven conformity was rewarded even in English Literature, not a topic that should be used to clone minds into the same patterns, again an issue for many in this book.

There is so much to say that it will not easily fit into the tight framework of a thousand word post (nothing new there, then, for me) so I’m going to have to spill over into at least one more. I may not be able to keep the threads of the different challenges separate from my own experiences either and may need to move freely between them if there is any hope of doing the complexity of my responses to this intriguing book some kind of  justice.

So, next time I’ll pick up on the education theme and see where it takes me.

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Some Keys to Empowering Relationships

What is imperative is that the quality of the educational process fostered at the level of the study circle rise markedly over the next year . . . . .  Much will fall on those who serve as tutors in this respect.  Theirs will be the challenge to provide the environment that is envisioned in the institute  courses, an environment conducive to the spiritual empowerment of individuals, who will come to see themselves as active agents of their own learning, as  protagonists of a constant effort to apply knowledge to effect individual and  collective transformation.

(Universal House of Justice: 21 April 2010)

Much effort is being devoted in the Bahá’í community to acquiring the capacity to empower others. A key component in this endeavour is what is being termed ‘accompaniment.’ In the same message as quoted above, the Universal House of Justice refers to this:

This evolution in collective consciousness is discernable in the growing frequency with which the word “accompany” appears in conversations among the friends, a  word that is being endowed with new meaning as it is integrated into the common  vocabulary of the Bahá’í community. It signals the significant strengthening of a culture in which learning is the mode of operation, a mode that fosters  the informed participation of more and more people in a united effort to apply Bahá’u’lláh‘s teachings to the construction of a divine civilization, which the  Guardian states is the primary mission of the Faith.

There are a number of contexts (see other posts for an explanation of these) which are allowing Bahá’ís to acquire, develop and consolidate these skills, but we are still at a relatively early stage of doing so and we have much to learn.

I for one have been helped greatly in my endeavours in this respect by the vast body of experience that has been accumulating over the years in the wider community, some of which I have discussed in this blog (see for example the posts on Effort and Excellence). In the book I was describing there, Bounce by Matthew Syed, he drew heavily on the work of Carol Dweck.

I simply had to have a look at some of her work myself so I bought her book Mindset. The whole book is a worthwhile read but I don’t want to go over exactly the same ground as Syed does, valuable though that is. I thought it would be worth looking in more detail at what she has to say about empowering relationships.

For the benefit of those who haven’t read my posts on Bounce, perhaps I’d better recap on the concept of mindsets and her argument from evidence that there are two mindsets which are particularly relevant to learning and personal development.

There is the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.

The fixed mindset believes in the crippling myth of talent which goes along with the idea that you either have it or you don’t. If you don’t have it, you can’t acquire it so there’s no point in practising. If you do have it, you needn’t work very hard to keep ahead of the pack. In fact, working hard to do well means you aren’t talented because if you were you wouldn’t have to work at it.

The growth mindset says that everyone has the capacity to become extremely skilled at any number of things. It just takes focused practice, openness to feedback and a belief in the power of effort.

One of the key distinctions between the way these two mindsets affect people lies in their experience of mistakes. To the fixed mindset mistakes prove you have no talent and are to be avoided at all costs which means steering well clear of anything you could learn from. It leads you to stick to what you can already do and avoid attempting anything that would stretch you at all significantly. The growth mindset welcomes mistakes as an opportunity to learn.

Now for what  Dweck says about relationships especially in the context of education.

First there is the issue of praise. She nails her colours to the mast very early on in her discussion of teaching and parenting (page 175):

Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance.

This is a central point for those of us who are involved in working with others to empower them. We know encouragement is vital so why should praising intelligence be so bad?

Dweck puts it most succinctly on the same page:

[Children] especially love to be praised for their intelligence and talent. It really does give them a boost, a special glow – but only for a moment. The minute they hit a snag, their confidence goes out the window and their motivation hits rock bottom. If success means they’re smart, then failure means they’re dumb. That’s the fixed mindset.

She adduces empirical evidence to support this and she is not the only well-qualified voice to do so. Many years ago I read a book by Guy Claxton, Wise Up, with the sub-title ‘The Challenge of Lifelong Learning.’ He discusses very similar issues in somewhat different language and makes the point that modelling the value of confusion rather than the value of simply looking clever is an important part of a teacher’s toolbox (page 70):

[A] knowledge-focused model reinforces teachers’ belief that they have to be the fount of all knowledge – a belief that makes student teachers very anxious. . . . . Not to know is, for them, to be caught out, to be found wanting, and thus to risk the loss of the pupils’ respect. . . . The idea that genuine confusion and uncertainty are part of learning, and that if children are to become good learners they have to get used to operating under such conditions, is, on this model, unintelligible. The idea that it might be useful for teachers to model for children ‘what to do when you don’t know what to do’ would be . . . unthinkable.

The House of Justice emphasises that in the adult learning processes we are striving to implement, everyone, including the tutor, is ‘to advance on equal footing.’ Feeling you have to behave as if you know it all would be completely out of place.

And Dweck is not blind to the importance of shifting the emphasis from having the gift of talent to seeing the value of learning. In her view we praise people (page 177) for ‘what they have accomplished through practice, study, persistence, and good strategies.’ She points out (page 179) how ‘speed and perfection are the enemy of difficult learning,’ When people learn something fast we need to apologise for giving them something too easy and denying them an opportunity to learn.

She condenses many of her insights into the incisive statement (page 186):

Don’t judge. Teach. It’s a learning process.

Her approach does not involve lowering standards in order to ‘encourage’ a student. Feedback has to be honest and the standards have to be high. That is combined with the ability to communicate to every single student, however disadvantaged their starting point, that they can learn to learn. And that once they learn that, who knows how high they can fly?

Fixed mindset teachers in her view (page 197) ‘look at students’ beginning performance and decide who’s smart and who’s dumb.’ They don’t believe in improvement. Teachers with a growth mindset combine challenge with nurture (page 198). And they do not regard themselves as a finished product either.

They love to learn. And teaching is a wonderful way to learn. About people and how they tick. About what you teach. About yourself. And about life.

She quotes a coach with a growth mindset (page 207):

You have to apply yourself each day to becoming a little better. By applying yourself to the task of  becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better.

It’s hard not to see the parallels here with spiritual development:

The lily grows from a very unattractive-looking bulb. If we had never seen a lily in bloom, never gazed on its matchless grace of foliage and flower, how could we know the reality contained in that bulb? We might dissect it most carefully and examine it most minutely, but we should never discover the dormant beauty which the gardener knows how to awaken. So until we have seen the Glory of God revealed in the Manifestation, we can have no idea of the spiritual beauty latent in our own nature and in that of our fellows. By knowing and loving the Manifestation of God and following His teachings we are enabled, little by little, to realize the potential perfections within ourselves; then, and not till then, does the meaning and purpose of life and of the universe become apparent to us.

(Esslemont in Bahá’u’lláh and the New Era: page 74)

So, we’re all on a journey, teacher and student alike, and none of us is complete and perfect. And the humility of that understanding is empowering when it translates into action within a relationship.

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New Educational Paradigms

I’m a bit slow to catch on sometimes and I may have been the last person in the world to have heard this talk by Ken Robinson when I finally came across it late last week, thanks to the heads up from a friend. Just in case some of the readers of this blog are still in the same boat as I was then, I thought it might be worth sharing none the less. He raises interesting points in an engaging way about that most important of subjects – education.

Also he talks about a topic that raised a blip upon my radar once more after a long long time – divergent thinking. I can’t find my copy of the book in which I first came across this idea – it was Liam Hudson‘s The Cult of the Fact I think. But it gave me a wonderful excuse to indulge my butterfly tendencies and I’ve never forgotten it. Robinson feels that we may well be devaluing this capacity in our approach to education.

Anyway, I’ll leave the handful of people who may not have come across this yet to make their own minds up.

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Swallowing Tablets of Stone

Humourists know that the best jokes are mined from the most serious topics. Morality is no exception.

Moses trudges down from Mt. Sinai, tablets in hand, and announces to the assembled multitudes: “I’ve got some good news and I’ve got bad news. The good news is I got Him down to ten. The bad news is ‘adultery’ is still in.”

(From Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar: page 78)

Nobody likes taking tablets at the best of times so who’s going to take kindly to swallowing tablets of stone, especially when they taste so bitter to so many palates? After all, when was the last time a great religion told us to covet our neighbour’s wife?

The humour lies partly in drawing our attention to the conflict between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ that Susan Neiman discusses so perceptively.  What we should do is so often in conflict with what we would like to do yet we know we ought to like doing what we should: we just can’t seem to get to that point somehow. Commandments are forever over-riding instincts that refuse to go away.

Part of the reason for this is that we have evolved to think in the short term and be unduly influenced by concrete specifics in the here and now, including the stories people tell us as well as what we experience ourselves. We’re particularly poor with probabilities (Dan Gardner‘s book, Risk, deals with this brilliantly so I won’t go into that here).

Let’s focus on consequences and time scales. Smoking provides an easy way to illustrate this. The table gives a few pointers in each box just as examples. If I’m a smoker, the short-term costs are virtually invisible: I enjoy my addiction so it doesn’t feel like a cost and buying cigarettes looks like choosing to dispose of my income as I feel like.  The habit tastes sweet for the benefits it brings which I value greatly and are very obvious to me. The distant disasters my present pleasure could well bring seem very remote and unlikely to my primate brain. So I show a callous lack of empathy for my future self whose suffering I don’t trouble myself to imagine. After all, things like that don’t happen to me.

And if that wasn’t enough to make sure that I’ll carry on smoking (or indulging in any other ‘vice’ you care to mention) the same examination of what quitting would feel like stacks the odds even further against giving up. The present becomes soured with discomforts of all kinds while future benefits fade into invisibility in the mists of distance. The gain in disposable income will probably weigh little in my mind compared with the horrible unsatisfied cravings alone, never mind the weight gain and the social costs.

In short, the long-term costs of continuing to smoke and the long-term benefits of quitting have far less impact on behaviour than the short-term costs of stopping and the immediate pleasures of continuing the  habit. And this is true for almost any insistent pattern of behaviour you care to name including those which are morally loaded. Virtue goes against the grain of our animal nature in similar ways.

We are though animals with some very special powers, rational thought being one of the most obvious – well, perhaps not obvious all the time. So, we shouldn’t give up on the idea of giving up our bad habits, as Neiman explains:

You think that what failed in the past will fail in the future?  Kant reminds us of how many sheer technological advances have disproved this old saw. . . . . If we don’t abandon efforts where science hopes we may create technology, how dare we abandon them where morality demands we create justice? . . . Of course ideas of reason conflict with the claims of experience. That’s what ideas are meant to do. Ideals are not measured by whether they confirm reality: reality is judged by whether it lives up to ideals. (Her emphasis.)

(Moral Clarity: page 153)

However, she does not underestimate the difficulty of acting on this realisation.

If you tell yourself that a world without injustice is a childish wish-fantasy, you have no obligation to work toward it. . . . Keeping ideals alive is much harder than dismissing them, for it guarantees a lifetime of dissatisfaction. Ideas are like horizons – goals toward which you can move but never actually attain. . . . . The abyss that separates is from ought is too deep to bridge entirely; the most we can hope to do is narrow it.

(pages 159-162)

And that can seem like a bad bargain — too much immediate discomfort for too little immediate gain once more. However, reason may not be as feeble and error prone as we sometimes think and there may be more at work in the world to push towards virtue than is immediately  obvious. Even if we are not convinced there is a God or that we have a soul that survives death, the way the world works should give us pause for thought.

Philo of Alexandria

Robert Wright‘s perceptive analysis, of how morality is essential (and perhaps inevitable) if civilisation is to progress and chaos to be avoided, deserves close attention from both the materially and the spiritually minded, as Neiman’s does also in its different way. It begins to tip the balance against the inertia of bad habits and hints that there is more to life than matter.

The same thread of thinking runs through the whole of his book, The Evolution of God, so a small sample of his argument will have to suffice. One of the most charming facets of this argument, that morality is a social cement that we ignore for long only at the risk of chaos, comes in his discussion of Philo of Alexandria.

The order at work [in the world] is the Logos, and it came originally from God. He set up the world so that mere self-interested learning – the study of cause and effect, and preference for happy effects  – would steer people towards virtue. So when Proverbs reports that ‘whoever digs a pit will fall into it, and a stone will come back on the one who starts it rolling,’ we can think of God not as pushing people into pits and pushing stones back on people, but as the one who designed the social ‘gravity’  that brings these effects.

(page 227)

Virtue seems painful, if you accept this line of reasoning, only to those who do not understand its value. The difficult task for education and parenting is to enable developing minds to defer immediate gratification long enough to secure the benefits of self-restraint — benefits that accrue both to the individual and to society. I will return to that issue in a future post, drawing amongst other things on some useful recent material, while recognising that this delay might not help any of us deal with present temptations.

A last thought for now.

Perhaps this perspective, if they would only pause to consider it carefully, would help those who kick against moral constraints, whatever their origin, to understand the words of Bahá’u'lláh when He explains:

3. O ye peoples of the world! Know assuredly that My commandments are the lamps of My loving providence among My servants, and the keys of My mercy for My creatures. Thus hath it been sent down from the heaven of the Will of your Lord, the Lord of Revelation. Were any man to taste the sweetness of the words which the lips of the All-Merciful have willed to utter, he would, though the treasures of the earth be in his possession, renounce them one and all, that he might vindicate the truth of even one of His commandments, shining above the Dayspring of His bountiful care and loving-kindness. . . .

5. Think not that We have revealed unto you a mere code of laws. Nay, rather, We have unsealed the choice Wine with the fingers of might and power. To this beareth witness that which the Pen of Revelation hath revealed. Meditate upon this, O men of insight!

(Kitáb-i-Aqdas)

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Humanity is our Business (5/5): (b) What can we do for our children?

THE BAHÁ’ÍS MUST WORK WITH HEART AND SOUL TO BRING ABOUT A BETTER CONDITION IN THE WORLD

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Paris Talks, page 99)

What do we do?

We have looked at the plight of children. We must face the truth. We are all responsible and we all need to respond to the challenge: we must all do everything in our power to change this situation for the better. The same message already quoted from our world centre states:

Our worldwide community cannot escape the consequences of these conditions. This realisation should spur us all to urgent and sustained action in the interests of children and the future.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

Obviously the whole problem cannot be fixed overnight but we have to start somewhere. This need to do what we can sustain over a long period, however small a step that may seem, has led to a concerted attempt to provide classes for children in as many localities as we can using all the resources currently at our disposal, though these are as yet inadequate to the task that faces us:

Aware of the aspirations of the children of the world and their need for spiritual education, they extend their efforts widely to involve ever-growing contingents of participants in classes that become centres of attraction for the young and strengthen the roots of the Faith in society.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2008)

Young people, on the threshold of independence, have comparable needs which we are seeking to learn how to meet:

[We] assist junior youth to navigate through a crucial stage of their lives and to become empowered to direct their energies toward the advancement of civilization.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2008)

How should we treat them?

We must appreciate fully and whole-heartedly

. . . the imperative to tend to the needs of the children of the world and offer them lessons that develop their spiritual faculties and lay the foundations of a noble and upright character. . . [and] the full significance of [our] efforts to help young people form a strong moral identity in their early adolescent years and empower them to contribute to the well-being of their communities.

(Universal House of Justice: 20 October 2008

Character building and society building are inextricably linked. The positive results of doing it properly are beyond dispute.

But how do we do it?

The House of Justice seek to define the qualities a community should possess:

An all-embracing love of children, the manner of treating them, the quality of the attention shown them, the spirit of adult behaviour toward them – these are all among the vital aspects of the requisite attitude. Love demands discipline,  the courage to accustom children to hardship, not to indulge their whims or leave them entirely to their own devices.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

It is perhaps worth dwelling a little on what they might mean by discipline and hardship, not positive ideas in many people’s thinking today.

Layard and Dunn, in an article in the  Sunday Times on 1st February describe four styles of parenting and point out what they feel is the optimal. These are: disciplined, authoritative, neglectful and permissive.

Researchers have studied the effects of each upon the way in which children develop. They agree that the style that is loving and yet firm – now known in the jargon as authoritative – is the most effective. In this approach boundaries are explained, in the context of a warm, loving relationship. Without boundaries and the management of frustration that these require children to learn, it is hard for them to develop the kind of impulse control that the work on emotional intelligence suggests underpins a successful life in society. All too often childhoods are  seriously warped by indulgent neglect, though it is the cruelty of an abusive background that more often hits the headlines.

They also refer to other things such as mutual respect, commitment and education in parenting:

An atmosphere needs to be maintained in which children feel they belong to the community and share in its purpose. They must lovingly but insistently be guided to live up to Bahá’í standards, to study and teach the Cause in ways that are suited to their circumstances.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

The Needs of Young People

They describe the special needs of a sub-group of young people:

[Those between the ages of, say, 12 to 15] represent a special group with special needs as they are somewhat in between childhood and youth when many changes are occurring within them. Creative attention must be devoted to involving them in programmes of activity that will engage their interests, mould their capacities for teaching and service, and involve them in social interaction with older youth.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

Paul Lample explains that this has led to

[a]n effort to endow youth with the capacity to conquer the word and unravel its meaning both for their own spiritual upliftment, and as a basis for social action. The work with Junior Youth broadened beyond efforts for SED to become a fourth core activity.

(Paul Lample: Revelation & Social Reality page 135)

Parents

The role of parents is clearly critical:

. . . parents . . . bear the prime responsibility for the upbringing of their children. We appeal to them to give constant attention to the spiritual education of their children. Some parents appear to think that this is the exclusive responsibility of the community; others believe that in order to preserve the independence of children to investigate truth, the Faith should not be taught to them. Still others feel inadequate to take on such a task. None of this is correct . . . . ..

Independent of the level of their education, parents are in a critical position to shape the spiritual development of their children. They should not ever underestimate their capacity to mould their children’s moral character. Of course, in addition to the efforts made at home, the parents should support children’s classes provided by the community.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

In the end where does all this leave us?

For Bahá’ís the message is clear. In capital letters on page 99 of Paris Talks we find the quotation at the head of this post:

THE BAHÁ’ÍS MUST WORK WITH HEART AND SOUL TO BRING ABOUT A BETTER CONDITION IN THE WORLD

The words immediately above that are:

Let your ambition be the achievement on earth of a Heavenly civilization! I ask for you the supreme blessing, that you may be so filled with the vitality of the Heavenly Spirit that you may be the cause of life to the world.

There’s really nothing else that anyone can add after that and it seems to me that it applies to everyone, Baha’i and non-Baha’i alike, each in his or her own way inspired by the purpose of God in this age which is to make us all act upon the realisation that we are one family — the human family.

The whole of humanity is indeed our business.

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