There is something
about the learning of language… about the
systems that we as social beings spend our formative years growing up-with-in… that I keep coming back to. I
am beginning to see the shape of this particular learning in the same way that
my visual brain sees the legacy of relationship… sees a spiral.
The potential of
infinite growth that exists alongside a tangible visual model is like comfort
food that both my left-brain and logic can agree upon…
around and back but never to the same place;
sometimes similar,
sometimes parallel,
never exactly the
same.
A system of
communication is not only a means of relating to others; it is a viable
and essential participant in one of the most formative relationships that we
have as social beings. If we are first taught that this system is all hard
edges, sharp corners and absolute rules, we are simultaneously ingesting a
message that there are distinct limits around what the mind is capable of
conceiving and creating…
Around what an individual can possibly do and be and become.
Any relationship
has some effect on the trajectory of its participants. In the case of human
beings and their relationship to the system by which they communicate with
other humans, the spin-off is exponential. The variety of means that we have available
to us to make interpersonal connections will increase or decrease in proportion
to the content of that contact and will continue to do so for better or for
worse throughout our lives. By the time that our brains reach early adolescence
and a stage of development where abstract reasoning becomes more possible, it
is already very difficult for most of us to even see this linear structure of expectations let alone the way that we
do (or do not) think in relation to it. If individuals are not taught early on
that concepts like “language rules” are in fact the constructs of some other
fallible human-person’s doing, it will becomes increasingly difficult for them
to even entertain the idea that other “absolutes” such as gender, sexuality,
race, religion, ability, etc. are far more multifaceted than the binary lens
through which those who hold the power in these models would have us view them.
Skipping over the
roots of why and how and when and where any idea turned into a “rule” is
precisely how we as human beings learn to ‘other’ everything that we do not
quickly and easily understand. It is how we learn that it is ok to shut out
anything that is too hard and therefore too scary to fit into what we thought
we knew about the world. This othering includes the best of one-another…
It includes the best of ourselves.
This chronic
omission of context is my primary concern about the way that we are teaching anything to young children.
As long as teaching
the history of “how” is not a priority in public education, individuals who support
that system without question or concern will
become complicit in the building of boxes upon long-established boxes…
Boxes that by definition are finite in
capacity and that therefore must keep
some people out in order to keep from collapsing.
This is no way to
construct a community worth keeping.
This construct is
not actually a community at all.
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