The child is powerful.
Children are only limited by limits that we place on children, or those that children place on themselves. It is important to reflect and consider ways in which we may be passing limits on to a child. Distinguishing our ways of being that limits us, or causes us to form a fixed view of the world and what is possible, gives us power to complete those views so that we are no longer limited by them or be and act in such a way they are not passed onto the child.
A child’s development is only hindered by the limitations that an educator puts upon themselves and their view of the limitations of children. Free of these limiting beliefs, educators are empowered to empower children to learn without limits.
Limitations are formed through language / expression and crystallise in your identity through language. Think about how your own limitations have been created in language (e.g. “Boys are good at maths, girls are good at language”).
To educate children to be powerful in this world, we must:
Reality is an illusion. It is an experience of everything that happens to you in your life passed through a model that you have formed. Your genetic coding (i.e. your “nature”) changes the way you relate to the experiences that you are uniquely exposed to (i.e. your “nurture”), creating your identity and the rules that consciously or subconsciously dictate every aspect of your life.
It’s good to start with the premises that whatever the natural world has allowed us to do is possible. For example, any human can learn theoretical physics but nature hasn’t given any of us wings to fly. There is no right or wrong in nature. Nor is there good or bad. There just is. Our view of good and bad, right and wrong, possible and impossible, has all been shaped within our individual model of the world. Someone, somewhere, at some point in time, told us that the world was a certain way and we continued on believing that was true.
It unlocks a world of possibility when we understand our model of the world has been constructed. Because this means that we can change our reality by relationship to the world around us.
To a large extent, our reality is constructed for us. This is true for all humans. Most of the way we interpret the world around us is constructed during childhood. The stakeholders who have the most impact on this construct are our parents, teachers, friends and other family [Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory].
What about if we could create a construct for children where they see themselves as limitless. Where they see themselves as capable. Where they see themselves as responsible and empathetic. Where they see themselves as an active contributor to the people around them, their communities and society. Where they see themselves as powerful.