This phrase has become a kind of proverb for me. An old friend of mine and Dakota holy man, Wanbdi Wakita, said that once, referring to the traditional phenomenon of learning. Children learn what is right and wrong, how to play with others, how to speak the language, how to pick sweetgrass, how to start a Fire through observation, listening, patience and just doing. In this traditional context, which still exists today in many communities around the world, children are not reprimanded, physically abused or stopped from expressing what they need to express. Their expressions are understood as mirrors to the community that carry great healing and lessons for the People. Children are so free and close to the Divine that they often express elements of life that many adults, especially in our Western culture, have forgotten or suppressed completely. A child’s response is so direct and without premeditation that it has the ability to catch us off guard; this is the potency of their teaching, and the potency of  traditional life.

On the other side of the coin, Western culture has devised an immense system of indoctrination that sits children down from the age of 4, or perhaps from the age that they can speak and hear their parents, until they become young indebted adults in the university and college systems. Children are not only reprimanded, but graded, judged and necessary compared to each other by their teachers on almost everything they do, from hand writing, participation, playing, reading, manners, and so on. This does not cover the homogenized curriculum that is taught to children, which creates simplified, blanket concepts and notions in the mind’s of children about the world we live in. It is an educational system that does not honour children or their crucial expressions in the world, but rather a system that glorifies itself, adult and intellectual superiority, and its academic and intellectual ideology, rather than creative, emotional or spiritual growth.