translated by: Eric Barenboim
(any improvement or advice on the translation will be appreciated)
Whoever wonders how to communicate with a kid, imagine you’re doing it with an immigrant.
We are not saying it in ethical terms, about values, but in technical ones according to the efficiency of communicating.
Nobody would ever lecture the law of gravity, so let’s not preach to human nature.
– Children, like immigrants, need to be efficient in the new world: to lack of superfluous and useless rules.
And they have ambivalent feelings:
* of gratitude towards that new world of which they depend
* of yearning towards the world left behind (translated sometimes as anger or rebelliousness with the new world to which they don’t completely belong yet)
Whoever communicates or points towards children and doesn’t take into account this part of human reality
is trying to lecture the Law of Gravity,
working on ideals (of himself, of authority),
the answer to their message will fail,
rebelliousness is all they will get as answer.
In this time when entertainment is such a developed industry, where television is being displaced by the internet, and audiovisual narratives are more and more attractive and elaborated, and their production is more and more decentralized (individual), it’s naïve from us to think only in the values but not in strategies to communicate.
Kids and immigrants are well-trained spectators in reading languages, faster and more complex editions.
In their case: specially, plus, their everyday depends on being very alert to codes and signs, explicit or not.
more content on the “creativity workshop”, click here
“Most writers on the emotions and on human conduct
seem to be treating rather of matters outside nature
than of natural phenomena following nature’s general laws.
They appear to conceive man to be situated in nature
as a kingdom within a kingdom:
for they believe that he disturbs rather than follows nature’s order,
that he has absolute control over his actions,
and that he is determined solely by himself.
They attribute human infirmities and fickleness,
not to the power of nature in general, but to some mysterious flaw
in the nature of man, which accordingly they bemoan, deride, despise,
or, as usually happens, abuse: he, who succeeds in hitting off
the weakness of the human mind more eloquently
or more acutely than his fellows, is looked upon as a seer.
Still there has been no lack of very excellent men
(to whose toil and industry I confess myself much indebted),
who have written many noteworthy things concerning
the right way of life, and have given much sage advice to mankind.
But no one, so far as I know, has defined the nature and strength
of the emotions, and the power of the mind against them for their restraint.”
(prologue to the third part of Spinoza’s Ethics, reminded to us thanks to Hernán García)
© Luis Pescetti