Conditioning
is natural. Crows caw at instructing their young; leopards and lions and
elephants and crocodiles have ways too. We see cuddly and cute and oh snap and
petite all being raised to become in our image. And we get taken by surprise
when the lion lays down with the lamb. Birds of a feather flock together. If a
fish and a bird marry, where will they live? But let us not get ahead of
ourselves. Teach your children well.
Naturally,
we are societal, somewhat if not very much gregarious, and each and every one
of us conditioned. Pavlovian, even before Kindergarten, neural pathways were
established by which we are identifying ourselves. Even as babies we can be
observed to display those archetypes of being sanguine, colic, phlegmatic, or
just downright belligerent. Already, even before most of us begin talking we
entrench our preference for psycho-geometric shapes of personality. Character
is not yet defined; it being an accretion of the things we do. But personality
comes very early on, and as a tool by which we engage our world we squarely
face it, squiggle our way through it, embrace our circle, or poke and prod and
prick in a triangularity of needing wants met. To be entirely indecisive is not
natural to us. We innately exercise likes and dislikes, and our personality
shapes our world for us. Kindergarten creates a social pathway. It is the first
stage at which we are generally no longer under the protection of family and
are lumped in with others more or less of our own chronology to find our own
way.
But
already some of us have been abused. Great fear and deep shame can scar the
psyche. Others may know great love and deep attachment. Nice. In either
instance being in Kindergarten among like-aged Gods is an experiment in
homogeneity. Simple dichotomies confound; personal complexity is developing,
let alone universality. But like a sixth grader in the Graves' Spiral Dynamics
model (a later curriculum; I peeked!), we are expected to display an equality
of ability, intelligence, and outlook. Yet already the differentiation is
multilayered. I was never going to reveal what my crippled uncle did to me.
Penelope was disbelieving that her wonderful parents could actually leave her
at the school gate. Tony was already feeling displaced. Mike was already conscious
of being impoverished. Justin was already conscious of being bored by
simplistic expectations. Rob found it unfair that the others were already older
than he. Simon....
The
differentiation is inescapable. And the layering upon layering has begun.
Nowadays we are racially and culturally more mixed than our histories. Thanks
to 'before-school' kids being bombarded with imagery in T.V. raised countries,
we no longer need stare at strangers. Racial, or handicapped. That segment of
our integration has begun. But we have the universal hyperbole of a kazillion
prepositions yet to interlace; our relationship to and with and in and of and
above and under and near and far is on its way. Ontology recapitulates phylogeny.
Education is dependent on culture, conditioning, circumstance, innate interest,
and the authority of the system. We are vulnerable, like comprachicos, to the makings of man; long before the fountainhead.
Our unique authenticity is a plasticity to be moulded by the conditioning of
that which our parents modeled, our immediate familial society reflected, and
is about to become graduated by degrees within the first congregated classroom
of conceptions inculcated in us by Kindergarten.
Would
then that its teachers be the wisest of beings!
Romanes' 1892 copy of Ernst Haeckel's allegedly fraudulent embryo drawings. Romanes version is often attributed incorrectly to Haeckel.
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