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Children's Class Report

By John Taylor; 2008 May 04, 07 Jamal, 165 BE

 

"For every one of you his paramount duty is to choose for himself that on which no other may infringe and none usurp from him. Such a thing -- and to this the Almighty is My witness -- is the love of God, could ye but perceive it." (Gleanings, p. 261)

 

Gradually over the past several months I have been building up the amount of time I spend teaching more or less formal lessons to our two kids. It took a surprising amount of work and will power to do this. I cut off live television completely (mostly because of my own lack of defense to the waterfall of images from the plug-in drug), and I limit the kids now to an hour a day on the computer. Even so, the demands on our time are pressing, what with hobbies, meetings and school homework.

There are five years between our two kids, Tomaso is 8 and Silvie 13. As a result, only lately have they both reached an intellectual level where it is possible for an inexperienced teacher like myself to teach a class with them together. I suspect that this grace period will not last long after Silvie enters High School next year.

 

The other day I read a statistic saying that the average American spends six hours a week shopping and six minutes a week playing with their children. In the light of that little insight into other parents' lives, I have paid attention to the amount of time I am spending shopping and with the kids. By my calculation, the time we spend is more or less the opposite in this house. Okay, maybe not for shopping; I cut it down lately, though hardly to six minutes. Maybe a couple of hours. I am well aware that shopping is like television, it is a kind of drug that is much more dangerous than it seems.

 

As for quality time, I spend an hour a day in formal Baha'i classes with them. Since Marie works evenings and I am with them that whole time, I do not even want to think about how much time I spend with them, playing or otherwise. God has given me a great blessing in this time, and I am quite jealous of it. I am conscious of Baha'u'llah's words:

"Blessed is that teacher who remaineth faithful to the Covenant of God, and occupieth himself with the education of children. For him hath the Supreme Pen inscribed that reward which is revealed in the Most Holy Book. Blessed, blessed is he!" (Baha'u'llah, in Baha'i Education: A Compilation, p. 9)

 

Like any other blessing, you have to be willing to give up other apparent goods to get it. Long ago, I took it on principle to avoid any person or meeting place that is not kid friendly. A hint of a slight to our kids, and I am out of there; from then on, I avoid that person or place completely. I felt bad about that harshness at first, but after I read what Baha'u'llah says in the above, I know that I have been making the right decision.

Ours is a very corrupt society, and prejudice against families and children is a symptom of corruption. I have been surprised at the antipathy I have encountered, even from otherwise exemplary Baha'is, especially towards my boy. It is a very boy unfriendly world out there, I must say! Tomaso is among the best behaved kids I have known, and if he is getting heat I hate to think what rowdies and rebels are going through.

 

Although I have gone through the Ruhi children's teaching book, I have not begun using it with these kids yet. My Ruhi guru, Tim Woodward, gave me a disk of supplemental children's class material, and on it I found the following story about `Abdu'l-Baha. It is the perfect story for kids, all of whom put PETA to shame in their loving defense of animal rights. I can hardly wait to tell it to Silvie and Tomaso,

 

"One of Abdul-Baha's gardeners had a dog. One day, the gardener decided to punish the dog by keeping it in a room for the whole night without any food, because of something the dog had done. The next day, at dawn, when the gardener was still asleep, Abdul-Baha came to his house. The gardener woke up suddenly and bowed down respectfully in front of Abdul-Baha. Abdul-Baha asked him why he had punished the dog and had not given it food.

"Don't you know that it is a sin to hurt the animals and we should never harm them? Hurry up and free the animal."

"The gardener immediately opened the door of the room where the dog was imprisoned and freed it. The dog came out and lay at Abdul-Bahas feet. Abdul-Baha asked the gardener what he had in the house to give to the dog. The gardener said he had nothing except a few sugar cubes. Abdul-Baha asked for some and gave them to the dog. The dog was so hungry that it swallowed the sugar cubes and rubbed itself on Abdul-Bahas feet. Abdul-Baha told the gardener to prepare some food for the poor dog and to never punish it in that way again." (Ali-Akbar Furutan, Baha'i education for Children, book One)

 

I do not recall coming across this story before in the biographies of the Master that I have seen. Maybe one of my learned readers can point me to a source; or maybe it comes directly from the Hand's own sources of anecdotes. Could be that he knew the gardener personally.

 

Thinking on what has happened so far in our classes, I think my goal has been to establish that love that Baha'u'llah says, in the opening quote of this essay, is something nothing can take away from you. The old saying is that education is a possession nobody can steal, but it is not quite true, as I realized after reading Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine." With modern torture methods they routinely use shock attacks to reduce people to cringing babies in a fetal position, with no memory of their past as adults at all. But even they, presumably, can still love God, if it is there in the first place.

 

Anyway, of late I have realized that in our classes I have concentrated almost exclusively on Baha'i virtues and history, and was neglecting my life's work, the Baha'i principles. So yesterday I took advantage of their ardent desire for me to purchase the latest "Ben 10 Season III" DVD and made them earn it by memorizing the twelve principles. Actually, I did not plan it that way, it was mostly laziness and a fat credit card bill that kept me from ordering the DVD. It just worked out that just as I was trying to get them to memorize the principles they assumed that the purchase was conditional on that. They tried so hard and did so well remembering the principles that I upped the bar and required them to memorize them in the particular order in which I order them in my own work. Sure enough they did, and now the DVD is on order from Amazon.

 

My plan is to use a sort of game to train Silvie and Tomaso in what I call "absorption" or dialectic, that is, to pick apart and classify quotations, problems and newspaper headlines under one or more of the principles. An upcoming Badi' essay will use that method to illuminate some ideas of my old guru, Buckminster Fuller.