Welcome to my new mantra. I would like to recommend it to parents and schools the world over.
This came to me in German on the plane back from Istanbul and I don’t quite come up with the translation I want (that in itself probably says something about the alienness of the concepts from our daily reality), but in German it’s absolutely perfect. I defend/will defend/am defending/protect your vitality/vivaciousness/spontaneity/natural élan, something on those lines.
We devote, as a society, as educators and as parents, a tremendous amount of effort towards extinguishing the natural high spirits of children. It’s embarrassing, inconvenient, annoys others or ourselves, brings (and indeed it does) unfortunate consequences in terms of accidents or social opprobrium. And I am not saying education is unnecessary: clearly children need to learn to live in the world as it is, and to defend and protect themselves. Yet our profoundest duty is precisely the reverse – to allow our children to carry their spontaneity and aliveness through into adult life.
So this is my promise to my children; I hope it may also be yours.