A continuacion se encuentra una serie de resumenes y estudios que he realizado en las ultimas semanas, a manera de ayuda para la preparacion de un examen de una amiga personal aca en Noruega.

 El ensayo y las notas corresponden al tema de la educacion de los niNos, y esta escrita en ingles por razones de conveniencia para los profesores internacionales de la universidad a la que asiste mi amiga, el Høhskole i Oslo

Es una reflexion bastante pequeNa acerca de los principios eticos y morales que ahora se entienden como modernos y puestos al dia, en todo cuanto se refiere a la pedagodia infantil.

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Child Education.

 -Education is to educate oneself-

Hans Georg Gadamer

This principal has guided my life and has set the pace to each of the enterprises I endeavor into. It stands for allowing the child and oneself to experience things first hand by allowing him to choose his method of learning and to allow him to guide himself. It is important to either understand or to make it clear to the child or the teenager that the goal of what he does is to gather knowledge.

 How can we explain to a child what knowledge is? This is of course not the simplest task, rarely can we find men that can provide us with a satisfactory definition on this concept, one which we can cling on to.

As the child grows he unavoidably learns things, he learns how to walk like human beings, how to speak, how to count, he learns all these skills that will place him in society and allow him to survive in it as a social individual. Yet each child learns differently, hence we have different people, and each child is constituted with a different material, this material which differs us from each other, the essence of our individuality.

Nevertheless, these surprising differences that make life worth living, that drive us into attraction on each other, these differences fade when we talk about humanity, when we talk about a society, we seek consensus in so many issues to organize our lives. We seek consensus to elect our leader or to tackle him out of power, we agree on values that will rule our daily life, and values with which we will judge ourselves. We agree on punishments for those who violate these values and morals. All this consensus begs the old Greek question: have we breath to warm our hands and to cool our soup?.

It is my belief that we do indeed possess such faculties, we can live our lives in agreement with laws settled and agreed upon by a community, and yet live our own individual rights, and possess full control of our lives activities, beset by the wonderful boundaries societies give themselves through law.

 A child will learn these things in his own way (hopefully) throughout time, and will also understand that he possesses freedom, that he can do as he wishes, that he owns his own self and can behave accordingly.

The way a child or a teenager learns these things is perhaps through the constant exposure to society. His living in this environment seems vital to his development.

-         Subject matter must be selected according to the developmental needs of the children, so that the teaching programme accompanies or conducts a child on his way from the childhood world of fantasy to the reality of adult life                Thomas J. Weihs.

-         Taking up a childs earliest experiences of himself as the Maker, the Creator; going via the Fairy-Tale through myths and legends, a child is then introduced into the archetypal events of he old testament, which marks a departure from the pure world of fantasy and an entry into the world of morality and the beginnings of human history.            Thomas J. Weihs.

-         In this way (Science teaching) a childs gradual descent from the imaginative to the mechanistic appraisal of the world is done proper justice. Thomas J. Weihs.

-         During the First seven years the aesthetics argument, the argument of the beautiful, is mandatory. Only at the onset of puberty should the argument of intellect and truth be introduced    Thomas J. Weihs.

-         In his early years, a childs critical faculties and intellectual independence should not be forced forward; then, when he arrives at puberty the point at which these faculties start to develop naturally, his moral codes will already have been properly constituted and consolidated and can safely withstand the erosion which naturally tends to come from his own developing critical intelligence.            Thomas J. Weihs

-         The gradual separation from the ALL which we originally are is of fundamental importance to the constitution of our ego. Thomas J. Weihs.

-         It is assumed that vicissitudes of physical environment exert a selective influence on genetic qualities through the survival of the fittest. We must now accept the fact that the considerable improvements in hygienic conditions through technical advance counteract this mechanism, and thus cause an increase in the survival of genetic aberrations. This in turn gives rise to further technical efforts to influence chosen genetic survival, both by means of early suppression of aberrations as well as by means of selective biology. Such trends sow the seeds of distrust and fear with respect to science in its one-sided pursuit of causes.  Thomas J. Weihs.