[백성호의 현문우답]”I know chimpanzees, but humans don’t know”…

Everyone is worried. “How should I raise my child.” “How should I educate myself?” Most of us take our own life as a baseline. Ask your child to match it. Why? To me that seems to be the’right answer’. Because that seems to be’all’. But is that really the right answer?

The older generation grew up receiving infusion education. I grew up receiving memorization training. So I am used to the correct answer given. But the younger generation or the younger generation is different. They are the generation who have to create their own answers.

There is a gap here. The education method parents received and the education method children should receive. Because the two are so different. “Then what should I do?” I have met and interviewed many scholars, wise men, and spiritualists. Among them, there were three of them who presented unique insights for’child education’. Jae-cheon Choi, Chair Professor at Ewha Womans University, Hyung-Seok Kim, Professor Emeritus of Yonsei University, and Pastor Jae-cheol Lee, a Christian spiritualist.

On a larger scale, there are two questions. “What is the most important point in child education?” “How can I apply it in real life?” Their answer had a’common denominator’. They expressed different ways, but their meanings overlapped deeply.

#Landscape 1

Jaecheon Choi is an evolutionary biologist at Ewha Womans University. He has been observing and studying the life of animals and plants all his life. In other words, he has lived while studying the great nature. Humans are actually part of nature. Is it possible for humans to live away from nature? So I asked him. “How should I raise my child?”

Professor Choi, like a biologist, took’bird’ as an example. He asked, “Have you ever seen a sight to teach birds flying?” The scene where the mother bird teaches the baby bird.

Q How do you teach.

“The mother bird does not interfere with the baby bird by saying’fly like this’ or’fly like that’.”

Q Do not interfere? So how can you teach.

“It’s just the mother bird’flouring’ from here and there. When they see it, they follow along.”

Q Can babies be born from the beginning? Maybe some chicks fall from the tree.

“Of course there is. Then you climb up the tree and throw yourself into the air. The same goes for chimpanzees in West Africa. When you break nuts. The mother shows her baby how to stone it and eat it.”

Q So what do chimpanzees do?

“The little one picks up any stone and repeats it. Of course, it doesn’t work out from the start. Even the base stones on which the nuts are placed are not flat at first. So the fruit keeps rolling and falling off. The mother chimpanzee’s attitude is important here.”

Q What is the attitude of the mother chimpanzee?

“I never get annoyed if my cub doesn’t do it right. They look stuffy and don’t even break nuts instead. Instead, you are just with your baby with infinite patience. There is no way to throw off a baby for not doing it right.

#Landscape 2

I remembered listening to birds and chimpanzees teaching methods. “Oh, this is how nature teaches nature.” In fact, humans are also part of nature. So I thought the way nature teaches nature may be the most natural way of teaching.

During the interview, I came up with two points that I would like to underline. One is a baby bird falling from a tree while tinkering with its wings. Another is a scene where a baby chimpanzee keeps rolling down while placing nuts on a boulder. Both scenes are scenes of mistakes made by babies, scenes of trial and error, and, more deeply, scenes of pain.

But the mother bird and the mother chimpanzee watch it silently. Why is that? This is so that such mistakes and trial and error, in other words, such pain, will be entirely up to the child. Crucially, it went here. It’s a point where nature does, but humans do it. Because nature does it, it’s the point that humans should also do. The educational method we can learn from nature.

#Landscape 3

Professor Jae-Chun Choi said, “Beautiful wandering and warm grazing” is necessary for child education. Most parents think of it as “waste = pain”. I try to get rid of it from my child’s life. Professor Choi’s answer was different.

Q Are there any parents who like to see their children wander? Don’t everyone try to prevent their children from wandering in advance.

“Whenever I have the opportunity to give a special lecture to my students, I tell them to’Wander’. They tell you not to just wander, but to wander very hard. It tells them to find what they like.”

Q How should parents cope in such a case?

“It is difficult if we do not allow children to wander. You need to release them so they can wander on their own. I call it’grazing’.”

Q What if a child falls on a cliff while grazing?

“So we graze, but we need warm grazing. It is not a random grazing.”

Q’Warm grazing’, what is it?

“As an analogy, you need a dog string of a little extra length. Not something that is only 1 meter long. Do not tie the child tightly, but tie it generously, and pull the string when it feels like it will fall down the cliff. Be interested, pretend not to see, and always look sideways. But my parents aren’t enough to give dogs, aren’t they handcuffed at all? It’s not grazing, it’s breeding.”

Q What kind of problems arise when breeding rather than grazing?

“I will compare child farming to a business. Let’s say that you have children and raise them to make’products’ and send them out to society. But what happens when you breed. No matter how good you are, you can only make people who are similar to others. If you want that, you can keep breeding. But, what if you want to make a’great product’ once? It means to graze. The ones who raised chickens are chewy, and even if they eat some worms, the ones grown outside taste amazing.”

#Landscape 4

As I heard, the key is’pain’. Will parents be able to watch the wanderings their children will suffer, in other words, the pain they will endure? To get over this threshold, you need to understand exactly what’pain’ is and how’pain’ functions in child education. If you don’t know that, the mother bird will intervene whenever the baby tries to fly, and the mother will try to pick a pedestal every time the baby chimpanzee grinds the nut.

Q Most parents don’t like their children experiencing’pain’.

“For example, I burned my hand after touching a hot kettle. Then you won’t touch it again, right? What if you didn’t feel the pain at this time? I would put my hand on the stove or in a wood fire. Eventually it burns out. Even from an evolutionary perspective, suffering is essential to life on Earth.”

Q What is pain from an evolutionary perspective?

“Since the earth was created, the natural environment has been constantly changing. An ice age may come when the earth’s temperature drops drastically, or a massive volcanic eruption may cause a cataclysm. Big or small, the natural environment is constantly changing. This change is a great threat to all living things. Every time the creature feels pain. It is because of the gap between my body and my natural body. In this pain, despair arises.”

Q What kind of despair is it?

“It is a desperate desire to survive. For example, there is no food in the river, there is food only on land. Then, the fish is desperate. It is an eagerness to go up to the ground and eat food. Wouldn’t the eagerness that penetrates the body and mind of the fish eventually set the direction of evolution? The fish’s fins turn into paws that can walk on the ground.”

#Landscape 5

After all, pain produces eagerness, and eagerness makes us evolve. Maybe not the same in child education. What if parents are afraid of one or two pains that their child will suffer, and block them in advance. In the end, will it prevent’children’s evolution’? Parents who want the evolution of their children more than anyone else will take the lead in preventing the evolution of their children. Which parent in the world want it? But so many parents do.

The more I think about it, the more it is. Chickens raised in the yard are healthier. Eggs laid by spun chickens are more valuable. The chicks that fall off the tree are the first to fly. Do we only know? It means that the trial and error and pain that a child will experience is not’poison’ but’medicine’. At the end of the interview, Professor Choi repeatedly asked for “Beautiful wandering and warm grazing”.

Written by = Religious reporter Baek Seong-ho, Photo = Kwon Hyeok-jae, photo reporter [email protected]