I had a gem of a
conversation about the state of the world with a friend (a New Zealander) that
I hadn’t seen in a long time. He asked me “Why do you think there are good
people and bad people in the world?”, and I replied “I don’t think there’s a
distinction between good people and bad people”. He seemed to have a mindset
like “If only we could get rid of all that sort”, and apparently couldn’t parse
my response of ‘even people who get called “bad” weren’t always bad’.
What he calls
“good people” really means those who preserve the establishment and who do the “right”
thing, but what is right or not changes depending on the culture or the era and
it’s not quite as simple as those that maintain their allegiance to what
they’re told are necessarily serving society. Conversely, when “bad” things
happen, they might be the result of dissatisfaction or frustration with society
and there are often instances where they even become catalysts for the
betterment of society. But attacking people and damaging people’s property
because you’re dissatisfied certainly can’t be called mature behaviour.
This “mature” gets
used a lot, but if we use the Japanese equivalent of seichou shita (grown,
grown up)/seijuku shita (ripe,
developed), then the opposite,
immature, would be mijuku (unripe, undeveloped).
For example, the word “grown up” when you say “He’s really grown up” has this
meaning of mature, but how mature they are isn’t necessarily proportional to
their actual age. There are primary school kids who are wise and intelligent
just as there are grown-ups who are juvenile and immature. But everyone is
still growing, even if the rate at which or the way it happens is different.
So, we can’t
separate people into “mature” and “immature”; even within the same person the
mature and the immature parts will often be intertwined. For example, a highly
educated, hugely successful businessman may be as emotionally immature as a
child. Or a woman who leaves anything practical to her husband might still be a
master of conflict resolution.
You absolutely
don’t need to be the best at everything. Being independent, in its truest
sense, means maturing
both in terms of the practical and the emotional. Being emotionally mature is
being able to calmly interact with people, such as:
Listening to what the other person is
saying
Expressing your own feelings and opinions without
getting emotional
Empathising with the other person’s
position
Respecting your own will
Trying to find common ground
Accepting differences
If we could
actually do even just these six things, crime rates would definitely fall,
don’t you think?
These are the
sorts of things that I want taught at school. Not saying ‘this and this are
correct so do that’, but education that asks ‘how do you feel?’, ‘what do you
want to do?’, ‘why do you think that?’.
There’s no greater
happiness than when someone genuinely asks after and understands how we feel. Children
who feel that their feelings are understood develop remarkable self-confidence.
There’s no impulse in people who are able to believe in themselves to injure
others nor need to compete with others. One comes to want to respect others
just as one respects oneself.
“Take care of yourself, and then take just as good
care of others.”.
If we could take
the time to teach these kinds of things during the 9 years of compulsory
education, it would completely change the world.
[You can find the original post "成長する教育" in Japanese here.]
