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Michael Mendizza
Explore The Next frontier in Education in a series of essays.
To view/download - click the link.

I Know What Love Is
Dreams Are Real (while we are dreaming)mendizza what love is essay
Bonded to What?
Not Continuing Every Child Left Behind
Yes, Mr. President - on parent responsibility
Creation and Conformity
Embodied Peace
Understanding The Intelligence of Play CAEYC
Self and Self Image with David Bohm
Parenting Taboo
Creativity and Innovation - Interview
Sensory Deprivation and the Developing Brain
Pleasure Bonds
Everyday Abuse
Transpersonal Parenting
The Next Frontier in Education
Kids are NOT the Problem
Just say NO to Baby Einstein
Raising Shameless, Free, Responsible Young People
Sacred Playgrounds for Parents and the People Who Care for Children
The Genius of Childhood Rediscovered
Living Fully Moment by Moment
Enlightenment Now, because our lives depend on it.
Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be
Political Media Literacy with Jerry Mander, Part One
Political Media Literacy, Image vs. Issues, Part Two
Political Media Literacy, Deregulation & Misinformation, Part Three
Propaganda, Dirty Tricks and the Erosion of Democracy
Freedom, Safety & Ecstatic Learning
Basic Trust, Learning & The Intelligence of Play
No Agenda
David Bohm's Theory of Dialogue
Are We There Yet?
Reflections on Dialogue
Discovering Imagination-Part I
Discovering Imagination-Part II
Discovering Imagination-Part III

Nonviolent Communication

 
Marshall B. Rosenberg describes a way of listening, feeling and communication that reduces conflict and makes natural giving, (compassion) possible.

Our training centers on the literacy of feelings and needs, which is quite different than that which people have been trained in. Instead of speaking a language of life, a language of feelings and needs, most people have been taught a language of criticism, moralistic judgments, analysis and diagnoses.

They're trained to say to other people, "the problem with you is…", and they have a wide vocabulary for telling people what wrong with them. Any language that sounds to other people like a criticism, we suggest is a tragic way of expressing that your needs aren't getting met.

Another form of communication that contributes to violence and which makes it hard for compassion to take place is any language that denies choice. Language of "have to", "should", "ought", "must", "can't". Nonviolent Communication says get good at expressing two things: what's alive in you right now and what would make life more wonderful. Learn how to say just that without any criticism or demand. Just say what's alive in you, how you are in other words, and what would make life wonderful. And no matter what other people say, hear only what's alive in them and what would make life wonderful.

What do you mean by violence? Most people refer to violence as physically trying to hurt another. We also consider violence any use of power over people, trying to coerce people into doing things. That would include any use of punishment and reward, any use of guilt, shame, duty and obligation. Violence in this larger sense is any use of force to coerce people to do things. Violence is also any system that discriminates against people and prevents equal access to resources and justice to all people.

By this definition many aspects of our corporate culture, parenting, athletics and formal education could be considered violent. John Holt wrote a book about education, How Children Fail. I got to know John when he was alive and we worked together at times. He said, "If we taught children how to speak, they'd never learn." We don't use punishment and reward to teach children to speak. They learn because it enriches their life, it opens up possibilities. Why would we ever want to teach anybody anything except for that reason? And if it enriches life, you do not need punishments and rewards.

Jean Leidoff - The Continuum Concept

 
Life lessons from humanity living close to its genetic roots.

How did you happen to find yourself in South America living with a community of Stone Age Indians? Tell me the story.

On my first trip abroad, as a good American girl from New York, I first went to France then to Italy where I was introduced to a blond, blue-eyed Count called Eurico. He was so successful with the girls that he had become extremely conceited. I would not have anything to do with him; except for the fact that he was soon leaving to look for diamonds in the South American jungle and had fascinating stories to tell about his adventures. As he was saying god-buy to his friends he suddenly turned and asked me: "Why don't you come to the jungle with us?"

Even though I found him terribly arrogant the thought of the jungle was thrilling, so I immediately said yes. We had just twenty minutes before the train left, so we rushed to my hotel, threw a few things into a suitcase, rushed across this huge piazza, and jumped on the train, which was already pulling out of the station. It was very dramatic. It all sounds rather exotic, given your prim and proper background.

I guess that being prudish was a crude form of idealism. But five and a half months in the jungle that first trip had its effect and I came out a very different girl. It was quite an experience for a sheltered Manhattanite, hiking through the jungle, meeting snakes and scorpions, sleeping in a hammock. Even though there were jaguars and crocodiles, the worst for me were the things that made you itch.

Of course diamonds were the object- technically speaking. For me the attraction was the word "jungle." There was a kind of rightness that one missed in New York. That was what I was unconsciously seeking. The jungle represented something you felt was missing from your New York background. Can you reach back and help me understand this? As a child I was attracted to Tarzan and everything that had to do with jungles. It seemed to me-and this is, in retrospect, that there was something primal, something right about it. Tarzan represented a pure being, somehow before the fall. It was not the diamonds I came home talking about; it was the Indians and how they lived, what kind of lives they had and what the children were like.

I was so drawn by this first experience that I made four more expeditions and on these we went into unexplored regions. The people we encountered were living in the Stone Age. I suppose I was looking for what I found and shouldn't have been so surprised when I found it, which wasn't until the fourth expedition. It was then I realized that I had unlearned a great many assumptions that I had about human nature. It became clear that we have made a terrible mistake about what human nature is. We are under the misapprehension that we're born bad, or in the official words of the Church of England, innately depraved, and that is simply not true.

Joseph Chilton Pearce - Bonding and the Clash of Biological and Cultural Imperatives

 
How American technological childbirth prevents normal bonding and therefore weakens the social fabric that knits our world together.

Paul MacLean, for many decades head of the Department of Brain Evolution and Behavior at the National Institutes of Health, wrote a paper on three fundamental needs critical to all mammalian life, particularly human, from the moment of birth. These three needs (each calling for voluminous description) can be stated, in their barest terms, as Audio-visual communication, Nurturing, and Play. All three are interdependent; all are established and stabilized by mother-infant bonding at birth. Deprived of bonding, all subsequent development (of both infant and mother) is compromised.

Years ago Muriel Beadle asked why is it that the human infant seems born into the world in a state of alert excitement that quickly reverts to distress followed by conscious withdrawal. (This withdrawal lasts for ten to twelve weeks on average.) Answering Beadle's query leads to a richly woven fabric of nature's proposing and man's disposing.

First, all mammals, on preparing to give birth, seek out the most hidden, preferably dark, quiet and safe haven available. At the first sign of any intrusion, of any sort - even the snapping of a twig - and the natural intelligence of the old mammalian brain, which controls birthing, signals that birthing procedures stop, and the mother wait for the coast to clear. We humans are mammals and our old mammalian brain's instincts and intelligences are still right here in our head, and absolutely in charge of birthing, interpreting environmental signals, giving and initiating intelligent responses. In situations of complete safety, unquestioned support and security, fully in touch with herself and nature, a human mother can give birth in as little as twenty minutes - sum total of time from first signal to birth-passage accomplished. But at the first sign of any interference of any sort, regardless of the nature or reason for it, the birthing process will be disrupted, slowed down, or even halted, by very ancient and powerful intelligences within.

If disruption does occur, the smooth muscular coordination of resonant responses found in a mother "in the flow," where thinking, feeling and acting are a single harmonious response, is lost, and chaos generally reigns within her - muscle fighting with muscle, instinct with instinct, inner-knowing confused by well-wishing helpers, nature's intentions clashing with culture's attentions, mother and infant losing on all fronts - all of which is sadly the norm for the majority of modern women, and a primary cause of an ever increasing world-wide upheaval.

Jean Liedloff

 

jean_leidloff

We have made a terrible mistake about what human nature is. We are under the misapprehension that we're born bad, or in the official words of the Church of England, innately depraved, and that is simply not true. I was living for more than two years with these Indians, looking straight at them and not really seeing them, because I was so blinded by preconceptions. I didn't even notice that, amazingly, the children never fought. They played together all day unsupervised, all ages, from crawling, to walking to adolescence. Not only did they not fight, they never even argued. This is not at all what we have been taught human nature is-boys will be boys. So I thought, "well maybe, boys won't be boys."

One thinks these are savages. They wear red paint and father loincloths, so they're not people. But they're exactly the same species as we are, except they are behaving the way we all evolved to behave. We, on the other hand, are mistreated as infants and children, treated inappropriately for our species. As a result, we keep re-creating an anti-social population. Nobody's born rotten. You just don't have bad kids. It's not true. There is no such thing. But we can make them bad.

Just imagine the neurotic and psychopathic people that we have become. Why do we have a 70% divorce rate? Why do we have so many police? It's not just Americans; it's the whole of western civilization laboring under a misapprehension of what human nature truly is. That's what I learned from my experiences.

Children, three, four and five year olds would carry babies around all day. No one was saying, "Sit here and you can hold the baby while you're sitting down," or, "Watch out." Very small children are trusted to take care of infants because five minutes ago they were babies themselves. They just know how to take care of babies. Here we are, great big grown-up louts in our twenties or thirties reading books about how to take care of babies. I'd be embarrassed to admit to the Indians that our women don't know how to take care of their children until they read instructions written in a book by a man, a man they've never met. The Indians wouldn't have any respect for me. If you were there, you wouldn't either.

In the jungle every man, every woman, every child knows how to take care of babies. I don't mean to be disrespectful to our experts. They may be able to distinguish a measles from a mump, which is very useful if you have one or the other. But that doesn't, for one minute, give them deep knowledge of correct human behavior.

We use the word normal as though it were a synonym for natural, which it is not. Normal is how we think children must be. This includes things like three-month colic, where babies are constantly vomiting. They call it spitting up so it doesn't sound like a real illness, but it is an illness. It's painful. This happens even when babies are drinking their mother's milk. They're throwing up. There are contractions and a lot of pain.

How can we believe that we alone evolved over millions of years without being able to digest our own mother's milk? Why are normal babies so stressed that they can't keep their food down? The babies I saw in the jungle never had indigestion unless they were ill with a fever. Babies never threw up. They were not wriggling and struggling and arching and flexing and squeaking like ours do normally.

What the baby needs is to be in its mother's arms, and the mother even more so needs to have the baby in her arms to share this beautiful moment of falling in love, which is exquisitely choreographed by hormones. Today normal is adversarial. The baby arrives and has an innate expectation that it will be among trustworthy allies. That's not what happens. "Whatever I want, they say no. I want to be with my mother. I want to be close. I want to be safe. I want to be with someone alive, who's breathing and warm and smells right and feels right and who touches me and helps me feel my own flesh appropriately, not a lifeless box with a lifeless cloth. I don't want to hear myself screaming in my own ears, and hear other people screaming around me and get no response. When I scream I expect something to happen. Not just to scream but because I'm waiting. I'm expecting something and it doesn't come and I scream until I'm exhausted."

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