Faith

From the pen of Erich Fromm came this book: The Art of Loving.

From this book comes this quotation:

"Another meaning of having faith in a person refers to the faith we have in the potentialities of others. The most rudimentary form in which this faith exists is the faith which the mother has towards her newborn baby: that it will live, grow, walk and talk. However, the development of the child in this respect occurs with such regularity that the expectation of it does not seem to require faith. It is different with those potentialities which can fail to develop: to love, to be happy, to use his reason, and more specific potentialities like artistic gifts. They are the seeds which grow and become manifest if the proper conditions for their manifestation are given, and they can be stifled if these are absent."

Fromm is saying something important here. Some conditions do not favour the development of that which should grow. I believe that to love, to be happy, to use reason and potentialities that are unique to a person requires that the person land in fertile and well-irrigated soil. It would seem to me that the family or the home educating family in particular is so well suited to providing the enriched soil that I cannot see the reason in removing children from it and taking them into those concrete manifestations of the machine or institutional world called schools.

Home educators have remarked that you have a child in potential and you just add love to allow that child to reach his height and glorious colour in the world.

Fromm continues, "One of the most important of these conditions is that the significant person in a child's life have faith in these potentialities. The presence of this faith makes the difference between education and manipulation. Education is identical with helping the child realise his potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities, and on the conviction that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what is seen to be undesirable. There is no need of faith in the robot, since there is no life in it either."

Thank you, Erich.

I have infinite faith in my children's potentialities, and I have infinite faith that they will achieve their potentialities. I learned to have infinite faith in the arts of home education.

Have faith that your children will become all that they should be.
Just stand back and trust them as they grow.

"Education is identical with helping the child realise his potentialities."