But then occasionally, like in the eye of a hurricane, you get to observe a provactive thought intoxicate their minds and change their hearts, if only for a grain-of-sand sized moment.
The senior (high school) students, my Armenian counterpart and I converse about the meaning of happiness and education on a random Monday afternoon in our freezing cold classroom with its dilapitated walls and desks. Half of them are half-way present in the conversation, but truthfully (despite my smile and dramatic commitment to the topic), half are not.
The girls in the class offer their definition, albeit reluctantly, of happiness: happiness means having family, friends, health, etc. (where the et cetera only includes circumstantially-based satisfaction). We ask them if there is a way to be happy without any one of those things, and they say no.
As the conversation then shifts to education, we find that the students mostly agree that education means learning to become better people. But how? And why?
Not a whole lot of input. My counterpart then bravely posits her own feelings on education: “Education is freedom,” she says, and elaborates. Everybody’s listening now.
It’s the perfect segue into discussing mental freedom, or the ability to think for yourself, so we bridge the discussion with our previous ideas about happiness. “Isn’t it possible then,” we argue after a few students' comments, “through education, to gain the skills necessary to experience a kind of happiness that is entirely independent of circumstance?”
Mental wheels begin to move, engines begin to stir.
We want them to understand that education doesn’t only mean “schooling.” Education can mean developing an agile, resilient mind that enables us to imagine and create happiness that depends on nothing but our inner world or inner spirituality to bring forth peace. Education teaches us to think.
I think maybe next time we’ll re-enact the “walk against conformity” scene from Dead Poets Society to get them observing where their ideological thoughts really come from. This is just the begining of our discussion, but already they’ve proved the value of the topic being discussed. After this discussion, for example, one of the students came up with the following definition for the concept of love:
"Love is the sense by which we either love or die." She then went on to explain how love can either figuratively kill us or bring us life.
Beautiful! They’re thinking, transcending, wondering and questioning, and it’s all just a pleasure to witness.
I’m going to try to get this link translated into Armenian because it is a wonderful depiction of how choice can determine our circumstance, instead of the other way around:
I had chills as I was reading this...just AMAZING.
ReplyDelete