STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT

I was walking home the other night, and I couldn't stop thinking about a female friend of mine( Kate in NYC). The night before, we had been catching up by phone. Kate is very involved in a form of karate, and is also dancing in a troupe whose choreographer is a black belt. I was a bit surprised that this wise, young woman was engaging in an activity that seems a bit brutal to me. Then I flashed on the fact that I too had studied martial arts; I even went a step further, boxing in college. I realized that just because I am in a different stage of my personal evolution, I don't need to negate my friend's reality.

Then I began to wonder about the theories regarding the developmental stages of man. There are quite a few, and I have yet to find one that I can say, "This is home". One aspect of the theories that I am aware of is that they rarely talk about the ideal versus the real. They don't talk about how a shadow will develop if an aspect of reality that is present is not being talked about. It seems to me that youth is a time for shaping; in an ideal world, the parents and their support system would be letting the child discover for itself what are the most relevant issues that need to be grappled with. I have a family that I am friend's with, and I have watched the father Dan let his 4 kids decide what they want to do with their time, with their lives. His daughter came up to him and was worried because she is 12 years old and "I can't do math". And yet Dan knew that if he gave her 20 dollars and sent her to the store with a list, she would know how to buy things, how to count the change, even to budget her allowance. In the prevailing system of education, the state has the moral right, and the authority, to dictate what the child needs to know, how it will learn it, and what the consequences of misbehavior are. We might as well be raising robots. Just fill 'er up, put in all the data essential for an optimally functioning, contributing member of society. It seems to me we spend 15 years getting filled with information that has more to do with society's needs than it has to do with mine.