THE TRUE COMMON CORE - Part 3 of 6

The petite three year old entered the play yard through the awning and underneath the expansive limbs of the mulberry tree. Glints of sunlight played with her gleaming black hair. Momentarily, Aramesh stood still in her spotlessly clean pink dress and shining black shoes. Shyly, she hung back next to her grandmother as her large dark eyes surveyed early arrivals already populating the swings and slide. A couple of ‘cooks’ were in a sand box filling stainless steel muffin tins and bowls with a soil/sand mixture.

As soon as Aramesh oriented herself to her surroundings, off came the shoes and with equal decisiveness the socks.

Then she headed to an unoccupied sandbox and lay down. Shining hair, pink dress, arms and legs, fingers and toes commingled with the cool grains of quartz. After first creating a ‘sand-angel’ with her arms, this tiny person became motionless. As if in response to an ancient call to radiant health, she became absolutely still as she allowed the earth to caress her back, while the sun lent its radiance to her serenely innocent countenance. I watched in awe, silent witness to the meditation of a young child.

I didn’t have my camera at that moment, although the image is indelibly etched in my brain—A momentary flash, to echo through the years as confirmation that the outdoor spaces, offering contact with natural elements, are an essential link in childhood passages from infancy to adulthood.

Penetrating insight into the natural stimulators of whole person, whole heart/brain intelligence helps us discern the “core” that our children rightfully hold in common. We recognize this endowment as the synthesis of Living/Learning/Loving in the above sandbox collaboration, including the twelve-year old who volunteered to pour the sand. Compelling life experiences offer a living curriculum that integrates whole person individuality with wisdom and knowledge.

The fundamental Common Core entrusted to our children is a Living Endowment. The Source of this Trust held in the interest of Human Genius insures the centrality of the heart and the full range of joyous expressions of the spirit/mind/heart/body complex that is a child.

The Allegory of the Cave Culture – Part Three

The Common Trust

The frightened people chastised the adventurer as he peered through the tiny opening. Authoritatively prodded by Cave Curricula specialists, his elders bade him to stop wasting time and return to cave labyrinth studies.

The possible ‘enlightenment’ of the people threatened the entrenched specialists, hierarchies of authority, and captains of commerce, which had chiseled a secure niche in Cave Culture Curricula. Alliance with the government propped the lobbyists’ push for the broadest scope of their agenda. With slogans like “Into The Light”, text and test lobbyists zealously promoted the need for further penetration of dark tunnels to memorize stone cold minutia.  The power that investors wielded was singularly self-serving, but they promoted their cause vigorously as being ”For the Common Good”. 

Nonetheless, through the generations, adventurers and dreamers were so drawn to the beckoning light at the cave entrance that one by one they labored to enlarge the rock bound aperture.

Continued in The True Common Core: Part Four