Mango seed
Parables and Illustrations for Values Education |
There was once a man who planted a seed of mango in the courtyard of his house. Every afternoon he watered with love seed and began to repeat with true devotion: "that I get out peach, peach me leaving... "And thus, became convinced that he would soon have a matte of peaches in the courtyard of his house.
One afternoon, he saw with emotion that the Earth was quartering, and a green head bidding out in search of the Sun's rays. The next day, he attended excited the miracle of a life that began to shudder in the courtyard of his house.
"I was born peach matte", said the man with satisfaction and pride, and even began to imagine that, in a few years, the family could enjoy succulent harvests of peaches. In the afternoons, while she cared and attended fondly to his matica, it spoke to him as a child and told him: "you have to be a real peach matte, quite distinct and different from those clumps of handles that grow wild and, in times of harvests, filling the courtyards of the houses".
Matte grew up and, one day, the man saw first with doubt, then disbelief and bewilderment, which was growing in the backyard was not a matte of peaches, but one mango kills. And the man said with defiance and sadness: "I don't understand how could move this to me. So much that I told him that it was peach and mango left me".
With education, we will collect the fruits according to the seeds that grow, more than words, speeches or sermons that let's students. We will not gather fruits of creativity with seeds of routine, copies, presets. Nothing will be that we preach and demand respect, if not we sow in our daily relations, if we do not respect students, to the beadles, representatives. We will not train real democratic citizens with autocratic relations. Do we pick up really fruits of solidarity with a pedagogical practice oriented to promote individualism (individual desks, individual tests, individual works, individual honor boxes, which each see for yourself...)?
Often, we think that the development of attitudes and values is matter of advice and sermons, or pass stuff on them, without realize that the problem is more associated to the way in which we develop the educational process than to the contents. For example, if we want creative students, it will not serve much if we tell them over and over again that they should be or we ask that they deliver us the characteristics of creativity, but that we have to guide educational practice "provoking creativity". And creativity is raised only facing the individual with conflict situations, problems to solve, with imaginative proposals, with personal challenges.
Hence the educational emphasis must not be merely teach, but educating in and for: education in and - for the creativity, education in and for labour, education in and for citizenship, education in and for respect, education in and for solidarity...