){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
As everywhere, in the community where I live, some inconveniences have arisen because of children’s antics in the neighboring houses. Minor clarifications have been enough, and things have been resolved with each family taking charge of its responsibilities.
However, attentive as I usually am to how things make me feel (I have already said on another occasion that I am more than an intellectual; I am a sentimentalist) and accustomed to drawing my reflections and my writings from these feelings, I have uncovered in this case (apparently inconsequential) a little pain derived precisely from the fact that, in urban communities like where I live in (with people forced by chance to live together), each family ends up demarcating and assuming its responsibilities, without involving the others, in the common understanding that segmentation and even secrecy are the best tools for collective peace. I think there is even a saying (I imagine pretty contemporary) that the best neighbor is the one you do not know.
I must confess that if this little pain generally assails me when putting aside human coexistence (I have also said that I am an unrepentant communitarian), it is even more accentuated when childhoods enter the equation. Although adults may be very familiar with the saying, “The more I live with humans, the more I love my dog,” children should not have to face this disappointment; on the contrary, they should be able to live in harmony with all the adults around them, and even more, feel understood, protected and always guided in that coexistence.
There is a saying that it takes an entire tribe to educate a child. In our world today, I think what was once a tribe has become the whole of humanity: social media and all the means of communication have made the boundaries of our community extend worldwide. This has allowed us, for example, to learn about the significant advances in education in Finland, to be concerned about the upbringing and training of children in the indigenous communities of Latin America, to make donations to support African schools, and to have access to an endless number of similar options, which unfortunately also takes time away from us to attend to the children of our neighbors.
When I was born, my family lived in a middle-class neighborhood in the city of Philadelphia, in the United States, and at least my older sister has idyllic memories of those years. Among them is a sense of community in which their friends’ parents served as parental substitutes for the whole pack of kids in the neighborhood. The idyll included that parents could remain calm knowing that an adult was always watching over the children. My older sister’s memories are echoed by our cousin, whose childhood came ten or twelve years later in Los Angeles, California. In the neighborhood where she lived, being a mom and dad was also a democratic position.
It is essential to remember that we are talking about the United States. When the United States of America achieved its independence and freely joined the European trend of industrialization and the new colonial expansionism (more economic than military, although the latter also occurred), they added to those feats an ingredient that would make them stand out from the other nations: the morality of development. Producing more and more welfare items, distributing them worldwide, and giving people the opportunity to consume them became a kind of beatitude that no country in its right mind could refuse. (Faced with selfish governments that denied their population such an outpouring of comforts, the American system reserved the production of items of discomfort, of the bullets and cannons type.) Obviously, the more it imposed its model on others, the more prosperous the population became within the United States. The Americans came to feel that the ideal sought was present in them and that the future was already fulfilled in their country, so other countries simply had to follow the already open route. Hard-working, naïve people, not very informed about what was happening in the rest of the world (there is a legend that the average American did not know how to locate his own country on the map), could not understand why some opposed following their way of life. Marie Antoinette must have been in a bad mood when she replied, “Let them eat cakes!” to those who spoke of the lack of bread for the people. On the other hand, many American moms and dads, inhabitants of beautiful middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods, would have agreed with total innocence that it was the possible and correct solution.
I do not want to ridicule it. I do not have much experience living with Americans, but once I participated almost by accident in an event with a hundred middle and upper-middle-class families in that country, and, despite all my anti-Yankee prejudices, they seemed to me to be kind people, really interested in others and not at all pretentious. I understood well what my sister and cousin meant with their memories. The short-sightedness that prevents the inhabitants of the United States from seeing beyond their borders (increasingly invaded, by the way) has not taken away the old human gift of creating a tribe comprising those with whom they feel safe.
At least, that is how it was a few years ago.
In the sixties, when my family lived in those lands, many young people stopped believing in the great American dream. The hippie movement is hard to explain (one of the most spontaneous manifestations in history, as described by the great Arnold J. Toynbee). Disillusionment after the Second World War, which ended only yesterday for them, undoubtedly played a role. Despite mounting information about the Holocaust, the U.S. was now waging a fierce war in Vietnam, which had something to do with triggering a boom of admiration in the young people towards the East (Rama, Krishna) and, by extension towards everything tribal (American Indians, Africans). They were sensitive to everything that happened in that area. The fact is that they opposed what many already perceived as an invasion, and their protests signified a rebellion against the whole American way of life. They grew their hair long, dressed casually, even raggedly, made working-class denim fashionable, made peace and love their mission, and art their vehicle. Beginning with music, they radically left behind sexual puritanism and began to live collectively, undertaking a true crusade of collective child-rearing.
Each of these traits could face judgment, and countless personal experiences would testify against their exemplarity. However, the hippie effigy returns repeatedly as the great example (the great temptation!) of a possible communal way of life. Undoubtedly, the excess of drugs and their consequences – intoxication, addiction, marketing, violence – was a critical element in preventing ideals from being realized. The opposite occurred: abuse against women and children, religious fundamentalism, violence… However, the mistakes made by those young people (and how the State attacked the movement) are no reason for us not to at least dream of an education that recovers those ideals: a decrease in productivity so life can be meaningful, an approach to nature, self-sustainability, economic and ideological independence, sexual self-determination, gender equality, disdain for unimportant appearances, inclusion, spirituality, and of course the creation of self-managed communities and collective responsibility for the well-being of children.
Who does not fancy such a model of life, especially now that the entire society has decomposed, demonstrating that the failure was not that of those community ideals but, on the contrary, that of the system that attacked them? The hippies were young. Today, nothing prevents us from taking up their example with the maturity they failed to attain, but today’s world practically demands us.
Translated by Daniel Wetta
){kind=icon}
){kind=icon}
This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
)