Prensa. Senderos de Apure.net.
Eduardo Galindo Peña.
Nuevamente recibimos un email
de la señora y amiga Christine de Marcellus Vollmer quien es presidenta de
Provive en Venezuela y presidenta de la organización
mundial para la familia su ponencia más
reciente del mes de octubre del año 2013, en el Word Public Forum Rhodes y de
antemano le comentamos a nuestros usuarios que la ponencia completa esta en
ingles y le agradecemos utilizar el traductor de su equipo tecnológico en dado
caso para la lengua española. La ponencia es denominada, The Neglected Element
for Development”
Versiòn en ingles:
World Public Forum
Rhodes
October, 2013
Christine de
Marcellus Vollmer
The Neglected
Element for Development
Good morning! It is a privilege
and a challenge to stand here before you…especially just after Allan Carlson
has given us so much knowledge and so much to think about!
To the very interesting program
prepared for us today, I come to you from a country with pretty well the worst
scores worldwide for everything from business security, economic collapse,
poverty, scarcity and uncontrolled criminal activity. This is the amazing truth about Venezuela, a
country extremely rich in natural and human resources. Many donot realize the
contributions of just 3 eminent Venezuelansrecently: one is Dr. Convit who
found the cure for leprosy. Another is Jose Esparza who after many years at
WHO, is now working at the Gates Foundation for a vaccine against HIV/AIDS. A
third is the petroleum engineer presently working in Egypt responsible for
recovering the trapped Chilean miners. I
think Venezuela and its terrible situation is a good sample as we ask ourselves
in this Forum: where…with all its blessings… is the world going and why?
So, this morning, remembering
JFK’s great remark I am going to be a bit provocative. The world cannot
continue simply continue with “business as usual”.
As we survey the world we see
that a large part of the globe is losing the race between development and
population. Mega-cities grow where housing is totally deficient, and where
crime levels and life styles are not compatible with human dignity. Programs to
limit population have also proven disastrous.
Other large parts of our globe
show a super development with high living standards, but which show signs of
instability due to financial, social, political reasons and the problem of
aging.
Huge efforts are being made to
promote sustainable development and enormous efforts are being made to bring
development into harmony with the ecology.
I greatly admire and follow with interest all the genius which is being
applied to the economy of energy, and the designing of ‘intelligent,’ ecological cities.
Having said that, I would like
to visit for a moment with you the facts which must be recognized and corrected
if these aspirations are ever to become realities. I refer to the one, great,
indispensable, but completely neglected element for development.
And that, as Vladimir Yakunin
said so clearly last year, is the forming, from Kindergarten, of the children
and adolescents who will be living in those cities and driving the future. The problems we are discussing will not be
solved by the adults of today. They can only be solved by a new generation,
formed in values and virtues and trained to consider one another and the world
in the light of that formation. And this
formation is not happening.
I believe that to understand
why it is not, we must recall where the world has been during the last
century. The XXth century was most
probably the most violent century of human history and of the greatest change.
Only think of two World Wars, with weapons hitherto unimaginable, the financial
catastrophe of the 1930’s, and technological advances defying imagination. Humanity learnt to fly, to defeat disease, to
communicate long distance and be informed of the doings of the entire world,
among other things.
In the middle of this amazing
century, the cultural revolution of the 1960’s cleaved an enormous cultural
divide between the generation of parents and the generation of “young people”,
convincing both sides that the “generation gap” made communication impossible.
The new drug culture and the sexual revolution made this divide even more
daunting. The result of this cultural
turmoil was an interruption in the transmission of values and of the ethos of
life which had been passed down for countless generations. This interruption
has lasted already 60 years, which is 2 generations.
And so, just as technology made
development for all humanity a possibility, the lack of transmission of a
culture of common values has spawned social mayhem in many parts of the
world. Family breakdown, fatherless
street kids in gangs, drug cartels, white collar mobster practices and enormous
fortunes made at the expense of the poorest populations are all part of the
reality which must be faced. How should
this be done?
Ever since humanity lived in
caves and followed the bison, 20.000 years ago, the values of all peoples, in a
wide spectrum of variations, were taught in the family and in the tribe. These
values were based on the survival of those families and tribes and prized the
noble characteristics of courage, loyalty, sacrifice, dedication to duty, and
related virtues.
Since the XXth Century, these
values have not been given pride of place by educators nor by the culture, and
have been displaced by a culture of materialism and fantasy, the ‘me’
generation, and where most ambition is centered on wealth. The results are to be seen in the news every
day in the personal and social tragedies which out-number even the casualties
of wars.
Dr. Carlson has spoken to us
about family structure. And the statistics tell us that that structure is
disintegrating every year.
The changes in the social
structure of most of the world have been so profound that even those families
which have retained them find it difficult to transmit the values and virtues
they are convinced are needed by their children. The prevailing culture
transmitted by Television, film and advertising which distorts attitudes
towards sex and commitment, has been compounded by the ‘values-free’ position
taken by many governments towards education.
Families find it very hard to raise children respectful of the universal
values, although fortunately many still do manage to produce extraordinary
children with sound values and sterling qualities.
But because of the widespread
need for women to work outside the home, including the grandmothers who used to
be so important in the transmission of values, the vast majority of children
are being formed almost exclusively by schools (and by digital communication).
Side by side with great numbers
of families whose children are becoming successful and upstanding professionals
we are conscious also of the growing social problems which undermine
economies.
In many countries the silent
scandal is the number of young people, mainly men, in jails. These numbers seem to be growing. The
solution is not more jails. The solution is to inject into society a better
formation and other ambitions for children and for the adolescents who have not
yet chosen the wrong path.
Another concern is in the area
of health. Disordered sexuality at ever earlier ages is causing not only a
surge in fatherless children, but of Sexually transmitted diseases, of which
HIV/AIDS is only one.
And so, from a strictly social
and pragmatic point of view we must face the fact that if we do not work
seriously on what is sometimes called human ecology, or social ecology, our
dreams of an ecologically balanced world will be frustrated.
Said in simpler terms, if our
young populations do not learn to respect themselves, respect each other,
respect laws, and form solid families, we will never have the societies we
dream of. It is the formation we give
them from childhood that will determine life in the cities of the future. It
will not be the ‘intelligent’ buildings, the beautiful hospitals, parks and
thoroughfares that will determine how we treat each other.
For success
Fortunately, the social
problems which cause concern in so many countries have been the object of
excellent research and recently success and happiness have also been analyzed
in various important universities, resulting in most interesting findings. One of these studies of success,
longitudinal and covering all the socio-economic levels, has come out of the
Positive Psychology Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Martin Seligman and Angela Duckworth in
this study discover that self-control is more important than I.Q. for success
in a most of the measurements. In
another study Duckworth with Christopher Peterson of the University of
Michigan, demonstrated that perseverance
and passion for long term goals are more decisive for success than intelligence
and precision
Then these researchers teamed
up with 2 schools in New York, one public and inner city, the other private and
high-end, in order to follow a number of graduating classes and verify their
conclusions. They were able to observe that self-discipline and perseverance
are important, but that success at all levels followed 6 other important traits
which are: gratitude, hopefulness, resilience, sense of humor, enthusiasm, love
and social intelligence.
These 8 traits, call them
values or Christian virtues, are highly admired qualities in all cultures. The
individual who has them will not only be successful, but will feel self-worth
and confidence, no matter what his or her level of intelligence, studies or
income. It is therefore urgent that we apply ourselves to teaching these values
and how to live them to the young people of our countries as a basic part of
the culture, together with courage, loyalty, generosity, solidarity and
veracity.
These values, or virtues, are
universally recognized in every age, and are in fact written on every heart….or
‘hard wired,’ as we say today. The
problem is that it is no longer obvious how to live these values, as the
‘anti-values’ are so all-pervading. We
have seen again and again in the gangs of young criminals that we treat in
Venezuela, guilty of every kind of crime, that they too admire and wish to live
these virtues, but the distortion in their fatherless lives is such that their
application is completely wrong.
The brain
Neuro-science is now beginning
to help us to understand some of these social phenomena. The early formation of the brain has a huge
influence on later behavior. Children
who are left in daycare will not have the same limbic development as those who
spend the first 2 years with one principal care-giver. Children who are abandoned by their father
will need support and guidance from other father figures in order to enter
society with confidence and positive patterns. But very important also is to
take advantage of the years of brain plasticity in order to create the neuronal
connections corresponding to an understanding of the logic of virtues and correct
social interaction at the appropriate ages.
Children and adolescents who do not learn the logic of the golden rule
at the right age, will find positive community life very difficult as adults. Divine Providence designed us in this way,
and placed us in families with father and mother to achieve this.
Just as the acquisition of
language has its window of opportunity in the first 3 years of life, so also
there are Windows of opportunity for the acquisition first of obedience and
orderliness, then of veracity, perseverance, loyalty, positive risk-taking,
social intelligence and so on. These
windows of opportunity have become somewhat of a science since Piaget, Isaacs
and others first spoke of them.
The rural life of our
ancestors, which had much to do with survival, meant a rhythm of immutable
factors determined by the seasons and the discipline of planting, harvesting
and husbandry, and so developed in our forebears a great consciousness of cause
and effect. Children and young people
learnt these as part of life. Their awareness of dependence upon God reinforced
this learning.
All this has changed and
children and adolescents live in a world which is unstable, relative, and now
‘virtual’. Realism, logic and the
discipline of life are hard for them to learn, battered as they are by fantasy
and the promotion of the material economy. The values today must be taught
deliberately.
The social work we have been
doing in Venezuela and 15 other countries has proven that these can be taught
easily if the right tool is used. The most effective tool, as Aristotle knew
before us, is a story. Plato said that
who tells the story rules the world. So we are telling the story! We have
developed a continuous novel about a group of children which accompanies them
as they grow to adolescence and finish school.
This novel is in 12 levels, starting at age 6, first grade, and
continues through all the grades up to their choices of further studies. Each
grade level has 35 chapters, following all aspects of growing up. It
accompanies them through the universal existential stages of all human beings,
taking into consideration the primary desire of all persons, which is to have
significance. As demonstrated by the
great neurologist and psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, the desire for a sense of meaning is each
person’s deepest quest, although of course frequently we mistake where we will
find this feeling of self-worth. It is important to help the young to discover
that the best way to feel good about themselves is by being persons of
integrity, sense and service to a
greater good.
The 12-year novel we use is
called Alive to the World or Aprendiendo a Querer and is organized for use in
schools. It has a teacher manual for each level and other teaching aids. Now in
English, Spanish and in Portuguese as Caminhos de Vida, it is being translated
in Korea and in Hungary as we speak. A translation into Papiamento for Aruba is
also in the works as is an adaptation for Africa, complete with African
illustrations. We are digitalizing it for maximum penetration through e-books
and all the new media.
.
As you can see, they are
continuous and the approach is totally anthropological and at the level of
their physical and emotional development at each age. This is important. The
wide range of personalities in the story precludes stereotypes and allows each
student to identify spontaneously with one or another. The illustrations are
simple but fun. A teacher manual accompanies each level. The pedagogy is modern
and easy to use.
Conclusion
I invite you all to have a look
at these books …and consider them for the schools in your country. With their
anthropological approach, fun adventures and wide variety of personalities,
they have proven that children everywhere feel the story is about themselves,
and truly enjoy understanding how to live the virtues they admire.
I believe if we dedicate our
efforts to forming the children and massively use coherent and systematic tools
such as this one, we will soon form a generation who will understand peace,
justice, solidarity and transcendence, and the world will enter another age, an
age of real development. Many thanks!
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