THOUGHT TO PONDER

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself. Galileo

Have you ever Asked: Did someone teach you the alphabet, or did they help you figure it out for yourself? Did someone teach you math, or did they lead you, step by step, in that discipline, until you were able to make sense of it?

Let me give an example: My son was fascinated by candle flames. He kept reaching for them, but I kept moving him away from them. It was a battle I would never win, as I only had to miss once, and it could instantly become a disaster. Once I realized that the strategy of discipline wasn’t working (we knew the consequence and we were trying to teach him to observe, but not interact, with the flames) I let him reach for a flame, soon he realized the effect of it, he began to cry. The end of the story is that he still likes to look at THE flame, but he has never touched a flame again.

By allowing him to learn, to find out for himself, he learned what we could never teach him. By using this method, he has escaped childhood into adolescence without ever being harmed by fire.

It’s kind of like the Old West saying, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” You can only go so far when attempting to help someone learn. You can only make the conditions right for them to discover what they already know to be true.