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Buddhism and the Western Child

Jeff Wilson

ABSTRACT

Present-day Western education systems can be described as forms of disciplinary rationality; they employ punitive strategies to condition children.  They aim to prepare the child for the corporate marketplace by rationalising behaviour and constructing a defensive social ego.  In contrast to this model, Buddhist epistemology implies that education should be an emancipatory and transformative process.  This is clear from a study of the Kūṭadanta sutta, and of Nagārjuna’s Jewel Garland of Royal Counsels.

The Kūṭadanta sutta argues that social disorder should not be contested by means of “executions and imprisonment, or by confiscations, threats and banishments”, but by the distribution of grain, capital and decent wages.  It is the Buddhist way, in other words, to offer people the chance to transform themselves into useful citizens by means of self-discipline rather than through the threats and fear tactics of externally imposed discipline.  Chilean neuroscientist Humberto Maturana offers a detailed description of how the non-violent transformative process of social education can operate.  He uses the Spanish term convivencia to demonstrate how children can learn through their everyday interactions with wise adults.  The child ‘dances’ with others in a mutually supportive process of interactions, learning through a creative process of mutual respect rather than by means of a unilateral exercise of authoritarianism.

As Robert Thurman points out, Nagārjuna’s educational utopia does not seek to merely service society by producing “drone-professionals” but provides gateways to the liberated mind where duties and doctrines can be refined and transcended.  The ordinary becomes transcendent when mindfulness and emptiness work together to produce a “deglamorized awareness” that neutralises the culturally-assigned meanings and values that distance people from direct experience of reality.  French philosopher Michel Foucault adds that any punitive force applied to the regimentation of children often provokes an equal and opposite counterforce: “tyranny confronts rebellion; each calls forth the other”.  When young people rebel against authority it is because of a subconscious need to preserve self-respect in the face of an apparent lack of respect on the part of the parent or teacher.  Buddhism avoids this confrontation by insisting on the exercising of mutual respect and compassion for others.