“I wish that [the] youth would start preparing themselves for building a better world right now. I wish that representatives of the youth of different countries would get together and hammer out the constitution of the world they want to build. They must not only prepare by planning for the future but also by taking immediate action… They can do it.”
The Crazy Ape
Albert Szent- Györgyi
M.D., Ph.D., Nobel Laureate for Medicine
Seven…
Seven is my personal record for that childhood preoccupation called stone-skipping, a game one plays with the aid of a flat stone and a large body of water, preferably a river, a lake or an ocean (although the ocean may prove to be much too choppy for that). With one mighty heave on that fateful day I managed to let my carefully chosen piece of flat rock skip seven times, seven splashes, seven ripples until it finally met its watery end. A fitting adieu for something so trivial…
That event, however short or trivial, held for me so much more than a mere childhood moment complete with personal “bests,” bragging rights and a memory that for now seems too distant to even remember. For if I was to quote Leonardo di Caprio at that point in time, I would have shouted at the top of my lungs, “I am the King of the World!” And no one or nothing was better than I was at that special moment… No one that is until a gorilla of a next-door-neighbor threw a cannonball of a shot that sent his flat stone to an unbelievable twelve skips, a monster of a shot compared to my measly seven and a record that stands to this day. Damn his thick hairy arms!!!
Twelve skips… What an amazing impossibility! One for Mr. Guinness and his record books no doubt. And looking back on that very same event now, still produces nostalgic memories of childhood, one that can’t help but put a smile or two on my lips. Of how such measly efforts seem to have produced such gargantuan achievements in the eyes of a child. But in foresight that very same childhood memory started me to thinking about ripples, both real and metaphorical. For are we not, as teachers, in a sense trying in our own way to create ripples within the still waters of our students’ young minds? Unfortunately, for some, the Orwellian epitaph of, “some are more equal than others,” seems to reverberate more soundly in their ever-doubting crania than they would like to admit. For not unlike my own personal childhood experience with the thick-limbed Neanderthal of a neighbor, some teachers are finding it harder and harder to create ripples among their highly-strung, videogames-immersed and 3D graphically-savant students.
Never mind the fact that these very same online wanderers seem to relish the way that they can solve their problems by hacking their way out of it, we teachers are trying desperately to capture their attention with limited devices at our beck and call: our voices, large pieces of white, shiny boards and markers. And the ripples seem to be getting smaller and smaller with each new online game introduced. What a challenge indeed!
Now add to that melee an intangible concept called peace and you have before you a soup-mix straight out of some South American jungle tribe’s medicine man concoction. Often depicted by Westerners as a white dove holding an olive branch in its beak, peace has become as fleeting (or at times as rare) as that olive-holding dove, not to mention the rarity of olive branches to begin with in this part of the world. And with today’s computer-wielding young peoples’ preferences ranging from simulated battlefields to extreme sports, is it any wonder then that the concept of peace has become that elusive? When they start believing that the only “good alien is a dead alien” and the only way to solve a problem is with a sharp edge of a broadsword then truly, allowing them to grasp the concept of peace is close to impossible. Even cinema has reached new heights of mayhem and destruction by registering unbelievable records in ticket sales for those who wish to watch the “end of the world” over and over and over again. It almost feels as if the slogan “the more you destroy the better the movie” has become the newest Hollywood catch-phrase. So how then are we to push peace when our young people would rather push the destruct button?
The answer, I firmly, believe is not in the learning but in the unlearning process that only we as teachers should be willing to implement. When the bad habits of computer-maiming and destruction have reached new depths of blood and gore, the only way to go about changing it is by “re-installing,” if you will forgive the pun, a cleaner version… To create, so to speak, a tabula rasa or a blank slate within our young people’s mindsets and acquired bad habits and replacing it with the idea of peace. To create still waters within them that will reflect, as well as manifest, every minutest ripple that will touch its crystalline surface. A silence so enveloping that one can literally hear a pin drop. Or in this case feel the growing presence of “peace settling in”. The Beatitudes of Jesus Christ deals very directly with the idea of peace, in it the Christ is quoted as saying to the multitudes: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called sons of God.” Peacemakers as heirs to the Kingdom of God, can any reward be greater? But such a promise may prove to be too costly in the here and now, since the peace that some have been striving to achieve for so long may in the long run end with a not-so-proverbial bang or perhaps, in this nuclear age, with a very literal mushroom cloud of nuclear debris and fallout. Dr. Albert Szent-Györgyi, who won the Nobel Prize for his studies on metabolism and the discovery of vitamin C, believes in the capability of education to further peace. In his book entitled the “The Crazy Ape,” Dr. Szent-Györgyi expounds on the importance of good education and its ability to promote peace: “For this,” Dr. Szent-Györgyi writes, “we need an educational system based on the real understanding of moral, esthetic and spiritual values. There is enough beauty, grace and greatness in the world to fill the mind; there is no real need to go out and kill people in order to shake off boredom.” Bravo Dr. Szent- Györgyi!!! For you have with but few and eloquent words, managed to encapsulate the real reason why peace has become elusive: BOREDOM! Complete and utter boredom… Obsessed with the desire for self-gratification, our young people have doggedly pursued any if not all possible means to relieve boredom. They have gone to the point where their only means to survive in the real world is to “escape” into alternate worlds peopled with faceless entities and filled with endless vistas of virtuality and illusion, if one can truly call such an existence “living” to begin with. Peace for them has become elusive because tranquility is akin to silence and inactivity, and that for them is tantamount to boredom. Welcome to the New Church of the Youth! Where their god is hedonism and their patron saint is multi-sensory overload.
Do we still wonder then why young people choose modems over Sirs and Madams or hard drives over hard and soft covers? It is and always will be because the classroom, for them, has become the most boring, God-awful place in the universe. And we as mentors are partially to blame for this. When we continue to delude ourselves into thinking that the “one-and-a-half-hour-non-stop-you-can’t-take-down-notes-just-listen-to-me lecture” is worth an entire lifetime (and it may feel exactly like that when the students listen to it), when we believe that silence is “gold” and decide to invest one and a half hours of it every classroom session or when we believe that only stupid people ask questions, then we have driven them to their own Ragnarokian universes rather than to corridors of learning. And that is indeed a fate worse than what any “God-mode” button can do.
The computer is truly a powerful tool! But just like the devil’s own little workshop of horrors in an idle mind, it can weave so much more than mere magic in a bored young mind. But the good news is that we can fight fire with fire! Like some Biblical solution of loving your enemies and “thus heaping burning coals on his head,” we can use the computer to our advantage. To maximize its potential in the classroom or even beyond it to allow them to learn more about the message of peace on earth or as recent websites have shown through various 3D artists’ concepts, perhaps even expand the message to the entire universe and beyond… All we need to do is to start with one student, one mind and one spirit! One willing student that will take the message to his brethren and thus create a chain reaction more powerful than any fission bomb ever concocted by either Einstein or Oppenheimer put together. The message is simple: reach one mind with the message of peace and you reach the whole world. A ripple effect, so to speak, that will expand to the water’s edge of war, violence and fear and wash over it all like some Galilean baptism.
Now imagine that number multiplied by forty-five, the exact same number of minds we come into contact with every time we meet one class. And the results alone are beyond comprehension when we see the numbers raised to that power. Summed up in one word the results are INFINITE! We all, therefore, are at crucial crossroads, ones that could very well change the entire way in which we all think, act and interact. With every classroom session held, we have within our grasp the possibility to, if you will pardon my quoting Mr. Michael Jackson, “change the world.” To create ripples within a multitude of minds who in turn will create more ripples of peace that will change lives and better this world which for so long has been in the strangle-hold of violence. Harry Joel Osment, who portrayed an elementary school student with a novel idea in the movie entitled “Pay It Forward,” devised a brilliant idea of changing the world by “paying good for good forward.” It was a brilliant concept that couldn’t have been more applicable than in this case. His character’s formula, which can only be compared to cellular multiplication, was simple: you do good deeds to five persons and in turn those same five persons do good deeds to five more people each and so on and so forth, until you eventually have the entire world doing good to each other. Sounds simple, right? But then again, in theory everything sounds simple. It’s usually in practice where everything begins to unravel. Practice, “the great equalizer,” the one that puts all theories to the trial of fire and makes all that fall short of their capabilities mere slag. How are we then to truly know the potential of such a concept if it forever remains a concept, an idea and an intangible? This then is my challenge to all those who have had their fill of violence and wars, of terror and fear, of oppressors and slave makers… To those who have been given the incomparable and unlimited capacity to reach out to young minds daily, I urge all of them to practice the truest form of peace, by living it and sharing it to the world.
It’s been many years since my giant of a neighbor broke the stone-skipping record, but my thoughts still return to that fateful day. Of how we all gritted our teeth in frustration while watching his flat rock skip to its twelfth splash and the undeniable reality of a record throw that we all knew would never be broken, not then, not ever. And what significant numbers they were, twelve splashes, twelve skips, twelve ripples… Jesus Christ in His desire to change the world chose twelve disciples, twelve simple people, some fishermen, some tax collectors, and yet with these twelve simple people He changed the world and spread the message of peace on earth. In our classrooms we are privileged to have forty-five simple young people, forty-five minds open to the possibility of accepting peace as the best way to change their world, forty-five souls willing to contribute to a future made perfect through peace. With just a one-and-a-half-hour session we can, if we so wish it, break my neighbors stone-skipping record by making ripples in the hearts and minds of forty-five individuals. With one mighty heave we can set the best record for creating ripples of peace. And so what if we have a next door neighbor who can throw one better than us. The results will always be for peace and the promise of a better world. Are we ready? Then I say, “One, two, three, heave….” ©
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