Teaching Children to Guide Themselves

This week we are featuring a quote from S.E.E.D.S. Co-Founder Natalie Zartarian.  Toward that end, this card sums up one of her goals and guiding principles.  S.E.E.D.S. strives to empower people to learn how they learn best and to be life-long learners. 

We live in a modern high speed technologically saturated world.  A common lament is the near total connectivity of modern life that people seem to lack face-to-face human interaction.  In less technologically advanced societies, families bond when sharing food.  Look around, and you see people sitting together in restaurants and coffee shops.  Each seems totally absorbed in text or email exchanges while connected to the world, yet isolated from those sitting at the same table next to them.

Retrieved from http://www.cartoonaday.com/thanksgiving-table-family-texting/

As early childhood educators, we advocate direct human interaction as important for the development of the whole child.  S.E.E.D.S. lessons and activities are student-centered, project-based and involve group interaction.  How else will children learn to develop concepts and skills to interact with other people?

As Ghandi once said, “Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency.  Man is a social being.  Without interrelation with society he cannot realize his oneness with the universe or suppress his egotism.  His social interdependence enables him to test his faith and to prove himself on the touchstone of reality ”