It’s Back to
School, and I, like every other parent, is crunched for time and bowing under
the weight of pursuing personal success and supporting success for her
children. Much of it all comes down to
Time.
Time for
school. Time for homework. Time to relax. Time to get them to bed in time for enough
rest. Time for self-fulfillment, time
for self-indulgence (mine are only 6 and 3 years old, after all!). Time for physical activity. Time for musical and artistic development or
enrichment. Time for play. Time for cleaning up and putting away. Time for reading. Time for imagination. Time to talk and question and answer.
That’s a
lot of Time for a working professional mother like me who also needs a lot of
Time for herself. Time for work, time
for overtime, time for the commute, time for my personal projects, time with my
husband, time for sports, time for hobbies, my siblings, my friends? Time… so much Time that the more I write the
word, the less it seems articulate, or even real.
But the
repercussions of Time are very real. According
to current social mores, if your child doesn’t start lessons in a particular instrument
or sport at a young enough age, the child will probably carry a lag compared to
others (unless the child has unusual talent in the domain). If your child lacks the maturity for certain
math problems, the poor grades of the time will negatively impact the child’s
record and/or confidence and may be set back from hen as the child will maybe
be excluded from the higher math class from then on. If your child doesn’t excel at standardized
tests, there’s a chance that the child won’t be able to stay in that school
that has to keep its pass rate high enough to retain funding. It’s even worse for working parents and,
above all, working women who, with or without children, suspected to take away
too much Time from her work to care for babies, children, or elders.
Yet, if our
society shifted from this standardized, timed success towards a more spherical
time in which maturity and naturalness enabled each of us to grow at our own
pace and in our own way, we would all be greatly enriched by gifts of maturity
and wisdom that life experience carries.
In the
past, I have made the case for incorporating our understanding of quantum
physics into our lives, setting up a system that obeys natural maturational
processes and qualitative growth instead of always reducing everything to the
ticking of measurement and quantification.
In the past, I have argued that we refuse to minimize our lives to a Tayloristic,
linear logic of “then and than” and move onto a more quantum, spherical approach
to learning and achievement with greater emphasis on accomplishment and growth
instead of squelched memorization and graded success.
When we
allow ourselves to grow with experience, with scientific method of hypothesis and
testing, when we leave time for play and imagination, our children are likely
to learn more quickly and fully than when they plug away at hours of homework
every night after school. When we take
time to debate and constructively argue, we stand to gain much more knowledge
and wisdom than memorizing dates and trivia.
This might not meet the quantified and quantifiable expectations of “then
and than” linear time, nor does anyone probably have any Time for it… but it is
more likely to build better thinkers.
Children who have sturdier building blocks for learning and retaining their
acquired knowledge both at school and during their free time. Citizens who have better grasp on how things (objects, systems,
relationships) work and therefore a better hold on their own lives and the weight
of their vote.
As a
working mother want for Time and worried about her children being able to survive
in our “then and than” linear timing and Performance Society, I feel the drag
toward ticking away steadily without question, marching to the beat of the
drummer as best we can with no slack to ever consider a different tune, a more
harmonious rhythm that would enable our societies to start to dream again a
dream of progress, improvement, fullness, and sustainable growth.
And if we mothers don’t have time to help
imagine and build a better society, who will?
It’s time for us to be freed up from the
race-time imperative and give time back where we need it most: debate, quality progress, sustainable growth,
critical knowledge.
Talk to you
next week for another bite from the apple,
Eve
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