Mind, Heart, and Spirit: Educators Speak

by

Heather Cardin

Wilmette, Illinois

Bahá’í Publishing 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091-2844 Copyright © 2009 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States All rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ 12 11 10 09 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cardin, Heather.

Mind, heart, and spirit : educators speak / by Heather Cardin. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-931847-66-7 (alk. paper) 1. Bahai education of children. 2. Education—Philosophy. I. Title.

BP388.E42C37 2009 297.9’375—dc22 2009021143

Cover design by Bob Reddy Book design by Patrick Falso

Contents Acknowledgments........................................................................ ix Introduction..................................................................................1 1 / The First Educator................................................................. 13 2 / Personal Experiences, Society’s Standards............................... 41 3 / The Role of Parents............................................................. 153 4 / Curriculum.......................................................................... 185 5 / Education in Practice...........................................................237 6 / Expecting and Envisioning Excellence.................................. 313 7 / Solutions to Challenges Through Spiritual Means...............357 Conclusion................................................................................383 Postscript....................................................................................411 Notes........................................................................................ 415 Bibliography.............................................................................. 421 Recommended Resources..........................................................425

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Introduction In 1978, after two years at university, I flew to Papua New Guinea to begin my life as a high school teacher. I was assigned classes in English and a subject called Expressive Arts, which was composed of visual arts, music, and drama. I threw in some cooking classes for the boys and arranged for the girls to have some instruction in carpentry. A year on the Madang coast was followed by a year in the highlands, in Enga province. From this foundation, I decided that to be a teacher was a calling. I decided that I wanted to be a brilliant teacher, and I flew back to my home in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, and proceeded to finish my degrees. Shortly after graduating, I married my husband Bernie.

We had no money and no jobs. I applied for any job I could find and landed a position teaching French and English in Canada’s Midwest in small-town Saskatchewan. Think, if you are American, of the Dakotas. It was bald Canadian prairie, and on the evening we moved in, newlyweds, it was December 31, 1984, and bitterly cold, to the point where Celsius and Fahrenheit become the same: -40. We had some beef liver from a friendly neighbor, an onion bought from the Chinese café, and ketchup for a New Year’s Eve dinner in our new home. Little did I know that for me, it was the beginning of a career.

Not much of my time as a teacher would be spent in Cabri, however. I was soon expecting our first child. It was a busy time, preparing for several different classes, assimilating curriculum needs for French, and teaching every grade from seventh through twelfth. Any teacher 1

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can tell you that the first year can be challenging. However, I had enjoyed the benefit of the two years in Papua New Guinea, so classroom management was easy, for the most part, and I was experiencing that particular glow of being newlywed and newly pregnant, which made even the long prairie winter seem exciting. It was a happy time.

By the end of the school year, I had resigned from my teaching position because I knew I wanted to stay home with my baby. This meant that we had to look for other options, and Bernie and I decided to go to a Bahá’í pioneer* institute being held at a retreat near Sylvan Lake, Alberta. There, with about fifty other Bahá’ís from across Canada, we studied the pioneer life. My parents were, by then, Bahá’í pioneers to Belize, in Central America. We enjoyed socializing with everyone and thought we might relocate to Québec, where French-speaking Bahá’ís were encouraged to live. However, we were invited at the institute to think about going to St. Pierre et Miquelon instead. We were open, young, and happy, so it was easy to accept the proposal of the committee in charge. We arrived in St. Pierre in August but were unable to remain due to French laws regarding immigration.

Circumstances in our lives meant that I forgot about teaching.

It would be five years until I returned, formally, to the classroom, although I accepted short contracts. One such contract was deeply satisfying and involved teaching English as a second language to immigrants to Canada. Students came from all over the world, and our lives were enriched by their diverse perspectives. I remember many of their stories to this day.

* A pioneer is not a missionary. Pioneers are those who choose to move to other communities with the goal of assisting the local Bahá’ís in the development of community life. Pioneers are not paid to do this work and must earn their own living.

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By 1991, I was the mother of three young children, and we had spent some time in Saskatchewan, then in Belize, then back in Saskatchewan, and then in Ontario. We were getting a little tired of wandering. In August of 1991, I applied for a job teaching in a town in northern British Columbia. If everything worked out, I would teach French Immersion and Social Studies. I faxed the application on the Wednesday before Labor Day, got a phone call from the principal of the school the next day, and was invited to show up in time to teach the following Tuesday. Bernie went out and bought us a van, and with three kids, a trunk full of household goods and assorted suitcases, we drove from Saskatoon to Fort St. John, arriving on Saturday. We found a townhouse in which to live on Sunday, I picked up books from the principal on Monday, and I started to teach at North Peace Senior Secondary School on Tuesday. I was still nursing our son, Jesse, who had just turned one, and Bernie was home with Melodie, who was almost five; Maya, who was three; and Jesse. It was a dramatic reentry into the profession.

Education is, according to the words of Bahá’u’lláh,* a glorious calling. The Founder of the Bahá’í Faith emphasizes, in writing after writing, the importance of educating the mind, the heart, and the soul of humanity. Additionally, Bahá’ís view Bahá’u’lláh Himself as the most recent Divine Educator. In a work which includes many of Bahá’u’lláh’s collected writings, He explains, “The Prophets and Messengers of God have been sent down for the sole purpose of guiding mankind to the straight Path of Truth. The purpose underlying their revelation hath been to educate all men, that they may, at the hour of death, ascend, in the utmost purity and sanctity and with absolute

* Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith.

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detachment, to the throne of the Most High.� He also says, “We prescribe unto all men that which will lead to the exaltation of the Word of God amongst His servants, and likewise, to the advancement of the world of being and the uplift of souls. To this end, the greatest means is education of the child. To this must each and all hold fast.

We have verily laid this charge upon you in manifold Tablets as well as in My Most Holy Book. Well is it with him who deferreth thereto.�1 Thus, in becoming a teacher, I believed that I was continuing my personal calling but also fulfilling my spiritual purpose. It was a belief that would carry me through many years as an educator and that would bring me into contact with scores of devoted teachers. A career in education would also introduce me to some of the most vibrant and wonderful young people I would know in my lifetime, some of whom were kind enough to collaborate with me in sharing their stories of faith.2 I began to think of educators and the number of times I would be sitting in a staff room and hear someone recount their excitement at something that had occurred in their classroom that day. The energy is palpable when teaching is good. The teacher and students engage themselves in the upliftment of knowledge, and from there, the link to spiritual advancement is an easy stretch, the joy that gives us wings.3 For a teacher, those days are incandescent.

Other times, one wonders why one bothers. Every teacher has had days of terrible discouragement: the kids are cranky, they are misbehaved, and everyone seems to have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. Worse, there are schools where safety is an issue. The grief we feel when we lose a loved one is underscored when we hear of school shootings. I recall the horrors of fourteen women murdered in Montreal, then more recently at Dawson College, where an angry young man opened fire, then a week later in Pennsylvania, where a man killed several young girls in an Amish community. As I write, 4

1 / The First Educator To the mothers must be given the divine Teachings and effective counsel, and they must be encouraged and made eager to train their children, for the mother is the first educator of the child.

It is she who must, at the very beginning, suckle the newborn at the breast of God’s Faith and God’s Law, that divine love may enter into him even with his mother’s milk.

—‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá

When a child is born, the first person to greet her is her mother. In ideal circumstances, both parents will welcome this little one to the world. When our first daughter was born in 1985, my arms were slightly weakened from pulling on the stirrups, and I was shaky. Bernie was the first person to tell me our daughter was a girl, the first to hold her, the first to offer her seeking little mouth something to grasp: his little finger. By then, I was strong enough to hold her in my arms and began to nurse her. As I write, the memory is as strong as though it were yesterday. She is twenty-three.

In Bahá’í teachings, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá tells us that the mother is “the first educator.” Thus he acknowledges a fact that is often forgotten in 13

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modern society: education is not only a matter of schools. While this book will explore education and consists of narratives from colleagues and fellow educators around the world, no book on educating from the heart and spirit and grounded in Bahá’í teaching could afford to overlook the primacy of the role of parents, particularly the mother, in raising children.

This is not just a question of biology over sociology or a reductionist view designed to keep women in some form of oppression. It is a spiritual principle that acknowledges and elevates the role of parents and the special nature of motherhood. This principle of the importance of parenthood is so critical to Bahá’í thought that Bahá’u’lláh tells us that a father who does not care for his child forfeits the right of fatherhood.1 It is not a sacrifice to love a child. It is a normal state of affairs to love not only our own children but to love all children, and to have their best interests at heart as a society. This is a principle affirmed in the Bahá’í writings in numerous sources, but perhaps we find it most beautifully expressed in the recognition that elevates the station of a person who chooses to educate the child of another. Bahá’ís are required to ensure the education of all children. The education of children is a community endeavor, and the role of motherhood itself is extolled and affirmed in Bahá’í teachings: “O ye loving mothers, know ye that in God’s sight, the best of all ways to worship Him is to educate the children and train them in all the perfections of humankind; and no nobler deed than this can be imagined.”2 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá tells us that there is “no nobler deed” than motherhood. This is not meant to initiate an argument over nurture versus nature, nor is it meant to be an academic statement. It is simply a reminder, one of the many in Bahá’í teachings, of the honored role of mothering in the spiritual development of a child. It is a lovely and striking affirmation, and in some broad sense, may be a very 14

the fi r st ed u cat o r

necessary recognition, particularly for mothers in western societies and perhaps even more so for women in war-torn areas of the world, or those in places of economic depression, where women do so much, often unacknowledged, work.

The multiple tensions of mothering without societal support and often without the support of fathers are a grievous anomaly of current cultures. Perhaps in a gentler and more evolved future, society will embed the support systems needed by women and men who wish to love their children, who hope for fulfilling careers, and who understand that parenthood is itself a spiritual station. Bahá’ís view the development of such support as a critical part of the responsibilities of a religious community.

Until spiritual principle animates social practice, however, there are multiple challenges for parents raising children. Mothers, especially, are often so isolated, not only by financial hardship or emotional abandonment—both of which occur at a practical level and as the result of a sometimes unconscious trivialization by society—that they regret having children or find that their treatment of their children falls far short of their own ideals about child-raising. Rather than being forced to raise children by themselves or choose a career they don’t want, many women opt not to have children at all. The Bahá’í Faith does not teach that all women ought to have children, but it does teach that all women who choose to have children must be supported by their community in doing so.

It is a popular concept that it takes a village to raise a child. Our villages, typically, are cities, and we are abandoning our children. Mothers find themselves alone and on edge, in every way. In her fascinating work Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility, Germaine Greer makes an audacious statement that struck me forcibly when I first read it over two decades ago. In the opening chapter, “A Child is Born” she writes: 15

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‘Every child a wanted child’ is the slogan, but the modern Western infant is wanted by fewer people than any infant in our long history, not only by fewer parents but by smaller groups of people. Historically, babies have been welcome additions to society; their parents derived prestige and pleasure and pride from their proximity and suffered little or no deterioration in the quality of their lives, which could even have been positively enhanced by their arrival. . . .We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.3 I do not know if this is hyperbole. I do believe that Greer was hitting on a critical point: our attitude toward children dictates our practices with children. I also believe, as a mother and a teacher, that it is essential for the primary educative role of mothers to be acknowledged not only as an ideal but as a fundament. This is a deep spiritual principle that the Bahá’í community recognizes.

In the current development of its infrastructure, the worldwide Bahá’í community places emphasis on ensuring that spiritual education for youth and children is a task taken on with love and devotion by the entire cohort of Bahá’ís. These efforts serve as underpinnings for every aspect of a child’s life: an emotional connection with fathers, the loving role of extended family, the deep interest of religious community, and the development of safe, innovative places of education that schools are meant to be. These are all a part of the conscious development of Bahá’í practice.

Within all of these frameworks, implicitly and explicitly, is embedded the understanding that motherhood is noble and of primary importance to education. It is within this context that I wanted to share a conversation with you.

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