Wild Gaia: Timeless Wisdom

I Didn’t Come to Learn Like This

By Charles Snelleksz-Mathelot

When our eldest daughter was six years old, she informed us that she wanted to leave school and learn from home.

It was a weekend that remains fresh in my mind. Christel and I were busy preparing to host a one-day wellness retreat for a meditation teacher we used to work for, when our daughter, Alexandrea, became sick on the Friday. By that evening, she was admitted to the Princess Margaret Children’s Hospital Emergency Department with a very high temperature, upset stomach and a pounding headache. After hours of tests, the doctors had no idea why she was so ill. While she was in hospital, her symptoms dissipated so my daughter was sent home.

On the Saturday morning, Alexandrea began to feel sick again and Christel, decided to stay home with her while I went to work. Christel had to take Alexandrea back to hospital, as she was vomiting again with a very high temperature and headache. I became worried for the health and life of my seemingly very ill six-year-old daughter.

After hours of medical tests, the doctors came to the conclusion that our daughter was experiencing emotional distress. I want to mention here that Alexandrea went to a Steiner school, where we felt that she would receive the best care and education possible. As it turned out, Alexandrea didn’t share our perception and wanted to leave.

“Dada, I don’t want to go to school.” “Are you feeling sick again?” I asked. “Nooo…” she replied hiding her face in my shoulder. “Do you want to stay home today?” I asked, as a knowing began to settle in my heart. “Dada, I didn’t come to learn like this.” My daughter told me. “What do you mean?” “I don’t want to go back to school!” “All right.” I responded because, in that moment, there didn’t seem to be a better answer to offer my child.

Christel also knew in her heart that our daughter was making

herself sick because school wasn’t working for her. I realised how blind I was to the imposition I had placed upon my daughter, expecting her to fulfil my desire to have a ‘Steiner Child’. My admiration for Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy on education stopped me from seeing what was true for my child. She was deeply unhappy at school.

Once Alexandrea began her journey in home learning, she relaxed into herself and we saw her innate nature begin to emerge again. I realised how much of my daughter’s identity was created from all that she was learning and experiencing previously at school.

Every day we watched our daughter grow into her own being-ness, which was not always easy for me. I witnessed all my limitations surface, as my daughter challenged me to rise and meet her at a vibrational level. This required me to drop all my beliefs about how one learns and how one must parent. Alexandrea refused to learn, she just wanted to play. This violated my need to belong to a society that insisted on people being educated through a system that imposed false standards, which our children are required to meet through examinations.

“Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really

the work of childhood.” - Fred Rogers

Those early years of home learning were difficult for all of us, as Alexandrea continued to avoid learning. We felt worn out by her strong resolution to resist learning in the misguided way we were teaching her. We couldn’t hear what she was telling us; to do so would mean we had to change the way we did life. I didn’t know how entrenched I was in the system that had created my own identity. I was firmly entrapped in the world the system had built for me and I was entrapping my daughter too. Pushing her into this world of artificial intelligence at the ready to enslave her with false knowledge based on false history. My daughter awakened me to the fact that I wasn’t free.

My journey to discover the truth about this world, started

“I was firmly entrapped in the world the system had built for me and I was entrapping my daughter too.”

around the time Alexandrea began her journey with home learning. The more I learned, the less inclined I became to force Alexandrea to achieve the system’s expected false standards. Alexandrea became anxious about her level of literacy and began experiencing feelings of shame and guilt regarding her learning or lack of it. This caused her to reject learning even more and Christel and I felt lost as to how we could assist her to achieve a level of confidence and ease of mind.

In 2020, Alexandrea decided that she might have a better chance of learning in a class with other students and an assigned teacher. By then, I didn’t want her to go to school, not after all I had learnt.

“Only a fool would let his enemy teach his children.” - Malcolm X

However, I trusted my daughter’s divine intelligence and Alexandrea attend another Steiner school. It wasn’t long before she realised what she had always known: she didn’t come here to learn to be a slave! Alexandrea left high school and is teaching herself how to remember who she is and why she is on Earth. Christel and I learnt so much about ourselves, as we allowed our daughter to reflect to us our own limitations. Though it was difficult to see at first, we rose above those limitations and decided to acknowledge our daughter as the amazing teacher she is. We grew in ways we could not have achieved without her divine guidance. When we home school our children, the whole family begins a journey of self-discovery and the opportunity to grow.

Our children do not come to Earth to be enslaved. It is our responsibility to listen to them and to share with them the wisdom that keeps them sovereign and free. This can only happen when we are willing to allow them to grow by mirroring to us that which needs healing within our own psyche!

Check out Charles’ Blog on Gaian Heart Wisdom HERE

Image Credit: Pexel, Pixabay, Unsplash