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The world children have to grow up in II

The problem of lost children

To understand the problem of lost children, a small observation at the outset may provide a key of understanding what is meant by being lost. Not the child lost in the crowd after having become separated from the parents like so many when families visit fairs or festivals with many crowding into the streets. Nor is meant a lost child because it has been abducted although that poses a problem to parents, police and society especially if connected as in the late nineties in Belgium to pedophiles and posters of every child missing appearing at every entrance to train or metro stations. Rather it is the simple matter of a child waiting for some time at the fringe of a playground filled with children all playing, shouting, running, etc. The child waits at the fringe for a moment when it can release itself and suddenly stands up and runs into the playground to soon disappear amongst the waves of children. It is as if plunging into the sea of happy laughter. When over it seems as if the child pulls itself out of the maze of other children by means of an invisible rope. It pulls itself back to land as a way to remind itself who it was before plunging into that sea. For the child knows there is a risk to loose itself and then never find the way back.
Identity building processes have never been discussed in terms of a child needing to loose itself in order to regain after the experiences made in the world of others its own identity. That identity will no longer be the same since there are now the new experiences just made. But there is a need for a continuity of identity and therefore the need to recognize what was the identity before running off to dive into the waves created by the children playing altogether.
Freud called that ‘invisible rope’ the memory track to be remembered by stepping into the feelings as they come up to the surface very much like the bubbles of a diver. What distinguishes children from adults is that children are all about memory tracks while adults sit inside of systems which prevent them from experiencing the feelings. The will burst like those bubbles when coming up and hitting the bottom of the system sitting there like a big pot with the adults inside. Freud said clearly for adults to experience their feelings they must step out of the system and into these feelings as they come up. By following these feelings, they will again discover the ‘memory track’.
Children need to live in freedom if they are to bring together the different memory tracks in order to create their identities in terms of their own potentialities and not merely in what the world communicates to them in various forms as to what is possible. Albert Camus describes this identity in the making as ‘l’homme revolte’. Indeed, children are in constant revolt against what their parents and other peers tell them will not work, is not allowed, cannot be done, makes no sense while all that what adults celebrate as great feats is but a petty compliance with the rules of the system wishing to separate the winners from the losers as the only purpose of the school system. 21
There are general conditions having an impact upon children but also specific reasons such as what schools are turning out to be in order to explain why children are lost in this world:

Deprivation and neglect means social bonds are weak and the emotional side of a child not at all addressed. It is hardly conceivable but children never experiencing love and care will themselves be able to pass on any human empathy to their own children once grown up and when beginning a family life of their own. The reason is that they have become conformists by definition and cannot deal with reality when their own children begin to revolt.
Broken homes as background and being a social outcast has been portrayed in the most powerful way by Kenneth Loach in his film ‘Cathy come home’. 24 It is the story about homeless people and became a social outcry against a society ignoring the plight of the homeless. It has lead in the UK to the creation of ‘Shelter’ to take on the plight of exactly these people.
In another film called ‘Kes’ Kenneth Loach talks about a boy from a mining town having nothing but a wild bird, a hawk, as friend. The story about this bird breaks the boredom of the classroom for suddenly there is something interesting to catch everyone’s attention. Everyone sits up and listens. But then new problems awaited him at home. Instead of betting on a horse which won the race as had his elderly brother instructed him, the boy uses the money to buy food for ‘Kes’. That has terrible consequences for in such a world the dream to escape fate is ever more rigorously attached to money as fake solution for everything. That is explainable when there is none available.
Of interest is when seeing those typical streets of a mining town in Northern England and the milkman delivering early in the morning the bottles, cultural heritage of the industrial age becomes a physical existence under severe restrictions. The smoking chimneys which pollute the entire town are a symbol for that.

What is lost when growing up?

The amazing aspect of children is that they do try to become responsible whether asked or not. Interesting is to observe that when they listen to what parents and other adults are saying as to what is going on in the world, they develop concepts of the world based on their understanding of morality and what might be a solution. 25 By growing up they will be more convinced in these solutions as they have lived them through and questioned these solutions from as many angles as possible. By not being yet responsible for what goes on in the world, they can and do develop ideas about what they will do once in a position to undertake something against, for example, pollution of rivers, AIDS, poverty in the third world, need for renewable energy etc. Solutions are found by defining the problem in need to be solved more precisely.

Discovering the world and learning how to survive in it is an ongoing questioning process resting on assumptions, perceptions and evaluation of approaches taken so far to resolve things. The reformulation of original questions and perceptions needs to be precise if a learning process is to take place. Children must be made also aware that not every solution will work under any condition but only certain ones. That means learning out of failure becomes important and therefore the need to overcome initial disappointments requires more than just stamina. It will require philosophical reflections as a way of crying and consoling oneself at one and the same time.
Every new generation will have that chance to make a difference to the previous one. Even farmers are advised by the village preacher during one of his sermons up in the Austrian mountains to listen to their sons when they come back from schools for agriculture since they have a new understanding of how to deal with technology. It begins with the use or not of a tractor instead of horses for plowing the fields and transporting other things the farm needs.
Naturally it means in turns younger generations are clearly the target groups of companies when it comes to sell new products and in an overall sense youth are educated to embrace a certain viewpoint of the world that is conducive to a certain way of doing politics. From upholding values of democracy to a certain foreign policy it has to do with socialization and as Ernst Bloch, the German philosopher would say, with the risk that especially ‘young people catch very easily right wing fire’. This can be explained that young people can be inflamed especially if they see injustice not being responded to enough by present politics.
In either case, insights gained by maturing while free by growing into the world gradually or else being affected by some political ideologies and solutions being propagated at the time, there is a double risk for these children to loose their independence when inheriting the world but with the wrong political tools helping to reproduce just a conformist pattern. It requires still a much greater maturity to question abuse of power. And if thrown into strict survival within the adult world right away there will be no chance given to develop over time any solution nor will these children enjoy any support.
All that applies even more so to children who cannot complete childhood because they are already at an early age subjected to various forms of child abuse.

Poverty of experience

As a matter of fact, what a child experiences when growing up determines what it will do in future. It will be the material by which to link identity with whatever actions is perceived as being conceivable and compatible with social reality at one and the same time.
While growing up the social experiences made are equally crucial. It begins on how people treat each other, but also if justice and freedom prevails in the family, at school, in the streets and in society at large. Dealing with the poor as much as coming to terms with the handicapped and those with special needs are just as important for the formation of social justice as is the readiness to intervene whenever someone else is treated unjustly by others. All that will set standards for future practices. Almost all children have a strong sense of justice but once violated will turn their forces against that notion by joining gangs or else doing illegal things.
Especially children growing up in families praying ‘law and order’ while using physical and psychological violence to punish children when daring to question the authorities of the parents, will have already committed many criminal acts by twelve. Of interest is that a state at war will legitimize precisely those actions since now a part of the fighting method. It says a lot about the relativity of ethics for what a civil society in peace with itself would name as ‘crime against humanity’, a state at war would legitimize such actions. The problem is that the perversion of values begins already at an early age when the mother admires her man in uniform telling the son about his great deeds and still dreaming to make his career by climbing up in the military hierarchy for the sake of improving the life of his life. That more success means the cost of more lives seems hardly to hit home until too late.
Next to lived through experiences as making a difference in real consciousness when relating to reality, there is a need to create through use of cultural heritage a continuity of identity with humanity. It takes time for solutions to be found, hence only in the long run realizable and here peace as most fragile, equally crucial common good. It indicates that due to global challenges affecting daily life in all aspects, many people cannot cope with change. Here cultural tools are becoming ever more crucial on how people can deal with change. As this needs to be passed on to children, more emphasis needs to be given to such ‘informal learning processes’ than what formal education can do in such a case.
Indeed, children learn more on how to deal with changes over time when visiting with their school classes or with their parents or friends museums and cultural heritage sites. It will let them discover things their immediate world does not contain nor would ever remind them that there are still other forms of knowledge linked to quite different forms of living and work e.g. the Industrial age.
But when no such preservation of cultural heritage makes such knowledge accessible, and by contrast hunger and lack of future eat away at their time and leave ever more children without any heritage, then they loose what they need for life: a happy childhood to look back upon once they have grown up. When hunger and war makes the life of children into a real plight, it is the lack of future that clouds their otherwise friendly faces and lets deep worries and fear creep into their eyes. Lost children are the ones without childhood to look back to once adults. They are even adult children before they had the time to grow up.

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