The Cannon family have been reflecting on life and change in the last two weeks. One new baby born, another due in 2 weeks and 2 wonderful old ladies dying at 100 and 101.

When Margaret and Joyce were born in 1906 and 1907, life involved a lot more horses, no electricity, computers, phone or radios. Both were wonderful feisty ladies who brought up their children and lived very full lives. Margaret played competitive bridge nearly all her life and as she lived in the UK, used to like shopping in Paris until a very old age. Joyce got a passport at well over 80 years when her sight began to go and she traveled widely so she could still see the world while she could. Bravo to both of them.

What huge changes these two lived through!

What changes will the new babies see in their lifetimes? Hopefully human ingenuity will go on finding new ways to do things, but with less fossil energy used and more respect for the embodied energy in the “things” we all dispose of in such huge amounts.

The scary thing is that we seem to be bringing our children up with a huge emphasis on consumerism and the toys they have tend to confine their imagination rather than expand it. I heard the other day about research showing the a lot of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) in children is due to boredom and is best treated with different teaching styles. Why does that NOT surprise me?

I don’t pretend to have answers to the future other than that we must stop polluting out atmosphere and our seas. What I do know is that we need to do this urgently and we need to nurture our children’s lateral thinking and imagination.

In Australia they are raising the school leaving age but we do need to remember in all this training that we are training them for jobs that don’t exist yet, to do tasks that we don’t understand, using technology that does not yet exist. I am not sure that our education system is really geared for this. My experience as a student, former teacher, parent and observer is that we do not have either the facilities or the mindset to challenge the brightest minds and many of us feel safer with conformity. We are beginning to cater more for the disadvantaged but there is a lack of understanding of how to nurture those brightest minds who will be solving the problems that we leave them.

Technorati Tags: Cannon family, fossil energy, add, attention deficit disorder, polluting our atmosphere

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Latest activities & outreach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.