The task of educating should have as a mandatory requirement for the educator the need to love the one he has the task of guiding. And when we say "love" it is not necessarily in the fraternal or affective sense, but in the sense of devotion, of striving and giving your best so that the education offered to a child is the best that the educator can offer, improving with quality and the formation of a future citizen effectively. Despite the efforts to apply education with love, just as important is to educate so that this child learns to love everything that is part of their experience.
A child must be educated to love his parents, regardless of whether they always do what he wants. The fact that they do not always act as the young person expects or would like does not mean that they do not love them, quite the opposite. More difficult than the task of loving is the duty of disciplining, as this, in addition to all the antipathies it can generate, still has a great chance of counting on future ingratitude. Not to mention many other things that parents would like to do, however, they have financial limitations and are unable to do so.
The child who knows how to love will understand perfectly, because the presence and coexistence of his parents is the most important thing in the world, while the one who has not learned to love will be fixated on the materiality of the object he wanted and get angry with the parents, that is, he walks making great strides towards becoming a spoiled youngster and the kind of adult who will demand that others always do what he wants.
Loving your parents is relatively easy, after all, anyone with the slightest bit of discernment understands their value in life. Learning to love your neighbor is not so easy and automatic in the same way, starting with the love of animals. A famous phrase by the Indian leader Gandhi was already very clear: “The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated”. Considering that a nation is formed by a group of human beings, a child who is reprimanded from an early age when he mistreats his pet and is educated to live with and love animals will contribute in the future to a better world.
If loving parents is easy, then loving animals is as easy as, after all, are there more faithful and reliable beings? Well, the hard thing is to love other people, or better yet: enemies. It is not something that is literally learned, but practiced. A person who makes enemies is someone who will have a harder time overcoming goals and will lose his focus on winning in life by aiming to defeat another person. Every religion brings positive messages, one that is worth highlighting in this matter is Christianity: “Love your neighbor as yourself”. If that were the motto of all of humanity's educational principles, we certainly wouldn't step on the moon while someone starved on the planet.
- Text written by Diego Rennan from the Eu Sem Fronteiras Team.
