A good education is directed, to a great extent, to the formation of the character of our children, promoting their personal growth and facilitating their optimal maturity, to face the circumstances of life. In the early stages the father and mother are the primary reference, so that they are the main educators, and those who help them to shape their personality.
When we educate, we do it more by what we are than by what we say. We shape much more by the example we give than by what we focus on so that our children improve. That is why it is necessary to work on our coherence of life, to educate in the best way, when we are aware of the repercussion of our actions and when we are not. At the same time we grow as people in our effort to be a better reference.
But thinking about the future, when we are not such a clear leader -law of life- or we have less influence over them (in many cases before adolescence), we can give them some tools, as if we were to invest them with knights who go out into the world. They are tools for them to be able to face a polarized society, full of multiple ideas with which they coexist, and the challenge of Artificial Intelligence.
These are four: reading, writing, listening and speaking.
Read to fight
The importance of reading is more evident today than ever, because we live in a changing world, and we must be prepared for what we have and for what may come. That is why it is necessary to read in order to live, especially in “stormy and windy” times, knowing our fragility.
Julio Llorente says that “reading well is not only choosing good books: it is, above all, reading with the right attitude”. This would be the first characteristic that we should encourage in a good reader, to know why we read a book and what we expect from it. But what to read? “Mostly we focus on reading novels, when each genre brings a different perspective on reality and they are necessary. The preponderance of one genre is already a limitation of the art of reading,” Enrique García-Máiquez once said. So it is good to try different types of books, that discover new worlds. But always progressively and under the guidance and orientation of someone who can show us what to read. The Bible, the classics, encyclopedias, novels, comics...
But how do you find time to read? And the answer is clear: you have to want to. It is necessary to put aside the cell phone for a while a day and have a daily reading plan. 20 pages a day means reading 7,300 pages a year. Or 10 pages a day brings the appreciable sum of 3650 pages a year. Or a rickety 5 pages a day means 1325 pages a year. I assure you that you will not be the same after reading this amount of pages a year!
But how can we awaken a taste for reading?
Visiting a bookstore or a library is like visiting a good Italian ice cream parlor, one of those that are appealing to the senses, but especially to the eye. When you enter it, the colorful, apparent, suggestive and appealing vision generates the desire to taste the more than 150 appetizing flavors... Bacio, limone, fragola, cioccolato, stracciatella, caffè, ferrero rocher, nutella, nocciola, Pistacchio, Rum Raisin, Tiramisù,... After a while of thinking, we make a more or less correct decision: «Give me a scoop of limone and another of... fragola», we ask the clerk, while we keep looking at the counter and we are thinking: «next day I want to try the nocciola and pistacchio one. But I would also like to try the one with stracciatella and Ferrero Rocher, and also...». This indecision, the result of concupiscence, generates the desire to try more flavors and to return to the store as soon as possible.
In the same way that an ice cream shop awakens our desire to try a lot of ice cream, a good library or bookstore can awaken our “reading appetite or concupiscence”. When we see a large bookstore window, the novelty counter of a library, or when we go to look for a book and find a more interesting one, we feel the desire to read, either for knowledge or enjoyment. And not only that, but the variety of literary genres and topics on display invites us to broaden our culture.
But we do not only cultivate ourselves through reading, but also through writing, listening and dialogue.
Luri usually says that writing is not only transmitting ideas, as many people think, but also a way of having them. He also says that in order to learn to write well, it is not enough to read a lot and read well, you have to practice. That is why dedicating time to writing is a great way to interpret what happens to us, to shape us as people, to order our ideas, but above all to have them.
The most necessary thing is dialogue
But perhaps what is most urgent and necessary today is the capacity for dialogue, that is to say, for listening and speaking. For it is very necessary to form ourselves well, since it forces us to be up to date on current issues and to have a clear position.
To have polarity (one's own ideas and to defend them) is necessary, but to be polarized is to be out of place, since our ideas can never be above people, because they deserve our respect. In these times, a good Christian, if he is recognized for something, it is for this, for his capacity to understand, to dialogue and to build bridges, even if we think in the opposite way.
That is why it is more necessary than ever to cultivate and, to a large extent, to educate ourselves. Let us foster this attitude in our children and they will be better prepared for the future, knowing that we are vulnerable.
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