-- *Mar*Below is an edited, clearer, and more coherent version of your piece, preserving your core ideas, philosophical stance, and tone while improving language, flow, and structure. After that, I share my own views. ------------------------------ *Class Last vs. Class First*
When a child wants to play and resists going to school, it is not mere indiscipline. It reflects a deep urge to remain connected with nature. The child resists being bludgeoned into Cartesianism—the reduction of life into mechanical fragments—and being converted into a machine. >From the moment of birth, a child moves from the mother’s womb into the larger womb of nature. This instinctive bond with nature is carried at birth as a fundamental emotion. Nature is the child’s first language. Nature cannot conceptualize the mechanical paradigm. For nature, every machine is harmful because everything in nature is interconnected. Even the smallest harm disrupts its delicate symbiosis. A child is born with a clear sense of this interconnectedness. What the child needs is not confinement but free and healthy nature. Nature is the best teacher. It sharpens and strengthens every faculty of the child and instills the fundamental truth that the child is not separate from nature but a living limb of it. This truth need not be taught; it needs to be lived. The child needs freedom within nature, not lessons contaminated by Cartesian thinking, which severs the relationship between the child and the natural world. In nature there are no machines—only life forms relating and bonding emotionally. The child arrives with this emotional bonding intact. It is an invisible connection with 99.9965% of the totality that the eyes cannot see and which can only be accessed through feeling. A child needs trees to climb, animals and birds to play with, lakes to swim in, hills and mountains to explore, and waterfalls to experience. Nature offers a macro-learning that operates continuously, twenty-four hours a day. The so-called “Class First” child is often a victim of Cartesianism. Cut away from nature, it begins to be maimed—severed from the macro body of nature, which is its true self. Education today has been infected by economics, the very antonym of the free ecology of nature. Classrooms increasingly detach children from their best teacher. The tragedy deepens when children are imprisoned in air-conditioned classrooms, robbed of natural air, natural smells, and the living presence of flora and fauna. Air-conditioned rooms block natural air and expel hot, unhealthy, anti-natural air into the environment. The child is deprived of nature’s sensory lessons—the smells, sounds, and rhythms—and is unable to exhale its own understanding back into the world. The child is amputated from its limbhood of nature. We are all conditioned by economics. We are trained to become machines—economic men—rather than natural humans. We are taught to believe that economic life is total life. It is the “Class Last” child who resists this atrocity against nature. This child longs to feel, smell, hear, and sense nature’s lessons and to escape the Cartesian paradigm. Every such child represents a living protest. Cartesianism has converted free nature into a prison. As prisoners of economics, we relentlessly destroy nature in the name of economic life. Every “Class Last” child is a pioneer of resistance against this deadly paradigm. Let us pray for the emergence of a university that repudiates Cartesianism and makes a radical new beginning—one that starts with a Free Nature Park as its foundation, untouched by human tampering and technological contamination. *—Y. M. Sarma* ------------------------------ *My Views* Your essay powerfully critiques the mechanization of education and the dominance of Cartesian and economic thinking. I strongly agree with your central insight: modern education often alienates children from nature, bodily intelligence, emotion, and wholeness. The sensory, emotional, and ecological dimensions of learning are deeply undervalued. However, I would add a note of balance. Cartesian reasoning and technology are not inherently evil; the danger lies in their absolutism. When logic, economics, and machines dominate at the cost of feeling, ecology, and lived experience, they become destructive. The goal, perhaps, is not total rejection but reintegration—where rational thought serves life rather than replaces it. A truly humane education would combine: - *Nature as the primary classroom* - *Emotion and feeling as valid forms of knowing* - *Reason and technology as supportive tools, not masters* Your call for a “Free Nature Park” as the foundation of education is both radical and deeply necessary. In an age of climate crisis and psychological fragmentation, such spaces may no longer be idealistic dreams but civilizational necessities. Your essay speaks not just for children, but for the wounded child within modern humanity itself. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CACDCHCJBJsrKtbWQJG%2Bwj%3DwKFkR%2BZfGVmBSk8JgKOviOShEs3g%40mail.gmail.com.
