it's where we live

I know I've not done a very good job of keeping up with the blog lately. I've been preoccupied by day with curriculum planning, and I've been preoccupied by night with the same thing hundreds of thousands of other TV viewers across the world have been preoccupied with.

One of the things that we really love about the Enki Education curriculum is it's emphasis on developing a healthy global consciousness. Their humanities program is designed around bringing the various world cultures to life for our kids, so that they see themselves as a part of those cultures as well as the one they are growing up in -- so that there is no "us" and "them", but just a deeper connectedness to all humanity. And that's an approach that jives very well with The Map Man's and my own world view, and something we would very much like to foster in our kids.

So it was with a bit of trepidation that I let the kids watch me cheering on the likes of Michael Phelps and Dara Torres. I was worried that the overblown patriotic tone that tends to come along with the Olympics would take seed in them, and they would start to view themselves as just this one segment of the world, and everyone else as "them".

What I didn't expect was how much kids inherently understand that they are a part of ALL humanity, not just the tiny divisions of countries or races. The boys cheered on all the countries, all the athletes. No matter who was leading at the splits, they would call out "Hooray Italy! Yeah Great Britain! Go Jamaica! Swim, Australia, Swim! Hooray China!" And for the United States? For the U.S. they would turn on an extra bit of delight, an extra burst of excitement. "United States!!!" they would call. "That's where we live!!"

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the inherent wisdom of children will never cease to amaze me. Of course, why hadn't I thought of that? The U.S. is our address! It isn't who we are, it's where we live. And that doesn't make us any better or worse than anyone else with a different address. WE aren't different from one another, our addresses are.

So hurray for China, and Great Britain, and Russia, and Germany, and Korea (both of them), and Jamaica, and Australia, and Italy, and Japan, and Romania, and Kenya. And hurray for the United States! We can be a little extra excited about that. It's where we live!