It Takes a Whole Village
The School Daily e-newsletter (www.theschooldaily.com) of 27 September 2002 featured an article by its own editor wherein he said his own teaching philosophy was based on the African Proverb: It takes a whole village to educate a child. Keystone’s editor replied with the following:
Forgive me, but I must counter this with the following quote by the Wisconsin Independent School Board Association:
Only the village idiot
would consider letting the entire village in
on the task of raising his children.
I ’m fairly sure I don’t want my children adopting the lifestyles, values and attitudes of the typical African village our media and missionaries portray to us: the poverty, the disease, the men folk sitting around drinking or chewing, the women doing all the physical labour, the rampant sexual immorality, the deadly AIDS plague running out of control, the superstitions of the animist religions, the greed and envy and corruption of the witch doctors, the female circumcision, the slavery still practised by the blacks and the Arabs as it was 200 years ago, the prostitution, the slash and burn agriculture, and the killing of rare animals to feed the tourist and aphrodisiac trade.
And the NZ village: it contains a growing number of men who refuse to marry the women they live with or have anything to do with the children they sire; it has women who refuse to spank children who do wrong, claiming it is too violent, yet who will slaughter their own children, who have done nothing, while still in the womb; sexual immorality and perversions of all sorts are freely available on the internet to people of any age, on video for slightly more effort, in massage parlours, and through the personal columns while the health classes in some schools train younger and younger children in the fine art of condom use; children openly skip classes in order to help with the cannabis harvest and show up at school stoned; teachers appear to be unable to curtail the rampant bullying and women’s refuges are full to bursting.
Please allow me to suggest another old proverb, spoken 2,000 years ago by a swarthy Jewish fellow, as an alternative to this defective African one: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and your neighbour as yourself.” I reckon we’d all get a lot more mileage out of it.
From Keystone Magazine
September 2002 , Vol. VIII No. 5
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