Teaching Babies (and Parents) To be More Human at Balay Binhi

In my mid-twenties, I was a snooty graduate student who liked to toss philosophical words in any word salad essay like idealism, empiricism, and theism. But my favorite one was the word 'humanistic'. And for awhile I claimed to be a humanistic person because I adhered to the philosophy of humanism. To make it academic sounding, I'd tell people (who cared to ask about my teaching philosophy) that I am into the existential-humanism philosophy, which basically means that human beings are inherently good and that they carve their own destiny.

I am now in my early-thirties, a full-time mother and a wife. I have since stopped being snooty because after almost a decade of being in the academe, I really don't have anything to show that I am scholarly. My rather mediocre resume will prove just that. But I have learned so much from my short stint as an elementary teacher and from my 9 years of teaching in a university. For one, no matter how much private and public schools in our country claim to mold the character of our youth, we still end up with self-serving leaders (and they come from the so-called Ivy League schools here).

I still claim to be a humanist, but what does it mean to be one? I found some answers in my son's toddler school in Leganes called Balay Binhi.

Here are other lessons I learned from this little community of nurturers:

1. Love is best spelled as T-I-M-E.

Every article I have come across about how to rear a genius or how to have well-adjusted kids seem to boil down to this simple advice - spend time with your kids. Nothing beats having Mom around to listen or Dad helping little Johnny fix his bike. Everybody knows love is best spelled as t-i-m-e,  but it's difficult to practice it when you're a career mom. This is one of the reasons why I was happy to let go of my job.

2. Exposure to gadgets at an early age do more harm than good.

And not just gadgets, mind you. Include battery-operated toys, as well. I have personally witnessed how pushing buttons on a plastic toy to prompt animal sounds and blinking lights caused Thirdy to become a zombie. TV, tablets, and cellphones not only damage a child's vision, it also damages his brain causing him to become addicted to such.

3. A child's job is to play, not study.

From 0-7 years old according to Steiner (founder of Waldorf Education), a child should be taught that the world is beautiful, not a structured place where spewing the multiplication table and the alphabet backwards are more superior tasks than climbing trees and playing with mud. And how do we teach them that the world is beautiful? By nurturing their imagination. But how? By play, of course. Period.

4. Early academics will not make your child any smarter.

Sure, you might find a 2-year-old who already knows how to read a genius, but will this little bit of a talent matter to him after 30 years when he is struggling to find a job because he has poor interpersonal skills? I think what matters more is for our children to become highly functional adults, not someone who can memorize a textbook from cover to cover.

5. Parents need to be educated, too.

This is what I truly appreciate from our sessions at Balay Binhi. The parents are the ones who are educated and the children are allowed to just be children.

And the humanistic part? Balay Binhi focuses on the head, heart, and hands of a child. They make sure that none is too big nor too small than the other. Now, that's one lesson in not being snooty.