In case it is not obvious, whilst many of these quotations are consistent with Taking Children Seriously, many of them are not. Sometimes it is just interesting that that person said it, or it is interesting for some other reason.
“Suppressing criticism of whether to learn something is siding with ‘learn this thing’ dogmatically, instead of rationally resolving the conflict. […] Criticism is how we learn. The more we suppress our own criticism, the more fragile our understanding will be.”
“To suppress your own critical faculties and follow someone else’s agenda, you have to find ways of directing yourself to not think about something you would naturally think about.”
“People do not have a hard time because of their race or cultural background. No one is attacked, abused, oppressed, pogromed upon or enslaved because of their race, creed or cultural background. People are attacked, abused, oppressed, pogromed upon or enslaved because of racism and anti-Semitism! There is a subtle but important difference in focus here. The first implies some inherent fault or shortcoming within the oppressed person or group. The second redirects the responsibility back to the real source of the problem.”
– Amoja Three Rivers, 1990, 1991, Cultural Etiquette: A Guide for the Well-Intentioned, p. 10
“[T]he experiences we have as children, mostly in our families of origin, have a profound impact on the rest of our lives. In response to difficult experiences, we create strategies or behavioral patterns to help us deal with what we experience as threats to our emotional, and sometimes even physical, survival. What we first use for our survival, we later use as a generalized and familiar way of engaging in life. These formulas or strategies are usually very intelligent and appropriate at the time they are created and are of very real benefit to us. As a result, they tend to become habitual and to then persist long after they are needed. Because they are responses to disturbing and even dangerous realities, they’re usually associated with quite a bit of anxiety. We avoid feeling this anxiety by pushing these strategies out of our awareness. They then continue to operate without our conscious participation, potentially for the rest of our lives, unless brought into awareness and challenged once we are adults.”
– Bruce Tift, 2015, Already Free, Chapter 1: The developmental view, p. 15
“In the environment of freedom, it turns out that there’s no problem with being fully human.”
– Bruce Tift, 2015, Already Free, Introduction, p. 20
“For me, something shifted a number of years ago. […] Before this shift, my baseline—what I returned to, spontaneously, off and on, every moment—was feeling, to some extent, like a problematic person. I was always trying to improve, trying to wake up, trying to feel completely at peace. From that ground of dissatisfaction, moments of clarity, peace, and freedom would arise. But those moments were temporary, and I would always return to a more fundamental sense of problem. Then this shift happened.”
– Bruce Tift, 2015, Already Free, Introduction, pp. 18-19
“Imagine being a little child standing out in the world and feeling threatened. You might put up a wall for protection or even hide in a little box. That would help, but it would also keep you from feeling connected with the environment. In the same way, when we put up a psychological barrier, we end up feeling disconnected from ourselves and from life. Being alienated and disconnected from life doesn’t feel good, and so we suffer. What we don’t understand is that we’re the ones choosing—with very good reason—to put up the wall. It’s not happening to us; we’re doing it ourselves. The very success of our effort to protect ourselves leads inevitably to an experience of feeling divided against ourselves and separate from the world. We feel alienated from life.”
– Bruce Tift, 2015, Already Free, Chapter 1: The developmental view, pp. 48-49
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
– Leo Tolstoy, 1873, 2000, Anna Karenina, Part One: I
“It’s no surprise we fail to tune into our children’s essence. How can we listen to them, when so many of us barely listen to ourselves? How can we feel their spirit and hear the beat of their heart if we can’t do this in our own life? When we as parents have lost our inner compass, is it any wonder so many children grow up directionless, disconnected, and discouraged?”
– Shefali Tsabary, 2010, The Conscious Parent: transforming ourselves, empowering our children, Chapter 1: A real person like myself
“Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run;…”
– Mark Twain, 1903, Sketches New and Old, The Facts Concerning The Recent Resignation, Dec 2, 1867, p. 350
Return to alphabetical index of Quotations pages
Taking Children Seriously, ‘Quotations T’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/quotations/