A Child's Life

A Child’s Life

Jenny Lee

Copyright © 2015 by Jenny Lee.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 06/18/2015

Xlibris

1-800-455-039

www.Xlibris.com.au

697441

Contents

Prologue

The Translator’s Note

PART I

How Children Enlarge Their Thinking Container

Chapter 1:  Thinking and Memory

Chapter 2:  ‘What’ Exposing Senses

Chapter 3:  Curiosity

Chapter 4:  Imaginative Thinking

Chapter 5:  Reasonable Reflective Thinking

Chapter 6:  The Different Types of Thinking

Chapter 7:  Children Form Their Own Thinking Containers

PART II

Children Can Achieve Their Independent Learning

Chapter 1:  Children’s Independent Learning

Chapter 2:  Children Keep Operating Their Senses

Chapter 3:  Independent Operating and Reasonable Reflective Operating

Chapter 4:  Children’s Curtained Mind

Chapter 5:  How to Transcend the Curtained Mind

Chapter 6:  Miracle in a Child’s Life

Chapter 7:  After Operating the Senses, Thinking Emerges

Chapter 8:  Thinking Comes after Changing the Mind

PART III

Children’s Education in Developed Countries

Chapter 1:  Now in Australia: ‘Australia Is a Children’s Paradise’

Chapter 2:  Children’s Exposing Senses Must Be Supported by Education

Chapter 3:  Considering Another Point of View

Chapter 4:  Children Are Born with Freedom

Chapter 5:  There Is One More Thing Not from Education

Chapter 6:  Attempt at Educating a Child’s Mind

Chapter 7:  Children’s Education Is in the Recipe

Prologue

Children can be easily lazy when they have too much freedom. But if they are loaded with stress to have a duty towards studying from a very young age, they must stay at the stage to explore their senses. Most parents have similar expectations from their children, that is, growing up healthily, respecting parents, and excelling in academic achievements at school. However, the reality is that we cannot control everything about parenting. Parents ceaselessly debate and obsess over how to serve their children’s needs. In most cases, children cannot fulfil their parents’ expectations and wish to live their own way. They have different personalities and interests that determine which pathway they want to take and follow in their lives.

Using techniques and learning skills from my Postgraduate Degree in Early Childhood, I try to show how children can achieve their independent learning. During my efforts in running my childcare centre for around sixteen years in Sydney, I found children could not only enhance their academic skills similarly like in Korea but also develop their thinking process by exposing their senses as emphasised in Australia. This book helps you to understand that with case studies and theoretical backgrounds. I was encouraged and cheered to publish my book. Now I hope that parents with young children will be encouraged like me.

Jenny Lee

The Translator’s Note

I have endeavoured and devoted my efforts to perfectly translate the author’s work and intentions of this book. During the translation, I journeyed through the author’s ideas about a child’s life, and I experienced delight in reminiscing about my childhood days, opening the door to my innumerable nostalgic memories. There is no other person who is more qualified than Jenny to talk about the child’s life. She understands both the Korean and the Australian education systems and she has been able to observe first-hand the strengths and weaknesses of each.

I feel this book possesses great value in clarifying some of the issues afflicting education, which affect every single person on this planet today. I hope people would unveil their curtained minds, seize the opportunity like I have, and have the honour of reading this book. Not only is this work worth reading, but it is also a life-long handbook for parents about how to nurture their children to become our future great people. If this book is right up your alley, then turn this page and indulge yourself in another world.

Isabella Sun Me Lee

Part I

How Children Enlarge Their

Thinking Container

Chapter 1

Thinking and Memory

I define thinking as the process of finding another memory with the already stored memory to go an extra step for enhancing it in order to make it useful. Through thinking, we can manage our memory by deciding whether to keep certain memories or throw them out. The basic skill in thinking is the process of filtering the external influence that comes from our surrounding environment. Children start thinking when they change their memory, which stores the operated senses automatically. It means that they can transfer their memory manually. To change their memory manually, children need to operate their bodies spontaneously by using their senses because they know what it is. Then they can create their thinking process differently from their existing memory. If children can recognise that the memories can be only changed manually, the children’s thinking process will occur.

There is no need to make an effort to memorise when memory automatically inputs in our minds without realising. On the other hand, there are some cases when we need to make a lot of effort to memorise something in particular. These two types of memories can operate or even govern our bodies. To move our bodies automatically, we need to move our bodies depending on our memory functions. In their early childhood, if children don’t have the senses of memories, how can they fit into their environment so quickly? These functions make children believe that they can achieve, thus making them grow and develop. Children are able to change their memory as much as they can when they operate manually according to the children’s needs. That is the difference between thinking and memory.

While children transfer their memory, they keep forming their own thinking ways, which allows them to develop their mental ability throughout their whole lives. Without developing and recognising their thinking process, how can they change their behaviours by themselves? Even though children can change their behaviours temporarily by force, it is not the same as changing their behaviours spontaneously. When we use animals for psychological experiments instead of humans, we can find out the animals’ memory capacities, not their thinking processes. After the experiment, we can judge whether it is good or bad memory in rats and dogs according to the results, but we can’t tell the value of human intelligence according to their memory functions. In particular, it is very dangerous to make definitive judgments about children’s mental capacities or intelligence when they have just lived for a few years in the world. Unlike animals, which act according to their memory, human’s behaviours come from their thinking; therefore, memory and thinking are clearly different.

From the beginning of early childhood, children need to learn by themselves about how to think and discover their senses in their environment and not just be focused to be taught and input information. The main purpose of education is to extend knowledge and introduce new information while increasing the fundamental memory function. It is necessary for children to imitate the ways of their ancestors regarding survival as soon as possible using the education system as a tool. So it is important for children to organise their memory to maximise their capacity. But if they are forced to have more and more stored memories that they don’t know, they do not have enough space for thinking to manage their environment.

Mathematically, the word capacity means the amount of volume filled in the shape. For example, when we use elevators, their capacities depend on the sizes with limits written as numbers on the wall. Also, when we plan to build a house in an empty land, we calculate how many people can live in the house or apartment, taking into account the maximum capacity of the land.

Another meaning of capacity is the ability of human beings to manage by themselves. I wonder why children don’t lose their own capacities. I believe that nobody should measure the children’s capacities because it is an ongoing progress for their bright future. Where there is children’s thinking and their memory changes freely, there are children’s capacities.

Even though one’s memory is run automatically, the capacity of memory has a limit. The memory capacity in the brain has an automatic function that sorts out important or irrelevant memories. Our important memory portion enlarges when we have something of our concern. Our brain cells not only take in the information but also throw out some memories that are considered to be unnecessary in order to fit its capacity. If our senses consider something to be important and memorable, it is kept in long-term memory and they will not forget it until they have a reason. If it is not of our concern, this information just passes through short-term memory. If we ignore that function and try to only keep increasing the memory capacity, our memory function will be damaged. Because the memory capacity in the brain is not elastic, the excess of memory capacity causes our body, which is the origin of our emotions and senses, to be sick.

If we give children feedback, they can memorise automatically very well. However, most of them take pride in their memory achievement and don’t try to go further. I have observed that quite often children stop their efforts to develop their abilities. Not only children but also adults want to live back in the past, and they will say, I was very good in the past and You know who I was? This is laziness, in my opinion, because they like preserving their pride on what they had done in the past. If children have this pride and get lazy, they turn into a loose thinker and his or her behaviour cannot be controlled by themselves. This is one of the serious problems as children have too much pride in just their memory skills and refuse to go forward; as the English saying goes: Don’t rest on your laurels [high achievement].

There are many cases when children’s emotional and intellectual developments have been disturbed by pride since they have achieved their memory skills. Charlie¹ was one of those children. He memorised tables from two to eleven in four days when he was four years and ten months old. I opened after-school care classes temporarily for six months especially for him when he went to primary school and hired a primary maths teacher, but the teacher gave up within a month because he couldn’t stand Charlie’s scatterbrained behaviour and talkativeness. He gave me his negative opinion that we shouldn’t encourage Charlie’s memorising skills because he couldn’t control his unstable emotions even though he had a talent for exemplary memory ability. I had to give up trying to increase his mental capacity. I still remember the time when he memorised the meaningless thirty digits for two minutes and was overly proud of himself, but now he has changed into a gentle and polite young boy. When he was in Year 4, he visited my centre during the school holidays and he asked me if he could stay at the childcare centre for one day. I saw him manage his study and play, but his bubbling pride was not present. I guessed that he had some hard times during his years in primary school.

Children’s gentle or proud manners emerge by themselves, depending on how they get feedback from others. Children take pride in not only their outstanding memory skills but also the reward that they get in the form of words of praise from adults, especially parents. I found that on average one out of seventy children every year becomes lazy and spoilt after they become too proud due to high words of praise. Charlie’s pride came from his mother’s pride in his abilities. When parents take pride in their children too much and too early, the children’s early development of emotions is disturbed. If parents want their children to grow up spontaneously, sometimes they need to suppress their pride in their children.

The efforts in trying to keep memory and seeking to upgrade memory are different. The two things are not comparable. If children want to seek something, they will use their memories or gather new memories. But even though children keep inputting everything into memory, it is useless if they don’t want to seek on how to change and upgrade memory. Furthermore, they may only have pride, which would make them lazy and spoil their behaviour, as well as conserve the memory. Most of the parents misunderstand that the memory function is the same as intelligence and that the memory is the same as thinking skills. Our brain cannot be replaced with a computer memory chip because we have our own unique abilities, which is to think from our senses. Although there are countless and useful memories, our lives could be operated like machines without the thinking skills. The life run by memory, like a computer, is a cruel and breathless one. We human beings are the greatest creatures, famous for our thinking skills, but we may shift the focus of the memory function to make our brain sharp and ignore our thinking process that we only have.

Perhaps it is very important for us to use our memory function when we intend to use our memory for scientific purposes. As we have become concerned more about memorising accurately, we can use it to discover the facts. However, the thinking process is not calculated from scientific methods. It emerges from one’s needs, which people have depending on their values. The scientific approach can judge whether it is correct or not, like an answer to a maths equation. However, the human’s thinking only appears in human lives, which cannot be compared with the accurate memory functions of a computer.

If parents look at their children’s behaviour scientifically, they will find that children don’t move accurately in a mathematical way, so parents cannot predict their children’s behaviours. Early childhood education in Western countries provides little time to children and