Second Grade

As the children grow, their personalities become more differentiated. With their imaginative powers still intact, some children clearly show a need for connectedness and grounding with the animal and plant worlds and the work of humans in the world. Nothing would be worse at this stage than keeping children idle, or allowing them to sit about without participating in the physical work that needs to happen every day. They must feel involvement in everyday tasks and projects while still being allowed to regularly bask in imaginative play. This age is marked by an interest for the pitfalls of instinctual life, where a sense of humor develops in witnessing how human passions like greed, arrogance, sloth or envy cause a person’s downfall. This is the spirit out of which animal fables and trickster tales emerged in pretty much every world culture. When this need is satisfied the children then become responsive to the stories of people who, by the overcoming of their instinctual natures, showed an exceptional capacity for loving-kindness. Thus the children’s deeply moral longing is satisfied not by moralizing talk, but through the cultivation of the polarities that live in the human psyche.

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