Once upon a time, there was a family farm called the Peltola Farm, “where several generations raised cows and crops.” At the height of the farm, I’m sure nobody imagined that strangers would be traipsing through their land every day, jogging, walking their dogs, helping their kids ride on their bikes, picnicking, and learning about the local wildlife and the natural history of the land. It was a farm — a business. It was private property. That’s just the way it is.

Well, now it’s not. After many generations, the family decided to donate the land to the city. The city then turned it into Lewis Creek Park and is helping the land return to its native state. The visitor center features many displays and books which describe the habitat of the park. The rangers who work there are welcoming, friendly and always eager to share stories of wild animal sightings and to talk about anything in the park.

This land which was once the domain of one family is now enjoyed by countless visitors every day. It’s one of our family’s favorite destinations and when we went last Sunday (for day two of our taste of spring) it was wonderful to see how many people were there enjoying the rejuvenating power of nature.

The story of the Peltola Farm becoming a public park which has fed our souls came to mind as I was thinking about something I heard a parent say last week. We were at a parent meeting where the head of my daughters’ school went on at great length about all of the wonderful academic accomplishments of our children as well as the vast academic resources of the school. It occurred to me during his talk that there was no mention of the social or emotional environment of the school, so in the subsequent question and answer period, I asked how the school was addressing social issues such as foul language, gossiping, teasing, cliques, and bullying. After the head of the school replied, a parent added the comment that her older child had expressed to her that he was grateful he experienced bullying when he was my daughters’ age. He said that the experience had made him stronger and more able to deal with bullying now that he was older.

Although I am happy that her son was able to find some good in his experience of being bullied, I object to the implication that bullying is okay because it toughens up our children to survive in a tough world. This has been nagging at me until today when I realized something about my educational philosophy:

I do not want my children to learn how to live in this world. I want them to learn how to live in the New World.

S and J have been learning about the American Revolution, and one thing I’ve taken away from talking with them is that the colonists felt they had become a new breed, distinct from the British. What they had been taught to do in order to survive in England didn’t serve them here. They had needed to learn a whole new set of rules, skills, behaviors and attitudes in order to thrive in the New World.

I feel very much the same about the world that S and J will live in and hopefully help to create. It will be a New World, different from the one I lived in as a young adult. Already I’ve been hearing about recent college graduates who would normally head for Wall Street, shunning high paying jobs for ones which provide more opportunities for creativity, collaboration and autonomy. In my opinion, anthropogenic climate change and our unsustainable consumer culture demand a New World with a new definition of “success” which no longer includes “more and bigger stuff.”

Clearly some people, like the parent who commented on her son’s experience, don’t believe the world will change. They think that if we don’t toughen up our kids now, they won’t be able to survive in the adult world. A number of parents I talked with after the meeting seemed to agree with that parent’s view. They think that’s just the way it is.

I don’t agree that it needs to be that way. I believe the world is a giant self-fulfilling prophesy. If we educate our kids with the expectation that their world will be tough and mean and self-centered, then we teach them to keep the world tough and mean and self-centered.

The world doesn’t need more young adults who know how to be bullied. The world needs more young adults who have held onto the intuition they were born with: the native understanding that meanness is wrong for all. It hurts not only the victim, but also the perpetrator and the witnesses. It poisons the whole community and dampens everyone’s genius. We need to support our kids now in using their wisdom, passion and the greatest gift of all: the fact that “they don’t know any better,” to create a more co-creative world where masculine and feminine energies are balanced, where instead of “us versus them” we have only “us,” and where everyone is encouraged to live out the life of their true heart’s calling.

Looking back over human history it is impossible to ignore the enormous social changes we have made as a species. We are capable of great shifts when we choose to make them. I believe it is our children who have the greatest power and ability to make these shifts on behalf of all of us, but we adults are the ones who need the courage to guide them. We need to first believe that it is possible. We are the ones who need to yell, “HA!” when we hear someone say, “That’s just the way it is.”

At dinner I remembered a song which I hadn’t thought about for many, many years. It’s “The Way It Is” by Bruce Hornsby and the refrain goes like this:

“That’s just the way it is.
Some things will never change.
That’s just the way it is.
Ha, but don’t you believe them.”

Our children are better served being prepared for the New World that is being born, rather than the Old World which is dying. This means that we need to guide our children towards something that we don’t even understand. To do that, we need to stop preparing our children for the world we know and let go of our attitudes of “adults know better.” It’s time we learn to listen to, learn from, and co-create with our children for their sake, if not for our own.