We don't have to give up modern education to meet the basic biological needs of children any more than we need to give up our jobs to be healthy adults. Initiat

We don't have to give up modern education to meet the basic biological needs of children any more than we need to give up our jobs to be healthy adults. Initiatives like http://standupkids.org/ http://standupkids.org/ demonstrate pretty clearly that there are plenty of obvious, easy ways that we can address these needs. The obvious answer as to why we haven't tried them yet is money. But that seems like a lazy explanation, because American schools are some of the best-funded in the world. I think it's really a reflection on how we in the West view child-rearing in general. I read a really interesting interview a few months back discussing Freud, where the psychologist being interviewed was basically saying that Freud's model was implicitly based on the shame he felt about his childhood self, how the relationship between therapist and subject is derived from the relationship between parent and child, and that every time Freud was speaking to a subject sitting in a chair in front of him, he was talking to his 8-year-old self. Ironically we tend to see the natural reaction of a child as somehow wrong. If a child can't sit in a chair for 3 hours, the child is wrong, rather than the idea of sitting in a chair for 3 hours. So as the article points out, the conversation begins as "How can we modify the children to fit the environments we've built for them" rather than "How can we modify the environments we've built for children to fit their needs?"