The Mind of a Child

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TRANSCRIPT OF "THE MIND OF A CHILD"
1 HOUR DOCUMENTARY BY GARY MARCUSE

KEY:
LW= Lorna Williams LB = Lettie Battle A = Angelo
CP = Chaim Peri CH = Carl Haywood DT= David Tzuriel
AS = Adeline Saunders M = Mitchell D = Devese
RF = Reuven Feuerstein J = Julia C = Clarissa
AL = Art Loring R= Rosa

DT: Listen, I want to tell you something. I want to tell you something.. Look at me.... look at
me. Do you think that you are stupid? Clarissa?

A: It's weird because you can be on one block and thinking 'it's nice - I'm going to go to the
store'. And the next block you're in Kill Heaven. It's disgusting. They kill people and put
them in little dumpsters back up here and stuff.

LW: I came to Vancouver from Mount Currie 10 years ago. I was hired by the Vancouver
School District. People were really not sure what it was I was supposed to do. The
inclination was to be able to say that I was responsible for the 2,000 First Nations
children in the district. In 1985 in Vancouver there were two aboriginal children who
graduated from High School. In the same year we found that aboriginal children were
dropping out of school in Grade 5.

AS: OK Rocky - If you're look at me, you're listening to me, and you're thinking about what I
say, then you won't be hearing what they are doing. That is how you learn.

LW: I have a colleague - Lettie Battle, in Washington DC. One of the things that we hold in
common is that we're both working with children who have lost a belief in themselves.

LB: Do you believe that everybody has the ability to love themselves?

M: Yes, but some people choose to don't use it.

LB: Some people choose not to do it. What would cause them not to?

D: Because like, somebody might be putting them down, telling them they can't do this, and
you can't do that, and you can't do this. And they probably have no use for themselves.
They probably think they're useless. That's when they probably say they want to commit
suicide. Kill themselves - jump off a bridge.



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LW: We've looked and looked and looked for something that would help us.

DT: Clarissa - you are not. Of course you are not. And that's why I want you to learn. Because
I think you can learn. And I wanted you to come here and learn very much. Because I knew

that you can learn.

LW: I think that I found the tools and the teaching method that would help me work with these
children. The tools and the teaching method were developed by and Israeli psychologist,
Rueven Feurestein.

RF: Very good. Bravo. This is good Now, wait a minute.....

LW: Rueven began his work with children who had lost everything. Children who had lost
their families, children who had lost their histories, children who had lost their languages.

RF: Well, I must tell you the conditions which were in the Holocaust. In Bucharest during the
time of the war, parents were taken away to the camps and children were living, literally,
on the streets. Totally abandoned. Without food, without shelter. Many of these children
had no childhood - they were 8, 6 when the war started. They had to survive - they were
survivors. They were very ... life-wise. They had a kind of a wisdom. I was then about 18
and I was responsible for the preparation of the youths which were to be shipped to Israel,
that you called then Palestine. But I was caught by the police and I was in great danger.
And I was... I escaped the prison and was immediately shipped out to Israel. The children
from the camps were those whom I met in Israel. Children who came from Buchenwald,
from Auschwitz... One of the great experiences which I've had was to sit by the bedside
of these children at night. Usually during the day they didn't want to talk about their
experiences. Later, when you were sitting near them, they would start. And then you
could see a world which has crashed. Some of the children didn't know nothing about
their parents. All they knew was that these parents were destroyed during the war. We had
one boy who even attempted suicide, and we had to fight to keep him with us. We didn't
let children go away. We didn't give up on any one of them. One of the great problems
which we felt these children have had was the feeling of discontinuity. They didn't have a
picture of their parents. They didn't have memories. They tried very... in a a very... a way
that was really reflecting their need to reconstruct their past. And one of our ways to re-
establish was really through the cultural transmission, in which we became somehow
substitutes for the parents who were supposed to do it. I was everything - I was sitting
with these children in the morning when they couldn't get up from their beds and trying to
make them feel that a beautiful day is coming. They had to open their eyes and go out
from their nightmare in order to believe that the beautiful morning comes up. And I
showed them -- "Look, look, look! A new day is born. The sky is blue. There is the sun
out there" And make him come out of his bed.



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J: I like squares.
RF: The squares are very happy that you like them.
J: Yeah.
RF: Would you please make a square of this?
J: Yeah, OK. I'm working very hard
RF: I know, I know
J: Ohh

RF: Good, good, that's OK
J: It looks like a triangle.
RF: Yes, it looks somewhat like a triangle. And there are children who tell us that this is a

triangle. Is this true?
J: No!
RF: How many dots do you have in a triangle?
J: Three!
RF: OK Julia, you did very, very well and I was very happy with you.

CH: I always knew him as surrounded with children. And I remember one day going with him
from his home to shul on shabbat. And at the first intersection some children came out
and began to walk along, and he's talking with them. And a few doors down the street
some more children came out and I'm afraid I had a vision of the Pied Piper. Because
every step we took closer to the synagogue, more children joined. He is, in many ways,
magic with children. He gets them to do things they had no idea they could do. They are
so delighted to learn that they could do things they didn't know they could do, they come
back for more.

DT: Show me four. Show me five. How many are all together?
LW: Clarissa already knows she wasn't doing really well in school.
C: Ten
LW: She was working with lots of challenges and lots of failure.
DT: She has an inefficient strategy.
C: Nine.
DT: Now look what I'm going to do. You know the difference. One is..
C: Small
DT: And one is...
C: Big.
DT: Very good. So they are different in..... size. Can you say "size"?
C: Size
DT: Size, OK. And these two are different in what way? This and this are different in what

way?
C: Size
DT: Size, good for you. And these two?



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C: Size
DT: And these two?
C: Size
DT: You know everything!

LW: If you're involved in the work of Feuerstein you don't start with saying that they have so
many handicaps that there's nothing that I'm going to be able to do.

DT: Look at my eyes. You have nice eyes.

LW: You start believing that they can do it.

DT: What's the correct answer - -- Beautiful! You can see according to the quickness of her
answer that she got it.

LW: When David was working with Clarissa, that's what he was doing. He was having her see
that she was able to think things through.

DT: You see that you learn? Good for you. Good!. She is looking now on the third one by
herself. Intrinsic motivation, Curiosity. Now she's engaged in the situation. That's what I
want her to be. To be engaged. You are doing fine!

LW: What Instrumental Enrichment does for those children is it shows them, it reveals to them
their ability, their capacity. That they have brains that function.

DT: Beautiful! She has a good gestalt - good closure.

LW: We can also use these instruments in a classroom.

AS: We are getting the children to learn how to be precise and accurate. To let them know
precision is really important........ It would be symmetrical. We're not here just to cram
information into their heads. We're getting them to learn how to solve problems. ....We
could count the dots..... In order to solve a problem they have to be able to think about it...
Can you see this part? OK , let's try this. .. You got it!

LW: More than 50% of the whole First Nations population in the district are in special classes.
And so the task has been to bring the students back into the classroom rather than pushing
them outside of the classroom to get fixed.

M: No one wants to hear it. The way you got hear it.

LB: We're going to connect the dots here, OK? Oh God. Here's the first dot, honey. There's



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the first dot. The first dot is that I haven't even listened to you. If someone does not listen to
what you have to say, right, what do you think that person thinks about you?

D: They say uh, that you're a waste of time.

LB: That you're a waste of time.

D: And they say the way act here is the way you act at home.

LB: OK, actions. What else do I think about you?

D: We was wrong. Disobedient. And we need discipline. And we're rude. And have bad
conduct.

LB: Rude, you're rude, you have bad conduct.

D: And viewer discretion is advised. (laughter)

LB: Needs discipline, right?
D: Yeah.
LB: How does that make you feel, when nobody listens?
M: Sometimes my self-esteem goes low.
LB: Your self-esteem goes low. Does it?
M: Yeah.
LB: Need another dot.
M: You feel like you is nothing.
LB: You feel like you are nothing?
M: Yeah, like a piece of trash or something. Feel like trash
LB: Now, when you have low self-esteem and you know that somebody makes you feel like

trash, then how do you act to them?
D: That's when they snap on them.
LB: What do you mean by snap?
D: Get mad. Get angry. That's what it takes for some teachers.
LB: That's what it takes for some teachers or people to finally understand that you need to be

listened to when you snap.
D: Snap!

LW: Looking at the history of African American people and the history of Aboriginal people
both in the United States and in Canada, there's an ingrained belief on the part of the
educational institutions that our children are not able. And that they're not able because
we are not a intelligent. So when we came into this world, we were born with less
intelligence. And people, um, in a way, they say that in jest today. But it's been a belief



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that's been there for many generations now.

LB: Because of our history, people assume that we have totally assimilated into the society.
So if there's anything that goes wrong, automatically it has nothing to do with our culture. It

has to do with our intelligence.

LW: Some time when I was in grade seven or eight, I remember that they were doing
assessments. People from Vancouver came to the school to do assessments on us, the
grade six, seven and eight class. And they did this in preparation for us to go to public
school. And , um, I remember that when the results, when they were finished, there were
45 of us in the class, and they did the assessments and we found out that there were only
two students in our class who were above the mentally retarded age. And I wasn't one of
those two. And I think that, although we laughed about it, and we joked about it, that they
would think this of us. But it always stayed with me. And it was partly that that I think led
me to Feuerstein's work.

During the 70s it was said that we did not do well in schools, in Canadian schools and
American schools, because we were culturally deprived - of Canadian culture and
American culture. No one had talked about the importance of one's own culture.

RF: In the development of the ability to adapt to life, as a matter of fact, my hypothesis, just in
a speculative way, was if people have learned their own culture, they have formed tools to
learn another culture. People who have learned one language would be able to learn
another language.

LW: Basically what he was saying was that everybody establishes and develops efficient and
effective ways of transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next generation, so
that the next generation is prepared and is able to meet all of life's challenges.

The important point was that one culture doesn't do it any better or any less than another
culture. As humans, we were born with the need to connect to other people. And that first
connection is through the language of your face and the language of, you know, your own
language. And it's that exchange that you begin t build right from babyhood, that, you
know, with your babies, that build their ability to be inquisitive later on. And the ability to
be able to derive meaning from what's going on around us .

RF: If you have been given a good insight into your past, if you have learned how to listen, if
you have learned how to look, by the kind of cultural transmission which has been offered
to you, where you were asked to look well at the face of your parents and learn what is
positive and what is negative about what you're saying, to learn how to behave. How not
to approach your father too close or to give him the hand as it was culturally transmitted.
If you learned all these mores and these ways of behaving, then you are open to learning



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anything.

LW: Through Feuerstein's work then, I was able to look at a lot of the things we did in our
community and to dig beyond just the surface to see the purpose behind it. To give you an
example - how did we help our children? How did we help them not to be impulsive?
How did we teach them to restrain themselves and then to act when it was appropriate to
act? Those begin from babyhood. Those begin in the way that children are engaged in a
family in being out on the land.

Child: I hit the tree.
Parent: Got to get the feel of the gun.

LW: You can't act impulsively out there. Otherwise, it become life-threatening.

Parent: You hit the target I think

AL: Right now, these kids are learning what is in the land, both in survival skills as well as the
skills needed to carry on through their lives. I believe this plays a big part in their growing
up and becoming adults. Showing the respect for the land and for the game and how to
use it. How to pay that respect back.

Child: Why do you put that salt on there?

AL: That helps to cure the hide. ... Everybody look - look over here

All: Cheese!!

LW: In every culture, people taught their children or the next generation, how to regulate and
control their behaviour. So it's universal that we did it. But the way in which it was done
was more specific to the culture .

RF: They have learned at home their own culture. They have been mediated. This is what I
call by the word "mediated" --- by their society, their community, their parents, have
transmitted to them all kinds of contents, all kinds of mores, and they learn them. In the
process of learning, they have learned how to learn.

LW: What happens when a child is made to feel that the teachings of their people are of no
value to them in the future? I saw this at an Ethiopian camp near Haifa in Israel when I
visited with Reuven's colleague Chaim Peri.

CP: An Ethiopian child comes to us with a whole world of mannerisms, behaviours, which



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are highly structured. Even the way they greet you - you give your entire self, you don't
just shake hands. It's a giving and taking. When I see a child that receives something from
a teacher and he just grabs it, I know he's on the way to be disconnected from his past
culture. In the Ethiopian culture the giving and taking is very meaningful. In Ethiopia,
education was mostly done through modeling. The father conveys to the child "see, I am
the model. In every little thing and bigger things" The parent is the one who draws the
behavioural red lines between what is allowed and what is not allowed. What is expected
and what is not expected from a child. Now, coming to Israel, where food and education,
everything is provided by others, they cease to be parents as they were before. When a
father suddenly perceives himself as not relevant --- he doesn't pride the food anymore, he
has nothing to teach the children anymore. There are the white people who will teach the
children, they will secure their future. The child sees his future career not attached in any
way to what his father will do or will not do for him. Once the children are left in a
vacuum, no other authority really takes the place of the parent's authority. Chaos takes
over. This is what we think is eventually going to make people who are culturally
different to culturally deprived. Because they don't adhere anymore to the structures of the
culture they have brought with them. This culture is identified with the parents' world. Is
not relevant anymore. So they just part ways from the entire culture.

LW: I could see in this camp what happened in my own village when the older generation felt
that they had nothing to offer the children

CH: Feuerstein said that every culture in the world contains all the elements that are necessary
for the adequate intellectual and cognitive development of its children. What has to
happen is that that culture has to be transmitted to the children. When the process of
transmission is interrupted by war, by famines, by social movements, or by less dramatic
events such as poverty or a very low education level of the parents, or by social
discrimination, the result is poor cognitive development of the children.

LW: When a parent doesn't feel that they have anything worthwhile to teach a child, that's
Clarissa. So that the parents have provided for her, have loved her, but have not invested
the time to really challenge her to learn.

DT: You are not excited from this? .... She has a lot testing behaviour.... You're not
excited?..... Oh God, she's testing us a lot. We have to be very careful. Because once

you will be angry, then you fall in the net, and that's what she's waiting
for. She's waiting to see that you are angry at her, and then forget it. She's
not going to listen, she's not going to cooperate, and she will fight you.
...I'm waiting for an answer.....

C: Yes!



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DT: So say it..... There is a tendency for some parents and teachers to accept the child in his
condition and not to impose too many things because it's too difficult, and anyhow, he
cannot do it. It's too difficult. Now, it comes back tot he philosophy. What are we really
wanting from the children? Do we want to change the individual and pay some kind of
price for it, or just let the child enjoy this situation of peacefulness?

LW: In the last 200 years, there have been many ways in which our way of life has been
disrupted, that our ways were devalued and thought to be useless in a modern world. In
the id-1800s, there were about 30,000 of us who lived in these valleys. By 1950 there
were only 500. Smallpox and influenza were the two major diseases. I remember when I
read that, that was when I fully realized the extent of the loss and the trauma that our
people had experienced. And in a way that gave me new eyes from which to look at the
strength that was still in the people and that they could persist and retain as much of who
we are as St'at'yemc with that kind of a loss.

R: That's him . Oh well
LW: Fay
R: That was my next guess
LW : Ricky? Oh yeah, sure look alike.

LW: I was sent to residential school when I was 6 years old. You know, at 6 years old you
don't think about the policies of the government. All of a sudden I was on a train and my mom

and dad were standing on the platform and I was being taken away.

class: "Then from the happy sky, angels bent low, singing their songs of joy long, long ago"

LW: It was a totally different kind of life. Like, there wasn't joy in living because everything
was so regimented. That I was always in a state of alertness, just constantly living in fear.
I think I was in such shock that I was up there without my family.

Teacher: Christmas is the day for Santa Claus. Santa Claus was a real person. His real name
wasn't Santa Claus, it was Saint Nicholas. He was a bishop. A bishop in Poland who lived
over a thousand years ago. And there was famine in Poland. In other words, people were
starving. And Saint Nicholas, he was a bishop, he was travelling and he stopped at an inn.
And they gave him a meal. A dish of meat. It was meat all right. It was children --human
meat. They said they got plenty in the back. So he went round the back of the inn where
these children's bodies were lying in a barrel and he made a miracle with God's help. He
brought those children back to life. That's who Santa Claus is.

Man: When an Indian girl leaves school, in most cases they haven't got much of an opportunity
to get a job.



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Woman: The parents don't really care one way or another. The parents are both alcoholics,
or perhaps just one of them is an alcoholic.

Teacher: You should always try to do better. Some of you can't do any worse than your
parents did.

LW: Loneliness, isolation and the fear, I guess, would be the most um, those were the feelings
I guess.

R: My parents were taken away form their parents and.. So they didn't know how to show
love and affection, so when they were bringing me up, and my brothers and sisters, they
didn't know how to show us any love. Because they were taken away from their parents. I
fell like something was... a part of me was ripped out. Because, because I lost out on so
much. That's why I want to give that to my kids. But, like, I don't know where to start.

LW: I think you are giving that to your kids, though. Because when you look at your kids,
they're really bright and comfortable and knowledgeable. People talk about the loss of the
language and the separation of the families, that it was a trauma for that generation. I
think that they don't realize how, you know,

R: ..how far down the line it goes.

LW: Yeah.

R: 'Cause I like, growing up, I never remember, not once, my dad, not once do I remember
him holding me. You know, he was scared, he was afraid to. He didn't know how to be a
father. He wanted to, but... because he was taken away.

LW: When I was sent away to residential school we couldn't talk our language. And then when
I came home after two years I was getting all mixed up. All the vocabulary. So there
would be some English, some French, some Shuswap, Chilcotin, some of our own words.
And everybody used to laugh at me. And so when I used to go and baby sit down at the
other end of the village. And so I used to come out of the house and then walk by Wis'
house.

Wis: \nka7 snasal'ap

LW: I remember many times I was trying to think of what I could say to her. SO one day I
worked out a whole sentence and I got mom to help me.

Wis: \nka7 snasal'ap



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LW: I was able to say it to her: \naskan alk'wilh. That was the first. Then the next sentence. I
said.. I wanted to initiate the conversation, so I said to her: \wa7lhkacw hahem'nakun \alk
'wilh, Wis? And then she seemed to catch on that I was wanting to learn, so every day
she would add and make the sentence a bit longer. And then she forced me to respond in
different ways. And then, gradually, over the months, then I was really able to learn again.

It helped then for us to understand that when our social institutions were destroyed - the
potlatching system , the winter and summer gatherings, the destruction of the languages,
the removal of the children from the communities, that resulted, on our culture, on our
way of life, our traditions, our knowledge then was not transmitted to us in a holistic way.

If I can understand what it is that one generation transmits to the next generation we'll be
able then to devise a way of working with people who have not had that natural process.

DT: You need a blue. You understand this?
C: Yes
DT: OK. God. Now let's look at number Five. Now, what is the first floor?
C: 10
DT: And what is the second floor? You see how it goes? Try to peel off the yellow and see

what is the shape that we will see?
C: 18
DT: and then?
C: 14
DT: 14, very good. This means she has the ability for mental representation. And it's

beautiful. This one, of course. Ah, this one is difficult. Beautiful!, Great! I'm glad that
you did it. You were so stubborn. You didn't want to come to learn. But now you're
learning. I'm glad that you're learning. And I'm glad that I was more stubborn than you
were. Are you listening to me?

C: Yeah

DT: Without all this behavioural garbage she can be a bright student. I would predict that if
she will get the proper mediation in the next two years then she will be back on track and
she can go to college , and she can be a student in a university. There is no question about
it.

LB: They just want to have what everybody else wants to have. And that's a voice. And to be
heard an respected for who they are. But they're in a world that just totally ignores them,
until they flick off and snap, and then everybody wants to pay attention to them. But what
do they want to pay attention to? Because now they want to close the schools and they
want to build prisons. These are the kids that have been labelled "at risk". Students in
crisis. Devese and Mitchell are boys who wear that label - thugs. If they walked into a
store they'd be followed. If they walk down the street people will cross to the other side.



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They are your " ordinary African American male". Those boys are what I encountered
every day.

LW: Many people believe that the children that Lettie and I work with are less intelligent
because they don't do well in school. When Lettie teaches, she looks for the intelligence
that the kids use outside on the street. She helps the kids to bring that intelligence and
knowledge into the classroom.

LB: We're going to make a list of things that happened to you because you've had it up to here
and you flick off.

M: Nagging
LB: People start to nag you?
M: Yeah, keep on nagging and nagging and nagging and nagging.
LB: What else?
M: Telling you what you're supposed to do. Trying to take over you
LB: What do mean, take over you?
M You know, take over. Take over your life. Tell you what to do
D Trying to make you do this, and make you do that, and force you to do it. Do what they

want you to do but not what you want to do. If you don't do it they blackmail you.
LB: What do you mean by that?
D: Way from the past and they tell your mother about it.

LB: After you flick off, if you're in school, there are certain things that could happen to you,
like you could be suspended or expelled. But as you get older, those things change
because you're not in a school environment. Am I right?

M: Yeah
LB: What could happen then?
M: You can get hurt. You can get hurt or killed.
LB: You can get hurt or killed.
D: Shot. Definitely shot. Around here, especially.
LB: Why?
D: Because they don't take no trash from nobody. No one listens to nobody. If you don't

show them respect they ain't gonna show you no respect.
LB: So we may have two people here who are looking at each other, who have gone through

this cycle, and they flick on each other. And then they have what they call black-on-black
crime. Or that's my opinion.

D: Yeah. That's how it gets started. The only way of resolving it is by shooting one another.
That's not going to solve anything. Just taking another body out of the world.

LB: Taking another body out of the world. Exactly right.

A: If I walked in that playground and none of them knew me, my shoes and shirt would get



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took, and I might get killed if I resist them, not let them take what I had on.

LB: You know, to have a kid call into school and say, "I can't come to school because they're
shooting outside my door"... or to have a child talk to you in a very reporter style about
how he held up his brother as he was being shot and how the bullet passed through his
brother into him and it really wasn't... it harmed his brother a great deal and he had to be
in hospital, how they removed the bullet from him, and - just matter of fact. like we're
talking about a hangnail. They're talking about removing a bullet from their chest that
passed through their brother. I mean, I can't even imagine how they... get up in the
morning.

A: I'm not scared as much as I was, now, 'cause I know a few people. I know a lot of people
and stuff. But it will build up on you if every time you go outside, like of you live in
southeast, like Montana Avenue, and every time you go outside it's that same thing - am I
going to get shot? Are they going to start that shooting around here again?

LB: There was a period in my life that I was homeless. And so I lived in the environment that
these children live in, have lived in all their lives. Me, as an adult, who knows that I have
some skills to be able to get out of this situation, had another perspective on that
environment. However, I could see the change in myself and my children. Just the way
we moved. I mean, it was a very aggressive attitude that you had to take just to survive. I
remember the first night we moved into this area someone was killed under my daughter's
window. We heard a popping sound and, because we were so ignorant, we were like,
"what is that? A car backfiring?" everybody else was on the ground, and we're like,
"what's happening?". We got out of there, quickly. But what about those people who don't
have the skills in the first place to get out? Those are the children I deal with, and so
when those children come to us and I see teachers responding to them as "You're
ignorant, you don't know how to act" or "Didn't your mother train you" or whatever. But
this child is dealing with these issues that we as adults cannot handle, and we need to
respect that.

A: I don't know how to describe bad people. Because nobody's bad until they prove to you
that they're bad. If you was to move into a new neighbourhood, and all you saw was
people just sitting around on a block, your first thing would be " Oh, they might be selling
drugs" or "I may not walk down this way because they may jump me". And they might
not even be about that. But when they say you could walk down some streets, because
down 7th street, it's a lot of boys around there, but most of the time they're not about that.
Somebody might say something to you, but they might say "You want to play football?"

LB: What I do as a teacher, what my goal is to do as a teacher, is not necessarily to change
their rules and regulations. It is to help them get the skills to analyze those rules and
regulations and then give them options.



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M: Yeah, how can you help somebody if you can't help yourself?

LB: So what happens if you have a group of people or community of people who all think or
do have low self-esteem. How are they going to help each other? Or do they help each
other?

M: They're going to have to find it in theirselves that they need help
D: Confidence - key word. Write it on the board - confidence.
LB: From where?
D: From their parents.
M: They need to know that deep in their heart... that they do got...that they need it.. Yeah,

that they need it or that they .. that they love themself.
LB: Say it again

LW: The children that Lettie and I work with, these children live on the street, or they live part
time on the street. Their knowledge is very seldom, if ever, acknowledged because the
teacher doesn't have any experience with that. They think "well, those children are bad" or
"they come from bad families or bad home situations, dysfunctional situations, and
therefore I can't do anything with this child unless they're fixed out there."

RF: Today, if you go into a school and you have such a child, what does the teacher tell you?
"I'm not qualified to deal with this child. Take him away from me. Bring him to a
specialist" And this creates a state of anemia. The teacher is anemic. He doesn't have the
power. He's not supposed to deal the power to deal with them. We have created a
community which had the power to help children even if they were very badly affected by
their past or by their condition.

AS: OK, this is you. What parts make up you?

Child: Feelings

AS: I have a group of kids who all have behaviour problems. And we've noticed that one child
now, before, he'd spent almost every day in the office. He's really changed. I;ve worked
with him, trying to have him think about his own behaviour. His mother has come and
talked to me. She says "I want you to keep working with him" because she's noticed the
change in his behaviour. He was so impulsive. And now this year, he's hardly ever gone
to the office. Now he realizes he's in control of himself.

LW: It was, I'd say, through Feuerstein and through his work that I began to see that I have, as
a teacher, a very very significant and powerful role in the lives of children. That I have
those children in my school, where they can be nurtured, where they're safe, where they're
warm and where they can see beauty and experience joy. The stronger that I can make
those children, and I do have the capacity to do that because I'm a teacher, that the



The Mind of a Child

15

stronger that I can make them, to learn how to problem solve, to learn how to make
decisions, to understand their actions and their behaviour, and to understand other people,
that if I can help them to do that, to develop strategies, that I can only make them stronger
for all of those other things that they have to contend with outside of school.

LB: Every child, every child has the right to be a child, and to be the skills and the nurturing
and the love to develop into the full human being that they were put on this earth to be.

end transcript