This I Believe
Chris Enger
When I graduated Kindergarten when I was 6, my Great-Grandma told me "The only important things in your life, you learn in Kindergarten." At the time I just blew off that bit of knowledge, looking forward to learning to read and multiply. The older I got and the more I thought about it, the more I realized she was right.
In kindergarten you learn the most basic skills of how to survive. Not like physical survival, but the basic rules of how the world works. Share with everyone, play fair, don't hit anyone, clean up after yourself, and always say sorry when you do something mean to another person.
Throughout this week I have been thinking of even more things I learned in kindergarten that are still very truthful and important even today as a Junior. A few more are; flush the toilet, wash your hands, watch out for traffic (hold hands and look both ways), live a balanced life, and in the end, everything, including you, will die.
A lot of this Kindergarten knowledge can be applied to real life today situations. Remember when the class pet died, how sad everyone was. The tough guys tried to beat up the kid who let it die. This might seem insignificant now, but when you were in Kindergarten, it was the end of the world. Today everyone is sad when your friend from gradeschool's mom dies, or the kid on your soccer team that you never really talked to, is having his parents get divorced, so evryone is sad. We learned how to deal with sadness in Kindergarten.
In Kindergarten, if you hit the kid next to you because he took the red crayon, you went to timeout for 20 minutes. In the real world if you hit someone for saying something negative about your mother, you go to jail for 20 years. Big Difference. Time-out teaches us that we will be punished for our actions, something that is very important today. A lot of our laws have their basis formed in the Kindergarten classroom. Don't run in the halls leads to not speeding on the highway, don't hit leads to don't kill. We learned a lot of rules in basic forms and the older we get, the more complex those rules get, and the more contradictions and complications come up.
Sharing, a basic Kindergarten teaching, is something that everyone, even(maybe especially)leaders of some of the World Powers need to re-learn. All the genocides going on in the world, and even domestic violence in our own country, are often overlooked for things far less important. We have plenty of money and resources to help everyone in the world, but we choose not to to make ourselves have more, we don't share because we want to be better than they are with our surplus of goods.
I recently found out that someone has written a book about this, and I think my great grandma probably copied it from him, but I still find it truthful and valuable. Everything I need to learn in life to be a good person, I learned in Kindergarten.....This I Believe.
*** Endnote - There is a book entitled "All the important things in life you learn in Kindergarten" and it was written by Robert Fulghum.My Great Grandma did indeed steal his idea.
THESE PEOPLE OBVIOUSLY FAILED KINDERGARTEN
