Dalai Lama reads Raffi's A Covenant for Honouring Children
Vision of a "Child Honouring" World
by Ron Miller
Mayne Island, BC - Raffi Cavoukian is known to millions of children and their parents as the singer and performer Raffi. His engaging and positive songs (such as "Baby Beluga," "One Light, One Sun," "All I Really Need") not only delight children, but invite them into a caring relationship with the natural world and the global human family. Since his first album, Singable Songs for the Very Young, appeared in 1976, he has sold over fourteen million recordings and video/dvd's. His books, including his autobiography Raffi: The Life of a Children's Troubadour [1], have sold over three million copies.
Ten years ago, Raffi began turning his enormous success into a popular campaign to draw attention to children's developmental, emotional, social and health needs and the ways the modern world is failing to address them. He called this movement Child Honouring, "a children-first paradigm for global restoration that calls for a profound redesign of every sphere of society."
"I realized in the early '90s that escalating societal issues and global ecological crises couldn't be solved in isolation, that they had be viewed in a holistic, connected way," Raffi says. "Early one Sunday morning I was awakened by the phrase—Child Honouring—and I knew in that moment intuitively what it meant, what it implied, and that it was the work of the rest of my life, which my years up to that moment had prepared me for."
His extensive experience with young children, deeply attuned to their needs for three decades, inspired Raffi to launch Child Honouring. Study, observation, and experience of their playful intelligence and pure love motivated him. He was further galvanized by reading authors such as Alice Miller, Joseph Chilton Pearce and Jean Liedloff, who described the vulnerability as well as resilience of young children, and by learning about other cultures that truly respect and accommodate the natural patterns of children's development.
"Child Honouring is a comprehensive meta-framework for global change," says Raffi. "It seems that no other philosophy connects the personal, cultural and planetary domains via the lens of the young child, through the vulnerability and priority needs of the infant ecology. As social change movements go, this is unique."
His website, www.raffinews.com, explains in detail what a child-honouring society would look like: 1) It would show love for its children in every facet of its design and organization; 2) It would uphold the basic human rights of every child; 3) Corporal punishment would be a thing of the past; 4) No child would live in neglect or lack access to health care; 5) Kids wouldn't be alone after school with violent computer games, eating junk food, waiting for a parent to get home; 6) Family support centres would be developed in every neighbourhood; 7) Working with the young would be valued and well rewarded; 8) Universally available child care centres would be staffed by trained professionals.
Inevitably, the Child Honouring vision holds specific implications for our educational system, such as the development of more schools and more teachers, smaller class sizes, and a range of learning options for families to choose from. Child development would be considered a primary subject as fundamental as reading, writing, and arithmetic; children would learn about the importance of empathy and the basics of nurturant parenting.
His A Covenant for Honoring Children, written in 1999, further spells out the conditions of a child honoring society: "We find these joys to be self evident. That all children are created whole, endowed with innate intelligence, with dignity and wonder, worthy of respect. The embodiment of life, liberty and happiness, children are original blessings, here to learn their own song. Every girl and boy is entitled to love, to dream and belong to a loving 'village' and to pursue a life of purpose." The Covenant also describes key principles that would guide a society truly concerned about children's welfare and their thriving. These include respectful love, caring community, conscious parenting, non-violence, sustainability and ethical commerce. The Covenant is currently circulating among policymakers, religious leaders, scholars and educators, inspiring them to rethink their understanding of children in society.
To promote the Covenant's principles, Raffi and co-editor Sharna Olfman have produced an anthology of writings by eminent scholars and activists called Child Honoring: How to Turn This World Around (Praeger Publishers, 2006/Homeland Press, 2007). So far the book has been well received. The Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, for example, held a special luncheon at which she referred to it as "required reading."
Currently Raffi travels around North America discussing ideas from the book and the Covenant. "Educators have been among the most receptive audiences for my presentations, and the reading of the Covenant often draws tears," he says. "At a number of universities—including those in Vancouver, Victoria, Pittsburgh, Halifax, Charlottesville and Toronto—Child Honoring has received a rousing welcome. In the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, the teacher training program uses the Covenant as part of its curriculum."
In addition to his educational work, Raffi is currently working in his native Canada with a group developing an "index of wellbeing." He is collaborating with the growing "conscious pregnancy and birthing movement," and with what he calls the "responsible commerce community." He is also re-directing his music towards adults, particularly those who grew up on "Baby Beluga" and his other ecology-oriented songs. His latest CD called "Resisto Dancing: Songs of Compassionate Revolution," includes inspiration from the Earth Charter, Nelson Mandela, Jane Goodall, Riane Eisler, and his Holiness the Dalai Lama. His newest production, a 55-minute DVD called Raffi Renaissance: Child Honoring and the Compassion Revolution, is scheduled to be released next month by his company, Troubadour Music. "Beluga Grads are saying they feel inspired by my new work," he says. "That's good news. I consider them a vital part of the Compassion Revolution."
Without a doubt, this Renaissance man is making a contribution to the world's children that goes far beyond the delightful music he has been performing for them for thirty years.
What is Child Honouring: Organizing principle, catalytic power
by Raffi Cavoukian
Across all cultures, we find an essential humanity that is most visible in early childhood—a playful, intelligent and creative way of being. Early experience lasts a lifetime. It shapes our sense of self and how we see others; it also shapes our sense of what's possible, our view of the world. The impressionable early years are the most vulnerable to family dynamics, cultural values, and planetary conditions. At this critical point in the history of humankind, the irreducible needs of all children (no matter where they live) can offer a unifying ethic by which the cultures of our interdependent world might reorder their priorities.
Child Honouring is a vision, an organizing principle, and a way of life—a revolution in values that calls for a profound redesign of every sphere of society.
It starts with three givens. First, the primacy of the early years—early childhood is the gateway to humane being. Second, we face planetary degradation unprecedented in scope and scale, a state of emergency that most endangers the very young, and that requires a remedy of equal scale. And third, the crisis calls for a systemic response in detoxifying the environments that make up the ecology of the child.
In this way, Child Honouring is a "children first" approach to healing communities and restoring ecosystems; it views how we regard and treat our young as the key to building humane and sustainable world. (It's not about a child-centered society where children rule, nor a facile notion of children being all things nice; and it has nothing to do with permissive parenting.) It is a global credo for maximizing joy and reducing suffering by respecting the goodness of every human being at the beginning of life, with benefits rippling in all directions.
What does it mean to honor children? It means seeing them for the creatively intelligent people they are, respecting their personhood as their own, recognizing them as essential members of the community and providing the fundamental nurturance they need in order to flourish. Child Honouring connects the dots between the personal, cultural and planetary factors that affect formative growth, and asserts that sustainability strategies must take into account all three domains.
Children are not a partisan concern, and Child Honouring is not pitted against person or ideology. Its allegiance is to children, and to their families. It speaks emphatically for the birthright of children of every culture to love, dignity and security. At the same time, it encompasses the whole of life. The focus on early life simply underscores a key tenet—the primacy of the early years.
Reprinted with permission from www.raffinews.com [2]
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Source URL:
http://www.theglobalintelligencer.com/jun2007/education
Links:
[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1896943500?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwtheglobali-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1896943500
[2] http://www.raffinews.com/child_honouring/what_is_child_honouring
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