The author of 13 books, Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D., has spent his life writing and speaking about human development, with a particular focus on children. He has appeared on The Today Show, CBS This Morning, CNN, and has presented more than 800 keynotes, workshops, and seminars in 42 states and 16 countries.
Dr. Armstrong, until the publication of The Human Odyssey, most of your writing seemed to focus on children and issues which affect their education. True? If so, why the departure?
In the early 1980s I began teaching courses in both adult and child development, and received a doctorate degree in East-West psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in 1987, where I began working on the idea of creating a psycho-spiritual book on human development. Then I was sidelined by my writings in education. About ten years ago, I came up with the focus of this book, and have been working on it pretty steadily since then.
My writing in education has been motivated by the fact that there is so little understanding among parents and educators about what children really need in order to learn. The No Child Left Behind Act and the general climate of education these days are pretty dismal. Childhood is disappearing as we push adult responsibilities earlier and earlier. For example, play and recess are being taken away, and corporate models of thinking are being institutionalized in classrooms. Kindergarten has become a worksheet wasteland in order to get kids ready for college. Childhood is being bulldozed by what I've called in one of my books (The Best Schools) "the academic achievement discourse."
Is there any stopping it? That is, the disappearance of childhood?
I don’t know. Childhood is a manifestation of the spirit. Spirit is being hacked away in other arenas of society too, through political and military influences, for example.
Yes, I do have hope, I’m an optimist. But I also have a realistic understanding that massive forces are being unleashed against the spiritual side of life these days.
Frances Wickes, a Jungian analyst from the 1940s, illuminates this dynamic in her book The Inner World of Choice. She shared a dream (it may have been her own as a young child) about a fragile flower facing a massive behemoth. The flower prevails and is able to survive against this catastrophic image. I believe that this is the situation we have today. Fragile truth will ultimately win out.
My blog addresses the image of the behemoth in posts such as the recent high rates of suicide in girls, boys beginning to develop eating disorders, infants being terribly abused — these are the warning signs of a disintegrating culture. But it also addresses the strength of the fragile flower by highlighting proactive organizations, programs, and resources that are available to help individuals at each of the twelve stages of life (prebirth, birth, infancy, early childhood, middle childhood, late childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, midlife, mature adulthood, late adulthood, and death and dying).
Back up a moment. What were you like as a child?
I was playful and serious at the same time. My father was a physician, but because he had a nervous breakdown and lay around the house for seventeen years, I became an anxious child. He would blow up suddenly without warning. It was like being in a minefield, and I had to be vigilant all the time. Avoiding my father's rage took a lot of work on the reptilian level. Our house was destroyed by an F5 tornado around same time my father had the breakdown, so there were a lot of terrifying moments. But growing up in Fargo, North Dakota, an uncomplicated place to live, was otherwise rather normal for me. I played baseball, had a coin collection, liked to ride my bike, had good friends. I was not a particularly spiritual child, but can remember things like being able to leave my body in a floating state while going to sleep, and producing eidetic imagery (inner images that were as clear as outer perceptions). And, I was always wondering about the ultimate questions of life. My mom even told me not to think about these things so much.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com. Nice work!