Your “inner weakling” and other beliefs in childhood education

(DE) An apparently insignificant incidence from my childhood is still in my memory today, more than 60 years later, probably because it reflects the position of a child at that time in all its facets.

Actually, my mother always dressed me fashionably, much to my chagrin, but....

“I know better than you what’s going on in the sandbox. If I show up there with the carnival ballerina skirt, which now, all of a sudden is supposed to be a summer skirty, then everyone will laugh at me!”, I protested when my mother forced me to go to play in the sandbox in our courtyard in the carnival costume of the last season. It was the beginning of the summer but no one had had time to take me shopping for a summer dress, so my wardrobe did not yet contain any suitable clothes for a hot summer day. I would have preferred to sweat in warm clothes or not play at all, rather than trudge into the sandpit in the middle of summer dressed in a fancy dress. I was maybe five years old and had quite a bit of sandbox and backyard experience.

“Nobody will laugh at you! Don’t be so grumpy! You will wear this now! Done! Don’t argue!” My mother’s resolute speech left me no room for escape from the embarrassment that I expected. Assertion, accusation, command – of course, I had nothing to counter. I shuffled slowly to the sandbox, watched by my mother from the second-floor window. Her intention was not to protect me from possible attacks but to check whether I did follow her instructions and whether I might have slipped away into a corner of the yard playing alone with my little bucket and shovel. She would not have tolerated that, because on a beautiful summer day I was supposed to be playing and having fun with other children in the sandbox. She was convinced that as a mother you know better what a child likes and what is good for her.

When I, dressed in my tutu, hesitantly approached the sandbox full of playing children, I was greeted with the expected jeering laughter and the teasing question: “Is it carnival now?” I didn’t have a good standing in the sandbox that day, and I didn’t have much fun either. I had been right, but absolutely no one was interested in that before or after.

What children liked, wanted and were able to do in the 50s and 60s was only of secondary importance. Their liking, wanting and ability were determined and controlled by their parents. And if children didn’t like, want or know how to do something, they had to learn it, if necessary the hard way.

In the eyes of adults, children were little unfinished beings, not yet real people. Therefore, they had to be forcibly moulded and shaped into a certain image. That‘s if parents took their duty seriously. The idea of how the child had to be and how it should become was, of course, as always, shaped by the family background, the social status and the spirit of the times.

What was it like for me?

My family background is quite typical for the reconstruction phase of the 1950s and 1960s. Both sides of my very young parents’ families of origin were incomplete. My father’s father was badly injured in the war, and my mother’s father was absent. Both families were from the working class. However, while my grandparents’ war pension was enough to get by, my maternal grandmother only had a meagre pension and had to rely on social benefits and the support of her children. This is why my grandmother, who raised me, was completely unaffected by the zeitgeist of the economic miracle, status symbols, travel, sports and leisure activities.

My parents, on the other hand, seem to be true children of their time in this respect. They put all their heart and soul into getting bicycles, then a scooter, finally a car, elegant clothes, etc., the blessings of the economic miracle. Material things became the basis of happiness for the whole family. Later, my father would always say: “You had everything, even though I’m just a worker. I worked a lot of overtime so we could afford all these luxuries.”

Two more factors seem to be worth mentioning if one wants to understand my family’s educational efforts.

Today, my family would be described as being uneducated. Higher school, academics, literature beyond the trivial literature of romances novels and detective stories, theatre, opera, concerts, music beyond the world of pop songs, etc. played no role. They belonged to a different world that was poorly understood. My grandmother with her love of operettas and “Wunschkonzert” was a cultural slip.

The other factor to consider is that my parents, both born in 1933, had grown up during the Nazi era. Although social democracy had already been the political orientation of choice for my great-grandmother, my parents had nevertheless internalised certain attitudes to life and beliefs.

Internalised beliefs

There are ideals in every era, they are self-evident things that one absorbs with one’s mother’s milk, so to speak, and which are automatically adopted from the previous generation.

In the 1950s, it was still evident that physical training – “tough as leather, hard as Krupp steel, fast as greyhounds” (Nazi propaganda) – had been a high value in the first half of the 20th century and continued to be important.

Whereas the nationalist idea of the Volksgemeinschaft was increasingly replaced by the individualism of the capitalist market economy.

Only in my mother’s case was a certain reluctance to be too self-interested. While she was very careful that the nice clothes she wore were not also worn by her neighbours and friends, she hated it when someone freely said: “I want. “It’s always me, me, me!” she would grumble angrily to herself.

A remnant not only of the Nazi upbringing was the existence of an inner weakness or temptation (in German called der Innere Schweinehund) in every human being that had to be overcome.

This inner Schweinehund sums up laziness, inertia and laziness. Only what is hard-won through self-conquest, similar to the original understanding of jihad, has value. The harder the more glorious! Sayings like “You make it easy for yourself!” or “You take the path of least resistance!” still have negative connotations today.

Overcoming the inner weakling

With regard to physical exercise, I saw no reason why I should overcome this inner weakness. I always liked listening to or reading stories, sleeping in late and eating treats more than anything. I had no burning desire for the latest scooter, bike, skis and other sports equipment. I much preferred playing with children, which included skating and rollerblading for fun, or sitting with one of my grandmothers and listening to stories of the past, or practising painting alongside my postcard-painting grandfather.

New Skiing trousers are okay, but skiing?

Nevertheless, I got all the new stuff from the world of sports because that was important to my father and he assumed that it must also make me happy. But I just wanted to have fun and dream. Basta! Sweating like hell and making a horrendous physical effort was not for me.

Nevertheless, I learned to swim at an early age, actually on a Sunday afternoon in the small river Regen. Standing in shallow water, my father lovingly showed me how to make the movements that keep you afloat, and then he threw me in. I went under with my eyes wide open, but was thankfully pulled out, put back in the water and by the end of the day I could swim. The inner weakness that I had to overcome at the beginning of the training for the sake of my father was no longer a problem for me. Enjoying myself splashing around in the water, diving and playing suited me. When it came to swimming competitively, however, I was no longer interested. Training and swimming lanes bored me. Out! I lacked ambition, I had no bite. It drove my father crazy because in his eyes I could have done it if only I had wanted to.

At times, my father’s enthusiasm for sports was a dreaded phenomenon for me and my inner weakling.

You can see by the expression on my face what I think of walking.

For example, my father had the obsession for a while that hiking in the forest and observing forest animals was a good thing and contributed to general education as well as physical exercise. So hiking boots, rucksacks and rain jackets were bought, as well as two pairs of binoculars, a small one for me and a large one for him and my mother. This ranger-like undertaking meant that we had to get up on Sunday mornings before dawn, which meant 4 a.m. in the summer because the forest animals have such an insane biorhythm. We crept through the woods, lay in wait or sat in the high seats and stared at the clearings. Wherever I stood, sat or lay there was a danger of me falling asleep all Sunday. What a pain!

My mother, who wanted to imitate the ideal image of a sporty woman, concentrated more on the image than on perfecting the sport. She wore her fancy sports clothes with great self-confidence and looked handsome in them. That was at least something.

To this day, I have a deep aversion to sporting challenges that are not primarily associated with enjoyment. I love cycling leisurely in a beautiful landscape with the goal of a beer garden; skiing in good weather on an almost empty slope and only from the late morning when it’s warmer; going swimming where it’s nice and a picnic with friends is on the agenda; mountain climbing of no more than an hour with a mountain hut as the goal; golfing without competition; all kinds of ball games where there’s a lot of laughter and no one develops excessive ambition, etc. All these things work. Torment and overcoming one’s inner weakling do not work at all.

Or we had to get up at 5 a.m. in winter to be the first at the ski lift in Sankt Englmar because our family had discovered skiing. What had worked for swimming could unfortunately not be repeated for skiing. I had reached my athletic limits. And so I more or less successfully ploughed down the idiot hill. I hated getting up early, was tired all day and then had to prove my non-existing sportiness. “Don’t be like that! Pull yourself together!” were the prompts to motivate me and besides, the whole day was about that damn inner weakling that had to be overcome. Why is that?

And yet another common belief troubled me as a child.

You can learn anything if you want to!

Of course, this attitude meant that it was always your own fault if you couldn’t do something because you didn’t want to learn it.

In my family, this desire to learn was not so much related to academic achievement. My parents only expected average results in school. Their educational goals focused more on the development of practical life skills.

In my case, it was not only my (lack of) sportiness but my whole personality that should have been changed.

As a child in need of harmony, I did not assert myself but always gave in, liked to share my possessions with others, even to my detriment, and was helpless in the face of bullying.

My father often and at length told me that I had to learn to assert myself and fight back. He wanted to teach me behavioural strategies that would make me a fierce Amazon in the backyard. It would have been worth five marks to him if I had punched the bad guys in the face.

In vain! I remained sweet and helpless and a disappointment to my father. An unathletic, good-natured, dreamy, somewhat chubby child!

Did I have any abilities at all that could be developed in the eyes of my parents? Unfortunately, the things I might have been able to do and would have liked to do were not seen as skills in their world of imagination.

I still remember, for example, that my teacher in the 5th or 6th grade drew my parents’ attention to my essays that seemed particularly literary or exceptionally imaginative to him. Writing and reading and making up stories, i.e. dreaming, were favourite pastimes for me.

I used my pocket-money to buy new notebooks in which I wrote poems and texts, which I then discarded. Since there was no promotion or appreciation, my efforts came to nothing. In painting, too, I naturally remained at a dilettant level, because there was no course or anything similar to ensure that I could have learned the craft. In matters of sport, I would have been promoted immediately. And how!

I liked to be an actress. As an adult, I enjoyed being an assistant director and stage photographer.

I didn’t have to overcome any inner resistance when it came to theatre either. Rehearsals, constant repetitions, stage fright, being on stage, I enjoyed it all. I’m clearly someone who likes to be in the spotlight. As a teenager, I even ruined my tailbone from devotion to my role. To express my surprise on stage, I plopped down on my buttocks from the stand. And I did that several times, at every rehearsal with a cushion, at every performance without a cushion.

I loved going to the cinema, with the grandma of course, and maybe once or twice there was a children’s performance at the theatre. Impressive! Inspiring! A fantastic world! For weeks I continued to retell the stories, changed them, put myself in the place of certain characters. A child with too much imagination!

But my parents couldn’t relate to any of these talents and interests of mine. It would never have occurred to them that there could be potential here worth promoting. Uneducated family? Zeitgeist?

When I think about the opportunities that existed in the 1980s and 1990s for my son, who was also musically gifted and interested, and the low-threshold offers that children and young people could access today, and how few of them there were in my childhood, then the different priorities in education become clear. In the 1950s and 1960s, musical activities were not available to the masses in the Federal Republic of Germany; they were a privilege for the upper classes. In the GDR it was different. But others can tell you about that.

The adults in my environment and in general in the 50s and 60s in my home country were not bothered to put themselves in the shoes of children, because there was nothing significant and unchangeable to discover.

The requirement for a good upbringing was that the child is taught, indoctrinated, instructed in the right feelings, thoughts and behaviour…just pressed into this unfinished being. Some children fitted into the ideas of their families and their time, and for them this upbringing was beneficial. But woe betide if they didn’t! Those who had other dreams were ridiculed, disillusioned, made to feel uncertain and remained very lonely.

It doesn’t have to be physical violence that later blocks you in your search for your own abilities and your own goals. If one constantly disappoints others’ expectations or if one’s achievements, abilities and talents are not appreciated or even promoted, then that is not very helpful either. You lose faith in yourself.

What became of me?

In fact, I fought against my family’s will to get a higher education and studied German language and literature, politics and history. These are not exactly subjects that seemed particularly impressive to my parents. However, I not only taught literature in schools as a teacher, but also wrote texts throughout my life, either just for myself or in form of articles for newspapers, sometimes as PR texts and always as narratives for my pupils. I earned my living with all this for years.

And when I got the opportunity, I learned to be an assistant director with a director who worked with amateurs. Unpaid, of course, but I was completely dedicated and fascinated by this creative task.

I developed analytical skills that constantly lead to new ideas. And I love visual expression, I surround myself with exciting photographs and discover inspiring ideas in picture exhibitions. Even my decades-long involvement with astrology can be traced back to my fondness for images, characters and analysis.

In fact, I have made something out of my talents, although they were not nurtured in my childhood. But I never had the self-confidence and self-assurance necessary to develop ambition and bite.

For a long time, actually, until today, I have been searching for my path, my destiny. I have the feeling that my view of myself is very blurred by a veil.

Personally, I developed a rather fragile self-confidence in my abilities late in life. The insecurity is always greater than the success.

And of course, I still feel guilty when I can’t do something because it means that I actually just don’t want to do it. Naturally, I then also have inhibitions about seeking and accepting help.

But what touched me very much was that my father discovered his artistic and creative side as an old man and we even created small works of art together. He was even very fond of classical music and sometimes we read the same books. This side had not had a chance to develop in his youth either.

I felt a little rehabilitated by this experience.

Comparison to today

The view of the child in the 1950s was dominated by the need to educate. You almost get the impression that adults believed that there was a little devil in every child that had to be exorcised. And even if you had a little angel in front of you, you had to harden this being to make it fit for life. The danger of a child taking the wrong path was omnipresent. You had to take preventative measures. No question about it!

Kids were considered as basically lazy and too playful. At best, they had too much imagination and at worst, they lied about everything. Some tricked and others were too dreamy, unintentionally funny and clumsy to the point of being completely awkward or talentless. These imperfections had to be smoothed out through education if one wished to create valuable members of society. The character and future personality had to be instilled by quite different means. The aim was to mould the conformist and uncritical citizen. People were not aware of the contradictions for a long time until in the late 1960s young people began to stand up and protest until reform educationalists experimented with other approaches and methods, and for my generation “Summerhill” became the ultimate model for all learning and relationships.

Today, in the 2000s, the goal of education is mostly understood in a very different way. Parents and teachers should strive to discover the potential in the child, make it visible and promote it. So much for the theory.

Whether the principle of the “Nuremberg funnel”, i.e. filling pupils with vast amounts of knowledge, has actually been overcome, I rather doubt it, but at least the scope for promotion is more extensive than in the 1950s and 1960s. In schools, efforts are certainly being made to promote abilities and to identify limits and deal with them in a constructive way.

However, in my experience, not much has changed for children from educationally disadvantaged families and from the socially marginalised. In most cases, the family’s attitude and the idea of what the child should and can become are decisive.

While some are able to grow up with the silver spoon in the mouth, others, less fortunate, move in the limited world of a milieu characterised by resignation. Only some reach for the stars. The others have the scissors in their heads.

Your experiences? Your view?

These are my experiences with the beliefs of my childhood, of my social background in my home country. Of course, it would be very interesting to hear and read about other experiences. Later generations, too, have been exposed to certain taken-for-granted beliefs as children, which probably differ from what I experienced. Or perhaps not much has changed at all! (TA)