it's important that moral education starts at a very early age. Imam al-ghazali talks about this. One of the important lessons that we learned from imam ali is, he said he said to play with children until the age of seven. You know play with your children for seven years and we know now that play is work you know Piaget and others.
I mean I'm not a big fan of Piaget but Piaget did have some pretty profound insights about certain things and one of them was that the play of children is work that what they're doing is very important.
One of the things that they found in the West, is that many serial killers, many sociopathic people, were people that their parents would not allow them to play when they were children.
Imam al-Ghazali says if you do not allow children to play, you will kill their soul and so it's very important that for those first seven years in particular, there is a lot of play time and activity. that's what they should be doing, there should be very little instruction or education at that time.
another important thing that a lot of people don't understand especially parents, but teachers also, is that children before seven have no concept of lying. A child can say whatever it wants because it's still in the imaginative world, so if a child breaks something and you say who broke that? The child says "I don't know".
And if it's a six year old or a five year old, that is the world that it's still in. It's in a world in which "I don't know" is a viable answer to that situation. At seven this is called cinder Tamizh, which is the age of discrimination it's still not fully formulated but it's the beginning of this discrimination that's why tech leave only comes at puberty not before that children are not held accountable before that for that very reason so it's very important to recognize that in this early period a lot of play activity I mean the Montessori ID of a lot of sensory stimulation is is completely consistent with much of what we're learning now I mean there's incredible strides have been made in in the last 20 years in in the study of the brain in Neurology I mean things things that were finding out about the idea of a lot of positive sensory stimulation there's a lot of negative sensory stimulation going on there as well television these these games that children are playing you're going to create uneducable children if they indulge in these things that you know putting them into these hyperactive states they wonder where attention deficit disorder is most child children television programming is speeded up because what they found in early studies back in the 50s and you can find this in a book called he evil eye they found that children if you put them in front of television in real time get bored very quickly and they just leave and they'll go do something else because they'd rather be stimulated in all this so that's why Sesame Street's off and pals apps you it's to keep them focused on a hyperactive time and so you've got all these children watching this stuff for five six seven years and then they get to school and the teachers saying and now we're going to do and the child's you know where's the a and the B and the C and you know and so they they put them on ritalin do you think you don't need to be a rocket scientist it worked this stuff out it's just amazes me it just amazes me and they'll do tons of studies and then finally find this stuff out 20 years from now meanwhile we have a society of people that can't function anymore it's happening out there if anybody hasn't noticed