The Wonder of Children by Michael Gurian

Author:Michael Gurian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2002-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART II

God Is the Child

The aim of each thing we do is to make the lives of our children richer and more possible.

—AUDRE LORDE

4

THE NEW HUMAN:

HOW OUR THINKING

MUST CHANGE

The future of the human being lies in the free invention of the human mind.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

Albert Einstein is one of the heroes of modern civilization. He understood light. He laid the groundwork not only for the greatest and most frightening use of light imaginable—the nuclear bomb—but also the PET and SPECT scans, lasers, and infrared technologies we’ve referred to in Part I. While various men and women throughout history have directly altered the way we feel about life, very few have affected our everyday lives, and the possibilities for the raising of our children, like Einstein. He changed how we feel and what we do by helping us to change the way we think.

If we take the time to fully contemplate his ideas, it is possible to get the feeling of being a student in the eternal academy. We each become able to search for the doorways of our civilization; we gain an immense depth in the way we care for people around us. Albert Einstein taught us how to do these things with the intention of making simple and apprehensible what is complicated and intimidating about the universe; he promised, simultaneously, to retain the mystery of the infinitely mysterious, for there is nothing worse than human beings pretending they know more than they do.

For Einstein, the beauty of nature and the human ability to discover nature’s truths was, first and foremost, a matter of thinking, not of laboratory experiments. Einstein believed in changing the world through thought —what he called “the free invention of the human mind.” From that free invention, he argued, came understanding of nature’s truths, which laboratory and mathematical experiments would then corroborate. His love of free thought was one of the ways in which Einstein differed from other scientists of his time. Another was his commitment to use science for the betterment of human and natural life. Perhaps his most profound regret was that it seemed, when he was dying, that his science of light, which led to the creation of the atomic bomb, might destroy the children of the world.

Born in Ulm, Germany, Albert Einstein began his life as a young boy interested in both science and religion. His father managed a small electro-chemical plant, while his mother managed the family’s development. His father directed him more toward science, his mother toward religion. When Albert was five, his father gave him a pocket compass, which intrigued and moved him. The compass needle pointed in the same direction, no matter how he manipulated the compass itself! He would later tell friends that this moment as a child moved him to understand that “something deeply hidden had to be behind nature and human life.”

Between 1902 and 1909, when he was a young man, he worked in a Swiss Patent Office in Bern, Switzerland, where in his free time he began his thinking about light, and from there, about nature, human nature, and God.

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