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Children Interview with Nader Khalili of Cal-Earth Institute: Hesperia, California
When you ask children to draw a house they draw a pitched roof, a chimney, and a square window. And we tell children the earth under their feet is "dirt" - we send them out with this sort of vocabulary and images. This is the world you're in. The houses burn, forests are destroyed, all of these images and words we teach children. Meanwhile, anybody who calls the earth "dirt" here has to do ten push ups! We've been to the elementary school where my daughter was, and I asked them to draw a house. They all drew the same picture - the students, the teachers, the principal, everybody! And I said, "who told you a house looks like that?" I said, why don't you draw a house that looks like rainbows? And they started doing beautiful drawings!
A rainbow is nothing but an arch. We work with forms like an arch as we teach the children. We have them put their heads together and lean towards each other so they feel in their backbone what an arch does.
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