Basics for Teaching Children
One of Shorinji Kempo's greatest points of pride is our success at educating country youth. Of course it is a good thing when someone important joins. However, before we reached that point, first we had our youth members. It is essential for us to realize that this is the starting point from which today's Shorinji Kempo was born.
For the basics of instruction in the youth branches, the first thing I want to say to you is this: forget your background; forget the university you graduated from. Take yourself back to what you were like at one, always inexperienced. Your instructional approach of youth groups will change depending on how aware you are of what you were like as a 3rd Kyu Kenshi and what you were like as a child.
Don't think of yourself as someone important, but go back to what you were as a child, and join in together with them. My success is based entirely on doing just that. At the lowest level, students are just enjoying themselves doing the same things over and over in play together with you, and one day they notice that they've reached a new level... If you just get rid of the thought that you're some important adult, or that you're a teacher, I believe that you can do it. It's a simple thing that's also difficult, but I want you all to bear down and stick with it.
In the posture of our leaders, we are beginning to see people who have forgotten the starting point of Shorinji Kempo, and who are starting to think that doing Shorinji Kempo is their job. When people look at it that way, it's no longer educating youth or anything like that. This is a fundamental mistake. Especially, like all of you, when you are teaching children. They are pure; so they will be looking to what their teacher does.
I won't order you to act against your own interests, but if you can at least think that you are doing it as a hobby, I would be grateful. Hobbies cost money, and they can be a lot of trouble. Yet they are fun. The question is whether you are willing to do it on those terms.
Because their bodies are small, of course there are things that they can't do - it's fine if they can't. Still, they can understand things. When they get bigger, then that will be useful. Whether they understand or not, you explain it to them through words, and have them learn it through their bodies. If you repeat it every day, it will get through to them. I know this from experience. When you think that you can't do much with them because they're kids, or that you're better because you're an adult, then you're putting them down because they're kids. I think that is a big mistake.
Children understand things in their own way, and maybe try take things in an even purer way. Trying to make children understand things when you don't even try to understand them is the wrong way to do things. The problem is on the side of the adult who doesn't try to understand children.
(From the 1978 Youth Training Seminar sermon)
