It is through education that generations transform and improve themselves. To create a new society, new men are needed. That is why education from childhood is of so much importance.

        To instruct a child is not enough. He or she must learn how to conduct him or herself as a conscious and rational person, and this is as important as learning how to read, write or count.

        A child should enter life armed not only for the fight in the material world, but even more significantly, for the moral fights he or she will have to face.

        Sometimes the heart of a mother or father is the only key to give the necessary perseverance, strength and tenderness to awake the first aspirations of goodness in a child or to correct a difficult character.

        This task, nevertheless, is not as complicated as it might seem, as it does not ask for deep knowledge of any kind of science. Everyone can achieve it, if they are aware of the consequences of education.

        A lesson given in a supermarket beautifully explains that.The young mother was about 27 and the boy, around 2. He was being stubborn and aggressive. She was strong, serene, and irreducible.

        The setting was a supermarket shelf full of chocolate bars. The boy seemed very upset. He wanted five bars of chocolate, and the mother was saying firmly that he could have just one.

        It was like a maternity class. The boy shouted so loud that it seemed as if he was being beaten up.

        He was rolling on the floor, menacing to put the whole shelf down. It was all useless.

        Without using physical violence or even raising the tone of her voice, the mother said: Either you take just one or you take nothing. It is your choice.

        Her voice did not carry any anger. It came from someone who was sure about what she was doing. About fifteen people watched the scene, gathering in the supermarket aisle.

        After painful ten minutes, the little boy accepted he had been defeated. The screams and kicking slowed down. At the end, he stopped whining, accepted his mother’s hand and left the supermarket with his one bar of chocolate.

        The other bars stayed there, on the shelf. The supermarket lost. The mother won. Education won.

        Since the world is the world, children want things just because they want them. Many parents give in; maybe because they don’t want to face the stubbornness, maybe because they worry about the eventual look of disapproval other people might give them.

        Parents that do not educate their children will see them suffer later in their lives. These children will also make other people suffer, and will also lose their chance to progress.

        Remarkable are the parents that might forbid without anger, that give as much as it is necessary and not more than that.

        Our society has a supermarket mentality. Thousands of shelves are offered full of temptations that incite the immature ones to consume more than what they need.

        That is why couples that educate their children not to consume too much, who teach their children about how to make choices, and therefore about how to grow up healthily, are parents that should be prized.

*  *  *

        The Spirits that inhabit our children’s bodies came to us so that we would help them win their weaknesses and prepare them for the duties of life.

        From early childhood, we must analyze the tendencies these children brought with them from their other existences. It is our duty to develop their virtues and annihilate their viciousness.

        Neither fatigue nor excessive work should detain us.

        Let us help social transformation. Let us change the world through education.

Spiritist Moment Team, based on the text by unknown author and chapter 54 from the book Depois da morte, by Léon Denis. Publishing House: Feb.
July 28 2008.