Lily's school hosts a school for parents each semester. That is a meeting with some kind of experts on a certain topic coming in and presenting that topic. It's generally just a refreshment of things that most of us parents at the school already know, but always with some new ideas on how to improve our parenting.
This time, a sentence in the beginning stuck out to me. Every educator's goal (family and teacher) should be to enable the child to find their purpose in life. That struck me. It immediately raised some questions in me, which I then tried to answer immediately instead of paying 100% attention. Next time...
Can we even have success in helping them with that if we have not found our own purpose yet? You can't teach someone something that you don't know. Of course, "Purpose" is not fishing, but still, how do you guide on a trail that you don't know the end of, and for that don't even know if it's the right one?
How important is having a purpose after all? I don't feel like I have a purpose in life. For having a purpose, I must believe in something bigger, something that set me here to fulfill a mission. I don't believe in "something bigger", so that's out of the question for me. I could say that my only purpose is being happy, and as a derivative of that being coherent with my values.
Is there a general purpose? There might be something that all beings have in common. Propagation of the species and DNA for most, but for humans it's a little trickier. We think, and that's our problem (which is more and more resolved by tech, but that's another topic), so beside our animalistic purpose of spreading genes, there's also the ideological purpose of spreading our values. There could be also one general purpose, and several side-quests, so to speak. Like my general purpose is to be happy, and my side quest is to raise my child in a way that allows her to be a happy person as well, even in sadness.
Are we enabling, or are we teaching? It's hard to draw a line there. We can only help our child from our perspective, based on our values and our purpose, so there will always be a bias in it. Upbringing is teaching, both directly as well as guided learning-by-doing. The search for purpose is the latter, but still guided, hence influenced.
Doesn't purpose change over time? A child's purpose is to learn. An adolescent's purpose is to challenge. A young adults purpose is to break free. And so on. That underlines my theory of having a general purpose (like being intrinsically happy), with several side-purposes. Maybe it's about helping to live up to the side-purposes, that in the end create a symbiosis with the general purpose.
What do you think?
What is your purpose?
Do you think you're able to enable a child to find their own purpose?
Do you think "own purpose" does exist?