Essays on Freedom - To Be a Teacher ... With Affection

(by Mariana Linhares Araujo - Belo Horizonte, MG*)

What do you want to be when you grow up? What will be your profession? I heard these questions over and over again during my childhood. My career choice, which was filled with doubts and uncertainties, was always on my mind.

When I was a little girl, I answered that I wanted to be a teacher, perhaps because of the joy I felt teaching my dolls, or because of my mother's example since she herself was a teacher.



For a time, this choice remained firm and present but as I came into adolescence, submerged in a universe of many influences, the criticisms I heard were not sparse: "teachers are poorly paid, their universe is very small and their life is limited to giving classes, taking work home, and nothing else. This profession is for people who are not too skilled - you've always been in a good private school and you'll have wasted years of studies." In face of such discouraging comments, my objective had lost its veneer in my mind and had remained dormant for a while.

And yet, as the date of the college entrance exams approached, a friend said: "Mariana, were you really the one who abandoned this profession, dropping that important choice in your life because of the influence of people who undermine it?"

This question made me think and suddenly I remembered something I had learned when I was young: that I must be the master of myself! But how?

The benefits and joys that the profession could bring to my life were very clear in my mind and heart. However, the external influence had been so powerful that I had lacked sufficient inner defenses to have the courage to decide for myself.

What was leading me to discard that choice when I knew quite clearly the benefits this profession would bring me? Was I acting according to my own thoughts and concepts? Was I being free to think and act?

The knowledge of the reality of the thoughts was of fundamental importance for this experience, whose main characters are my own thoughts and concepts and not those of society in general. To know the thoughts, identity, select and utilize them in the best manner is the key to lead my life more consciously.

What I am is the precise reflection of what goes on in my inner world. All things in my life, all my actions, emerge primarily from this individual immaterial world that consists of my thoughts, feelings, concepts, virtues and deficiencies. How can I therefore claim to be free to think and act according to my own will without truly knowing myself or being able to distinguish my own thoughts from those of others?

I needed to be firm and convinced of my option when facing criticisms - a product of the inverted values in the current culture. I ask, therefore, "in what evolved culture could one accept that "teachers are less capable individuals with substandard psychological and intellectual aptitudes?" Can those who have the most impact on shaping children - the future of humanity - really have this profile? No!

I have learned a secret - and that is - when you have an objective you must be discreet. When I reveal this objective to several people I am subjecting myself to criticisms of all kinds, since each person thinks in a different way. When acting with discretion and sharing our objective only with a handful of those we trust, we have elements to discuss it reasonably without weakening.

Today, as a teacher; I experience blissful moments and feel immense gratitude realizing that I chose this option based on my own thoughts and feelings. Becoming a teacher has granted me countless opportunities, which are intrinsically connected to my life's objective, and to the archetype that I have built for myself and for the mother I want to be.

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*Excerpt from the book "Essays on Freedom"originally published in Portuguese. Based on Logosophical Cognition.

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