When it comes to identity, most formal and informal education system around the world focus on and elevate the person's nationality, religion, class, sex/gender, official position/profession, age, race, caste, sexuality etc. What is most important, however, is to teach a person to think of themself as a human being first and to value humanity above all.
When behavioral changes have taken place in an adult, we say that change has really taken place. When enough adults change their behavior, society changes.
Behavioral changes in adults, however, is a three step process and that's why it does NOT happen readily or easily or quickly. It start with awareness, which then leads to changes in attitude, which in turn leads, finally, to changes in behavior.
What’s interesting about children, however, is that they start with behavior, which adults can instill in them by modelling.
As much as we are products of our culture, education, society, and people, and as much as a closed and inward-looking society and people might fail us, as individuals we are also influencers and shapers of our culture and society!
When it comes to verbal, emotional, and physical violence against children is concerned, for example, we Nepalis have a choice. We don't have to follow the dictates of our culture and society. We can instead teach about empathy and compassion and even display them towards our children to end the vicious cycle of childhood violence, a hallmark of child-rearing and educational practices.
Cultivating the mind of a child is analogous to cultivating a garden. In Nepal, however, our still very traditional and regressive ways is to tightly control, confine, and constrain the garden of the mind of a child. In order to cultivate the mind, what we must teach and learn to do is to free it.