Every Monday I wake up a little early, head down to the kitchen, pick up a 10L container and creep out of Casa do Caminho to pick up milk.

As I slip out the front gate I immediately find the Brazilian myth of a fertile paradise.  The red earth of the road is damp from the morning dew, the hillsides are glowing green as the morning sun touches them awake, and the various birds are singing “Bom dia!” to each other.  It is a very pleasant way to start the day.

The dairy farm is half a kilometer down the road and I usually arrive a litte early.  Upon arrival I take up my position against a pony wall overlooking the cattle.  The farmhands say good morning and sometimes offer me coffee, but generally they let me be.  They think that I don't speak Portuguese and I am okay with this.  The farm cat comes begging me to pull some strings so that she gets her breakfast a little quicker but I'm having none of it.  I'm concentrated on the conversation of the Brazilian farm workers.

Two weeks ago they spent close to an hour discussing who bought bread for their breakfast.  This was a complicated matter.  One guy went weeks buying bread and no one cared but now the other guy is buying bread and asking for everyone to chip in.  The third worker insisted that bread was cheap so what's the big deal?

Last week the conversation was over the neighbour's dog who likes to chase the workers when they head out on their motorbikes.  One worker was of the opinion that they should talk to the neighbour and ask him to tie the dog to a post.  The other was saying it would be easier to just shoot the dog.  The third was calling them both wimps and saying that they should learn to drive their motorbikes faster.  Again this conversation continued for just under an hour.

I notice with these conversations that the workers are never really interested in resolving the issues.  They just enjoy the conversation.  And I sit on the pony wall, safely eavesdropping thinking that this is all quite quaint.  I am comfortable knowing that my life is not so boring.  I am confortable in my developed world mentality, in my educational superiority.  I feel protected by my 12 years of education in a private school in a develepoed land and my two university degrees.  Oh look at these farmhands, chatting away about the morning's bread as if it was important.  How cute.

Rudolf Steiner, upon whose ideas the Woldorf school system was based, said that modern society is ramming intellectual thinking down our kids' throats.  He says that children need to train their volition, emotions, and intellect.  In fact he says that the big push for intellectual developement should only come after the child has had sufficient volitional and emotional training.  But this is not happening.  More and more we are pushing intellectual developement earlier and earlier upon our  children.  Violin lessons for three year olds, IT programming for five year olds and if your kid can't speak three languages by the age of ten well you might as well forget it.

And I have to ask, wouldn't a little more attention to the will and the emotions be beneficial?  Would this not help reduce the alarming rate of mental diseases that are developing in our developed nations?  Would we not be a happier society if we all learnt how to choose and feel clearer instead of learning German and violin?

At Casa do Caminho we are forced to educate the volition and emotions of our children because of their troubled pasts.  If we did not treat their emotional problems and offer volitional and emotioanl training there would be complete chaos.  This, coupled with the poor conditions of public education in rural Brazil, ensures that our kids develop their emotional and volitional faculties long before their intellectual ones.

On my walk home from the dairy farm these thoughts ran through my head.  I met one of our residents Lucas, a ten year old, at the gate and we had a conversation about how he's going to fix his bikeseat with bamboo.  I see him laugh and enjoy the conversation the same way the farm workers do, and I wonder if he, here in the rural backwaters of Brazil, is receiving a better education than I ever did.  Two university degrees and all.