The printable February calendar art! (via February 2022 calendar — banners)

lucid blade

«  For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, “Because they’re scared.” What I now see is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child’s whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them.

[…] The idea of painless, nonthreatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t do what you want. You can do this in the old-fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words, infringement of liberty, or physical punishment. Or you can do it in the modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly, by withholding the acceptance and approval which you and others have trained the children to depend on; or by making them feel that some retribution awaits them in the future, too vague to imagine but too implacable to escape.

[…] Fear, boredom, and resistance—they all go to make what we call stupid children.

[…] What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it. Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear; they know what the trouble is when a child clings howling to his mother; but the subtler signs of fear escape them. It is these signs, in children’s faces, voices, and gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner. »

— John Holt, How Children Fail

“The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.” — John Taylor Gatto #quote #inspirational #tuesdaytruth

Page of Cups: New Love, Beginning of a Relationship, First Stages

An excerpt from the book Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal From Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents 

Author: Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD

Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom (via philosophybits)

good morning 

Character Art

Here is the newest illustration in a series of character sketches I’ve been creating lately. Drawn with graphite and watercolour.

www.eevanikunen.com

INFINITY WAVES

Lighthouse in Mumbles, Gower Peninsula, Wales

june 2021

WALKING IN THE CLOUDS

Shropshire Hills AONB, Shropshire

Oct 2021

Bigger rounder chickens

A recent little lighthouse piece. Watercolours & fineliner pens, 9x12 inches.