First of all, I would like to clarify that for me personally, the Young Greek Generation of our own Greek Society, age wise, is represented by the “young adults” in their twenties and thirties, who today make up the majority of my former students, both male and female. Most of the young people I taught were in their adolescence and their early adulthood, which meant a very “turbulent”, “enigmatic” and “existentially difficult” period of their life!!!
I feel very lucky that Life has provided me with the opportunities and the means to be able to transmit some knowledge to my young students, but above all to instill in them the “critical existential factors” of self-knowledge, self-confidence and self-respect; human qualities which could support and enhance a more creative and independent personal behavior and thought process, superceding the “virtual reality” and the “spiritual mediocrity” of their own Society!!! Similarly, for me personally, it was equally as “precious” existentially, intellectually as well as spiritually, the fact that from my youngest student who was 5 years old to my adolescent and young adult students (male and female), I derived a lot of knowledge about “real life”, as well as receiving from them a lot of “positive energy” and especially “love feelings”, since with them I functioned as a “partner” and as a “friend”, and not as an “emotionally distanced guide” or a “purely professional instructor”!!!
I have always sought and aimed at creating those “universal human relations” between teacher and student, similar to those which had existed in Ancient Greece. Some such historical paradigms were the School of Pythagoras during the 6th Century B.C. in Syracuse in Italy, which included both male and female students, the very close relationship between Socrates and his young male students in Athens during the 4th Century B.C., famous students like Plato, Alkiviadis and Aristophanis, as well as the legendary intellectual and cultural guidance of Alexander the Great by his teacher Aristotle, while he was growing up in Macedonia!!!
*doodle- an aimless, more or less automatic scribble, outline, design, or improvised sketch, traced while one is mentally occupied with something else.
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