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C) POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
TEN BASIC HUMAN NEEDS EDUCATION SHOULD CONSIDER (SOLOMON MARCUS)
We have the Ten Commandments. In complementarity with them, researcher Solomon Marcus
proposes a study that has been inspired by the ten human needs. They are rooted in childhood but
they should have been the subject of education and learning at all ages. We shall try to analyse and
adapt them to the system.
1. The need to give life a meaning: to be glad that we exchanged a smile with a child passing
by. From this viewpoint, the teacher should be the happiest worker because he has not just
one, but many children in front of him and he should absorb some of their innocence and
joy of living. To absorb and to give further: joy, knowledge, and a way of living.
2. The need of freshening: As we daily care to refresh our body through rest, through
movement, we also need a freshening of our mind, our senses, and our soul. Let’s wake up
every morning capable of freshly glancing over the world, available for a new beginning.
How many times hasn’t the teacher felt constraint by his own routine, day by day, year by
year, teaching the same subject, using perhaps many old or new methods which tens of
formative courses have inoculated or established as modern, active? All these, without
being adapted to the age group, context or communication and working situation can be
tiring, not only for the teacher but mostly for the student who feels the reserve and the
routine of the educator.
3. The need to question. Too many times, the school, instead of maintaining and developing
this need, it annihilates it. But if we don’t maintain the state of inquisitiveness, wonder,
aspiring to understand the world, not just to record it, then we cannot build for us the
capacity of problem solving, identifying the unsolved issues; also we cannot grasp the
magnitude and nature of our ignorance. The teacher should not be afraid of the unknown,
of the lessons’s interruption, with more or less successful questions, whether he has answers
or not. He can admit his limitations, he can stop teaching the lesson even if this is neither
comfortable nor efficient. In the long run, the child/ youngster has only to win. Not just
knowledge, but also a way of life, a way of solving/finding solutions, a way of thinking.
4. The need to doubt and suspect. In education and learning, it is advisable to adopt the
presumption of suspicion. We are born criticizing; the newly-born is crying criticizing of
discontent. Let us look with interest, but with suspicion anything delivered to us from the
teacher’s desk, from a tribune, from the internet, from books, any kind of publications, just
as a policeman looking for the perpetrator of a murder suspects everything. Educators,
teachers should be the first to recomnend, to stimulate this attitude to their students, to tell
them this: “the clearest sign of respect you could show me is to pay attention to me, but
don’t accept anything I tell you before your critical spirit assures you the truth and the
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