interview with jean leidloff (1998)

This interview (filmed in 1998) with Jean Liedloff, author of The Continuum Concept, by Michael Mendizza (Touch the Future) is the best summary of her views regarding innate intelligence-capacity and how we routinely interfere with this at great harm to children, adults and society. We have made a terrible mistake about what human nature is. We are under the misapprehension that we’re born bad, or in the official words of the Church of England, innately depraved, and that is simply not true. I was living for more than two years with these Indians, looking straight at them and not really seeing them, because I was so blinded by preconceptions. I didn’t even notice that, amazingly, the children never fought. They played together all day unsupervised, all ages, from crawling, to walking to adolescence. Not only did they not fight, they never even argued. This is not at all what we have been taught human nature is-boys will be boys. So I thought, “well maybe, boys won’t be boys.“