answers it once pursued with innocent sobriety, the child is essentially
unprepared to respond soberly to a drastically changing body sexually
charged with imaginations and the conflicting emotions of love, hate,
sympathy and antipathy which toss the soul like a ship in a tempest without a
wisdom anchor. And for those of you who are overly religious, ritual doesn’t
have any bearing at this time other than to cement repressed or unrecognized
hostility; especially when the child is forced to do things for which there is no
comprehension or reasonable purpose when commanded by a generation of
hypocrites and hapless ignoramuses.
Hence, the latent period, and most especially the pre-pubescent ages of 9-12,
is best suited for sex education as well as the morally imbued elements of
logic such as the abstract constructs of music, math and geometry, etc., so
that the virtue of mental order rather than confusion reigns as king during
adolescence. If honesty and virtue are anointed prince regent during the
latent period, then the ‘Rest of God’ as As-Sakkinah will govern the trying
time of adolescence. However, when chauvinist ignorance and hypocrisy are
the educators, psychologically-normative growth, development and
adjustment of the soul are most unlikely. Much like the perfectly formed
female body of a genetic male with testicular feminization, outwardly things
may appear normal (like a mosque filled with hypocrites and ignoramuses),
but inwardly there is a deep dysfunctional malady that will reproduce the
calamity by raising another self-same generation of deviantly-deformed
offspring; much as the prophet prophesied. The child will develop outwardly
to appear normal, but the truth of who he/she really is or aspires to be will
remain veiled and/or shackled by conventional pretense.
Though ignorant, the latent child bears a 'sense' of justice which is a major
component of the fitrah with which he/she was born. What was once
intuitive for the infant becomes a program of research and development for
the latent child, whereby the child seeks to know what is just vs. unjust, true
vs. false, etc. A categorization takes place wherein moral and factual
knowledge is confirmed and affirmed at this time with a forthright guiltless
consciousness, completely innocent of bias and prurience.
"But they have no knowledge thereof. They follow but a guess, and verily, guess
is no substitute for truth." (Q, 53:28)