10/12/2026
The famous Osho quote challenges the traditional, authoritative parent-child dynamic:
“In a better world, every family will learn from children. You are in such a hurry to teach them. Nobody seems to learn from them, and they have much to teach you.”
If you were to ask the Fillmores—Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, the co-founders of the Unity spiritual movement—they would enthusiastically agree with Osho's core premise, though they would phrase it through their own metaphysical framework.
In fact, Unity's entire approach to youth education is explicitly built on this exact philosophy, known as the "Living Curriculum."
Here is how the Fillmores would respond to Osho’s idea:
1. The Living Curriculum: "To Call Them Out"
Myrtle Fillmore, who took the lead on children's education in the movement and founded the long-running children's magazine Wee Wisdom, famously wrote:
"The mission... is not to entertain the children but to call them out. To be always entertained is to be dwarfed and dependent. To be 'called out' is to follow the harmonious law of the soul’s unfoldment."
The Fillmores would agree with Osho that filling a child’s head with rigid adult dogmas and rules is damaging. Instead of viewing a child as an empty vessel that adults must "fill up" with knowledge, the Fillmores taught that the child already possesses inherent spiritual wholeness and the Christ consciousness within. The job of the adult is not to inject information, but to provide a safe space to draw out the child's innate divine wisdom.
2. Who Meddles with the Rosebud?
Where Osho notes that adults are in too much of a hurry to make children "just like you", Myrtle Fillmore used a beautiful nature metaphor to argue the same point:
"Who meddles with the rosebud? What fingers are deft enough to pry open that marvel of folded beauty? We are wise enough to leave it alone to follow the glad law of its own unfolding."
The Fillmores believed that trying to force adults' rigid ideas onto a child is like trying to pry open a flower bud with heavy human fingers—it only breaks and stunts the child's natural spiritual growth.
3. The Shift in Who is the Teacher
Charles Fillmore taught that the ultimate teacher is the "Indwelling Christ" or the Spirit within. Because children are less conditioned by the cynical, material world, they are often closer to this source of pure spiritual truth.
Therefore, a Unity response to Osho would affirm that teachers and parents are actually co-learners alongside children. Adults have a lot to learn from a child’s natural capacity for joy, trust, and intuitive connection to the Divine.
To summarize this:
While Osho used rebellious, iconoclastic language to tell adults to stop dulling children's minds, the Fillmores used gentle, mystical language to say the exact same thing.
Both agreed that adults spend far too much time trying to construct the child from the outside, rather than revering the perfection that is already unfolding from the inside.
