EDUCATION IS FAITH {Fromm}
Another meaning of having faith in a person refers to the faith we have in the potentialities of others. The most rudimentary form in which this faith exists is the faith which the mother has toward her newborn baby: that it will live, grow, walk, and talk. However, the development of the child in this respect occurs with such regularity that the expression of it does not seem to require faith. It is different with those potentialities which can fail to develop: the child’s potentialities to love, to be happy, to use his reason, and more specific potentialities like artistic gifts. They are the seeds which grow and become manifest if the proper conditions are given, and they can be stifled if these are absent.
One of the most important conditions is that the significant person in a child’s life have faith in these potentialities. The presence of this faith makes the difference between education and manipulation. Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities. [The root of the word education is educare, literally to lead forth, or to bring out something that is potentially present.] The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of possibilities, and the conviction that the child will be right only f the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable. There is no need od faith in the robot, since there is no life in it either.
—Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving: An Enquiry into the Nature of Love, p. 124-5
November 11, 2014