Should we never say “Do not”?

My first thought was, but God did! If it was good enough for God, it should be good enough for us! (I was referring to the Old Testament and the Ten Commandments –the famous (or perhaps infamous) “Thou Shalt Nots”). If God thought it perfectly fine to tell his children, his people, to NOT do things, shouldn’t we as teachers, find it equally effective (or at the very least reasonable) to use the same sort of terminology with our beloved (or not so beloved) pupils!

The speaker went on about how surveys had shown that people respond better to positive instructions. He used the age-old (and may I say clichéd) example of how are brains are unable to not think of the colour yellow, when asked not to think of it. (I hope this wasn’t too convoluted a sentence!) Okay, but that was totally out of context, I thought. When do we ask a child not to think of a colour. We use ‘nots’ purely to establish boundaries, and emphasise rules in an absolute and unambiguous manner. How, for instance, did you tell (using the politically correct jargon) a child to stop chewing their gum? “Do chew gum, but not on school premises?”. I mean, come on.

Anyway, it was about half way through the session that the penny dropped and I found that you could indeed find all the answers to life, and learning, and good practice, in the Bible. It occurred to me that the old Testament (with its “Thou shalt nots” was about rules and laws and establishing the fact that human beings were incapable of following rules and therefore incapable of saving themselves. In stark contrast, as if to first make us conscious of sin, and then –only then –give us the solution, the new testament does the opposite. It does away with the rules (the negative language and the ‘Do not’s and changes to the language which tells us what do do, rather than what not to!

Jesus encapsulates all the rules in the old testament (so does not do away with them, but repackages them, if you like) in two simple ‘new’ rules, which involve a ‘Do’, with no hint of the word ‘Not’.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and your mind, and your soul” and “Love your neighbour as yourself”

So there you go. If God knew positive instructions were the way to go, who are we to argue?