We really ought to listen to our children more than we generally do. They have much they could teach us if only we would let them. The best teacher in creation cannot impart anything to someone who will not assume the role of their student. While it is commonplace for adult teachers to complain that they spend the majority of their time managing the few class members who refuse to comport themselves as students toward them, we are less prepared to hear children complain that most adults do not listen to them. Nonetheless, children know and see a lot to which through socialization adults have become inattentive, even blinded.
I grew up when the freedom movements were becoming more noticeable and vocal, a time when governments began actively intervening to insure equality under the law. My parents made a lot of mistakes rearing me, but they taught me that (absent a person’s being of ill intent) skin colour and nationality and religious differences ought not matter. It took me a long time to become aware that there’s more to it than that; that I had miles to go before I sleep. You know who taught me that? My son.
When he comes home from school (he’s in university now, but we’ve always done this) my son and I sit down and he tells me about his day. When he was in the fourth grade he came home excited to tell me that he’d made a new friend. He talks about why he likes him, how they met, what they do together. My son is a Jew and his friend was Muslim, both of them attending a Catholic school. Day after day he told me more and more about school and his friend. He said he wanted me to meet his friend. When the invitations came for the annual school Bar-B-Q that we always attended he was especially happy because his friend would be there and we could meet. And that we did.
His friend was a handsome little boy, bright eyed and friendly albeit a little shy. Everything my son had told me about his friend was true. There was however one truth about his friend my son neglected to mention. His friend was about as black as a person can possibly be. So black the sun made purple highlights on his skin. The kind of black it’s often difficult to capture in a photograph. In that moment I realized my son knew more than I did up until that moment. I’m no racist; far from it. But had it been me doing the describing, I’d have mentioned colour. I’d have probably mentioned it first. Not to criticize or demean at all; I would mention it because I guess I believed it was salient. Relevant. An important identifying characteristic. Later on that evening I asked my son why he had not mentioned that his friend was of colour. He told me he didn’t see that as important. What he had told me was the important stuff. Years have passed, and my son has learned that colour is important because people of colour too often are oppressed because of it. And when a person allows people to be different without being wrong cultural differences become interesting. But he still doesn’t see colour as an important enough factor in friendship to merit immediate mention or attention. From him I have learned to not let it occupy my mind so much as once it did. A boy in the fourth grade teaching his PhD. father an important lesson in life. No one had to show him that. All I had to do was fail to teach him otherwise. As the song goes “You’ve got to be carefully taught” to hate and to fear. And I never taught him that. And he returned the benefit of that to me in an important teaching.
A person can tell when a phenomenon is spiritual rather than material or physical. Spiritual phenomena have characteristics they do not share with material/physical phenomena. I was able to give my son the kind of an upbringing I myself did not have. Had it been physical, I couldn’t have done that. To give him a rock I’d have to have a rock to give. I would then have one less rock, and he would have one more. A zero-sum game. That’s physical. But I had no such childhood as I gave him. Yet I am able to give it to my son, and I am elevated and increased in the process.
No one shows a child the sky. Kids know stuff. One does well to listen to them.