Iona Winter

Teach your kids to read, and to question everything they read.

These words leapt at me this morning, while having my cuppa and trawling through my morning emails (trawling perhaps suggests that there were many – the opposite is true). I have lapsed into a routine, now that I’m writing again, of being distracted. What’s going on there, you might well ask. Call yourself a writer? Pfft.

Teach your children to question everything. Tick.

Yes, learning is important. But encouraging children to question everything they read (and experience), and then allowing them to disagree with it! Well that’s another thing all together. Or is it? We are (supposedly) living in a time where free speech is more acceptable. But is it really?

Children speaking freely is not something our mainstream education system allows for. I sent bright wee buttons off to school at five. Very soon they came home disgruntled and unhappy. It appeared to me that they were being systematically shut down for speaking their minds. They asked “too many” of their own questions! They already knew the answers to the teacher’s questions – god help us! Why would a system (purported to be a caring one) do this to a defenceless child? I have my own theories, and the question is perhaps rhetorical.

Belonging is part of human nature. So we (I use that word in the loosest sense) mould our kids into a predetermined system, with a long history of conform (or be ostracised for not doing so) just so they can belong. Why do that? It’s not particularly forward thinking, and harks (all the way) back to a time where control of children, women and the under-resourced, deprived, marginalised or ‘different’ started. When was that? It seems like it’s been going on forever.

Who decides how academic success is measured anyway? Passing all the pre-determined tests, making the grade, finishing high school, going to university, joining the elite. Really? How is that success? Isn’t that just moulding our children into conforming? Disallowing them the freedom to explore who they really are – you know, as in unique human beings.

Sure, we can’t all home school. But we can give our kids the experience of both a system, and the freedom to explore and learn in their own unique ways (when they’re not at school). Maybe this can help prepare our kids to go out into the world, with the knowledge that there are systems which require some level of (dare I say it) conformity, and also places where freedom of speech and independent thought are welcomed.

Having the right to question is imperative. Children don’t have to agree with everything we do and say. Who says we’re always right anyway? A fresh pair of eyes lends new perspectives to how we view the world. What’s blue to me might be purple to you. Neither of us is right or wrong, surely we don’t need to set our kids up with binary opposites. There are plenty of places (along the continuum) for everyone to sit, contemplate the world, and to coexist.

Here’s to freedom of speech, freedom to question, and to our young people finding more ways to be together harmoniously in amongst their differences!