Give our children the space to be who they are

"We are raised on comparison;
Our education is based on it;
So is our culture.
So we struggle to be someone other than who we are."
(J. Krishnamurti)

I worry about sending my kids to school. I worry for many reasons. The other night at dinner I asked them, “What did you learn today?” My pre-schooler told me that he learnt that the moon was made of rocks, which he picked up from God knows where, but he picked it up, which suitably impressed me. My school-aged son, who is in year 2, told me, “You know, I don’t really learn anything new at school.” Which kind of got me thinking, What is he getting from school? Is school a vehicle for knowledge or is it just dumbing kids down?

I’ve always been of the mindset that the main purpose of the modern education system is to produce a workforce; cogs in the wheel of society to keep it functioning; mice on a treadmill to maintain the status quo.

Pablo Picasso said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” How that quote tears at a parent’s heartstrings! And I have to ask myself, What role does formal education play in this loss of artistic expression and imagination?

It often feels as though I have to counter what my 7-year-old picks up at school with the truth, particularly when it comes to the question of peer pressure and the desire to appear ‘cool’. Why do second graders feel the need to be ‘cool’? And what is ‘cool’ anyway? We all went through it. Everyone wants to fit in at school, and so beliefs and self-perceptions are moulded around this insidious principle without realization, to the detriment of individuality and self-awareness.

“Mama,” he recently asked me, “what are girls’ germs?” Where does one start with such a question? And so I told him that I’m a girl and he likes me. His cousins are girls and he likes them. His grandma and his teta are girls and he likes them. Girls are people just like boys – what’s not to like? He pondered this for a minute before concluding that he would inform his friends of this fact. Which he did, and now most of them agree that ‘girls’ germs’ don’t actually exist. Just in the same way he suddenly mysteriously didn’t want to hold my hand when approaching school. “You know,” I told him, “most of the boys here love holding their mum’s hand. They just think that it’s not cool. But you should do what you want to do.” And now he holds my hand again.

He also doodles around the edges of his homework. But this is not considered ‘appropriate’. But why not? I like the doodling. I don't like the fact that I'm expected to tell him it's not 'appropriate'.

In grade 1 he got put in the remedial reading group. He’s always been an excellent reader, and when I prodded the teacher for an explanation, she confessed that he was put in this group to make up the numbers for government funding. Hmm. I guess because he has an ethnic-sounding name.

In grade 1, my nephew was chastised by his teacher for humming tunes at his desk because “It might disrupt the other children.” Very sad.

Let’s give our children the space to be who they are. Even in school.