When I was a school-aged kid I remember being fascinated and so impressed by my younger cousin’s intelligence. He would recite the scientific names of dinosaurs, name all the planets and their moons, point out constellations on his map of the stars–and he was only 4 years old! I remember thinking, this kid is advanced, and not only is he advanced, but he also has a leg up compared to the rest of us, those of us kids who weren’t encouraged to absorb all of this information in our spare time, nor provided with the resources to do so.
A decade later, I began working as a preschool teacher. The school’s curriculum introduced the kids to different units which were simplified, category-oriented, and compartmentalized, and left little-to-no room for ambiguity. The themes were similar to the ones my younger cousin knew about: outer space and the names of planets, the names of different animals on a farm, and parts of the body–to name a few.
While “teaching” these themes, I realized that these were the same topics I’d learned as a kid, and that I was prompted to absorb and memorize in a similar pursuit. Given the dry nature of the topics my knowledge or engagement with them had not changed in any meaningful way, nor did it seem that there was room for it to. We were teaching in a “here are the facts, aren’t they interesting? Memorize them, know them” format. There was a glaring contradiction between the wonderfully creative instincts of the kids and the content we were teaching them.
But children already have access to a content-rich site of knowledge which is stronger than adults: intuition. Children are born with their intuition fully developed. A child’s inner wisdom helps alert them to danger, provides guidance in decision making and aids in problem solving, moving children to jump more quickly to a solution. When we teach children to absorb and memorize as a precedent for learning, not only do we miss an opportunity to nurture their intuition, we actively encourage them to suppress it. When the lessons we teach children only and always insist on memorize, absorb, repeat, the lesson becomes: knowledge is always created and negotiated outside of me, never by me.
When we reward children for acquiring knowledge that is static, we affirm a misguided view of reality and our roles in creating it. The world we live in is not a fixed one. Equivalently, the inclination to delay children’s engagement with more “complex” topics is a construct created by adults and imposed on children; it is not immutable. We enable this kind of thinking in kids because we have enabled it in ourselves first. And when the promise of thinking for yourself comes far off in the future, many of us will find that it will not come at all. Because it is not a guarantee, it is something to work for. And we cannot expect this from children nor from ourselves if we are not committed to nurturing it from the beginning. In the words of Paulo Freire, “the future is not something hidden in a corner, the future is something we build in the present.”
With climate change’s deadly arrival, a global pandemic well underway, and America’s descent into fascism a looming possibility–we see the need for creative responses is not going away. And there are real dangers with waiting passively for the solutions to come from elsewhere.
And while I am not advocating for kids to stop learning the names of dinosaurs, I do believe that a decentering of sites of fixed knowledge that are imposed from the top down is necessary. The curriculum prioritizes sites of knowledge which are determined to be true by scientists and researchers—experts and institutions which are out of reach to so many kids. Where is support for the knowledge production that begins with the child?
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