What Can I Learn From a Child?
a.k.a. my Philosophy term paper
When I was younger I used to ardently believe that the nightly whistling the crickets made were the sounds of the stars. It was a belief that was so infused into my psyche that I never questioned it up until late last year, despite reading numerous science textbooks and watching documentaries, when I was sitting out by the balcony and had to stop for a moment to be able to discard a belief I so earnestly believed. Since then I have thought much about what last vestiges of my childhood are left and what else I will have to lose due to the ebbing and flowing of time. As a child, I used to believe that being an adult was the ultimate form of being — I couldn’t wait to be one — but now I find myself at the precipice of adulthood and I would give anything to have the childlike sense of innocence, wonder, and assurance again.
But I could not simply relegate myself into wondering what I could learn from myself as a child. I had to look elsewhere. I’ve been turning it in my mind for quite some time and I suppose that there is no way to say the sentence “I’ve been looking at children” without having some distorted connotation to it. But I suppose that in itself is a manifestation of aging that we no longer take in information at face value but rather, we always assume that any statement has a hidden meaning or agenda underneath it.
It is no great secret that children are naïve, that children will believe anything that they’re told. It is this naivety that launches them, launched us, into thinking some wild, improbable things. But it is also this naivety that defines children. They are clean slates, their innocence permits them to make mistakes and it is also this innocence which makes them unafraid to make mistakes. It is this innocence which makes children act solely on pure, honest intentions. That despite my upbringing as a Christian, I cannot accept that children are born evil solely because of what I learned from family, school, church, and the Bible. I could not see, in any child, any semblance of evil — only honest intentions.
Adults, on the other hand, are cynical. You cannot introduce them to anything new without being asked a tidal wave of questions about it. We think that every action has a hidden meaning and agenda — that every action is pursued for our own self –interest. No action is innocent to the adult: everything is done for a reason and every action is dictated by self-interest. Adults are embittered and cynical while the child is hopeful and curious. Everything is possible for the child while everything is the same old thing over and over again for the adult.
The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that life is a process of losing one’s innocence, that youth and childhood was a sort of chemical madness. You start out as something holistic, something pure, and as the years go by you slowly lose these things and finally shed all vestiges of it in what literature calls ‘the coming of age.’ When that phrase comes to mind, I remember Holden Caulfield refusing to believe that his old friends have come and started doing all those things he deemed ‘impure.’ And innocence is lost, and we become embittered and cynical.
The childlike sense of innocence allows for a worldview that is unhindered by what some would call ‘reality.’ In innocence, reality is merely a suggestion. As a child, we can create our own realities and forge identities without the sneer or criticism from another. As a child we can be hopeful and actually enjoy the world as it is.
As a child, we are free to wonder as much as we can and ask questions whenever we can. For a long time we were not so concerned with how or when or what or where or who — for a long time we only thought of the why of the world and everything in the world. We were inquisitive and the world begged for answers and then we slowly forgot to ask questions and fell into the habit of accepting things and doing things without question. It was only the how, when, what, where, and who — we threw ourselves into lives without the ‘why.’
When my cousin was younger, she used to pester me with endless ‘whys.’ Why was the sky blue? Why was drinking water important? Why was I studying? And, being the ‘holier and better than thou’ person I was when I was in grade six, I would usually respond with some sarcastic answer which she would not understand — I would then answer her in all seriousness, but the answer would usually illicit more questions. I brought this up to my mother over dinner and she said that I was exactly like that too when I was younger. In fact she said that one of the reasons she bought a set of encyclopedias for the house was because of my inquisitive nature. After this, I almost never answered my cousin sarcastically, but tried to answer her in earnest — she has since then stopped asking me why.
This wonder propels children into making observations and statements that would escape an adult. Although at times wrong, children will assert their observations and stick to their guns whereas most adults (at least in my observation) would back down their beliefs just to avoid conflict. Only a handful of children survive with this kind of wonder into adulthood. Most of us merely find ourselves thrown in to tireless routine without questioning why. Or we do, and we respond with canned answers: ‘because this is what you’re supposed to do’ ‘because this is growing up’ ‘because this is what’s expected of me’. All the while forgetting the dreams we dreamt as children and forgetting all the freshness that wonder brought to our day to day living.
And lastly, at least in this post, there is assurance. The reality I find myself in now is constantly shifting, it is a reality where nothing is certain and every major decision feels like a risk. It is a crossroads of sorts, but let’s not go into that. As a child the world was static, unchanging, constant, and there was this continued assurance that the world is in our favor: we would achieve our wildest dreams, we would get everything we needed and everything we wanted, the world was ours and no one could take it away from us.
I do suppose that we cannot adhere to the idea that the world is static since it would do us no good, but there is at least one takeaway from the idea of assurance: that the world is good and it is in our favor.
All too often we see the world bleakly, as if it were headed down a path we are doomed to follow, that it is beyond repair and is broken beyond measure. It is understandable to see the world as such — all the news, statistics, wars, famine, and disease only confirm our pessimism. But that is not how the child would see it. To the child, the world is good and only works towards what is good. The world is only as broken as we make it to be, to the child, the world was not broken at all. There is still the freshness and novelty of the world — the mere discovery of new things is joy to the child. There is this optimism (that many authors would say tragic) that exists within the child that nobody who sees the world pessimistically can ever hope to replicate. It is a pure joy and optimism that the child does not even realize.
This optimism is the hope of the world — that if generations of children do not become too cynical too early, the world will see change that it has never seen before. Hannah Arendt saw this, and in this she saw the future. That despite coming to harm, a new generation represents a second chance: a renaissance of hope. A continued self-assurance that the world is good would change the world enough to realize that an ideal world can be possible. That change can be seen as progress instead of what our cynical minds tell us.
I suppose that this whole post can be summarized into this: children are hopeful and curious and brave while we can be cynical, conformist, and passive. These lessons that we can learn from the bright eyed freshness of children are only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more to know, so much more to learn, and so much more that can be done about our state as human beings by simply observing and learning from where we came from, from our childhoods and the children.
