Today's Rantburg carries this piece, which links to this article, which is a very well done fisking of Barak O'Bama and the Audacity of Smarm™. Jules Crittendon's analysis notes the tried and true cliche that ... the great responsibility of students is to question the world around you, to question things that don’t add up. Utter that phrase or one similar to it, and a certain type of innaleck is guaranteed to nod sagely in agreement. To another kind of mind, to whit, mine, it's in the same category as scraping your nails across the blackboard, or a dog entering its fourth hour of non-stop barking outside my bedroom window, or the muezzin's call to prayer.
At which point in life are children supposed to start questioning everything they're told?
I've got a 5-year-old grandkid in kindergarten. Should he be questioning the construction of the letter "A"? Should he wait until middle school or junior high, whichever is currently in vogue? Does that mean that 11-year-old Dan, Junior, should be second-guessing the guff his teachers are putting out about long division and nouns?
Surely the admonition applies to high school students, since they're in court periodically to enforce their right to wear offensive tee shirts, to be male prom queens, or to call their teachers names.
But there doesn't seem to be any easing into this obligation on the part of partially formed minds. It's a binary thing, on and off, it would seem, so there's no year or two to be spent questioning some things and swallowing others whole because the adults might have some idea how the world works along with the intent to pass that knowledge on to the kiddies. So my question is: At which point in their pointless little existences are children assumed to know enough to question everything?
At which point do the children's opinions become more important than those of their elders?
And that brings up the corollary: at which age do their oh-so-important opinions become suspect because they're deeply enough into adulthood for their minds to have gone, like ours have? |