Wisdom from Ferguson’s Children
“To teach is to learn twice.”
~ Joseph Joubert (Moralist. Essayist)
~ Joseph Joubert (Moralist. Essayist)
Many facebook groups are devoted to education. Let’s take a peek. Hmmm. On innumerable pages, the whole child conversation looks bleak. Yes, there is talk of play and the need for recess. But what about the lessons learned at home or on the streets? In Ferguson, New York City, Los Angeles, and in Detroit, children meet – Young kids meet the police. This too is a lesson. But in facebook education groups it seems to be a breach. The mere mention is often followed by a question. “What does this have to do with education?” It is not about Common Core. It is not about testing. It is about our children, their wisdom, and how we can learn from what our youth teach.
The cops are supposed to ‘serve and protect’ citizens like the Jones boys, but now they have more questions than answers. Photograph courtesy of Shonta JonesBy Steven W Thrasher in Ferguson | Originally Published at The Guardian. August 18, 2014 07.15 EDT |
When I asked six-year-old Amor, who wants to be a firefighter and who lives here in Ferguson, Missouri, what he thinks of the police, he said, “They shoot people.”
The children of Ferguson have an especially painful – and unfairly adult – task before them: they must make sense of the death of one of their peers, Michael Brown, and deal with the fallout from the protests, violence and militarized police presence that has, in many ways, quickly come to define their young lives in the week since Brown’s violent death at the hands of a local police officer.
The police response to protests in Ferguson has affected children as much as the death itself. Amor’s 11-year-old brother, Tavier, told me, “They shouldn’t shoot people for protesting.” Sitting over pizza just a few blocks from the Ferguson Police Department, he added, “As I was getting older, I thought police were nice people, and as I’m getting older, I’m thinking they’re so-so. They’re still good people, but they’re judging us now.”
