Gone are the days when we lived in naïve optimism until puberty hit and the only news we got was pretty accurately reported on the BBC. Children are now getting social media accounts from a young age (despite recommended ages of 13). We have even built internet safety and other adult concerns like terrorism into our primary curriculum. Gone are those days where children can just listen to their parents and teachers and get that good grounding of fact-based knowledge before they hit their teens and here are the days that they need to start digesting, processing and forming their own ideas based on a barrage of conflicting opinions.
Life moves fast! For a few years the You Tuber Logan Paul was seen as a ‘safe’ influence. His brother was even a Disney channel regular until the channel “mutually agreed” to separate themselves from him. Skip forwards a few years and Logan Paul’s videos take a turn as they begin to objectify women and, of course, his now infamous and callous visit to the Japanese “suicide forest”. But at what point do the parents of his pre-teen fans decide that he is no longer appropriate? Before his inappropriate turn? Well that isn’t possible, so by the time parents stop their child from watching You Tubers like this, their child has already seen many videos that challenge their way of seeing the world. If the adults around them haven’t given them the skills to take in information and opinions and make considered judgements then children are left being influenced by no-longer safe idols. A sting in the tale to this example, by the way, is that my middle son loved Logan Paul. We bought a Logan Paul hoodie. Then he hit the press for being, in laymen terms, a complete imbecile and that hoodie got consigned to a drawer. We both learnt a valuable lesson there. Another part of the world children are experiencing is the increasing threat of terrorism. When I was young there were definitely still acts of terrorism around the world, but it was not to the scale that we see now and not such a part of a child’s world. It happened. It was in the newspaper, on the radio and on one of the three or four news programmes that were on grown up TV at some point during the day. It did not intrude, too much, into most children’s lives or consciousness. It was a grown-up concern. Children nowadays are experiencing terrorism and gaining an awareness of it from a much younger age. After the bombing of the Arianna Grande concern in Manchester in 2017 four of the children in my class mentioned it during register. This was the next morning. Less than twenty four hours after it had happened. They actually mentioned it as soon as I reached their names in the register and burst out with the tiny bits of information that had already seeped into their little brains. All of a sudden I was faced with four children who knew about the bombing and twenty three children who were now wondering what was being talked about and were eager to hear more. There was an assembly about it too. My class didn’t go, they were far too young for a 20 minute assembly even if it wasn’t on such a sad and scary issue, but their siblings did. Some parents chose to tell their children about the bombing and some didn’t but the children were a part of the world. A world where information comes from all avenues, and where even Disney Channel icons can end up in the midst of a terrorist situation. How can you even hope to explain these things to a three year old? I struggled with my two pre-teens. Not only are the children that we teach now exposed to more videos and news about terrorism, we even actively have PREVENT training for teachers to spot the early signs of extremism and radicalisation that we may see in children. It isn’t just the ISIS style extremism either. In a turbulent society there is also radicalisation coming from the white supremacist front. How can we expect children, who are only just becoming aware of a vague concept of death and whose biggest conflict is usually about not wanting to brush their teeth before bed, to be able to understand and process the existence of terrorism? Philosophy for Children does not give all of the answers but what it does do is help to create a mind-set from a young age which gives children the tools to take in information which is often conflicting (and sometimes fake) and opinions and create their own. That is the key. The opinion and ideas that we all have are exactly that. Our own. So it is up to us to give our children the tools to be able to form their own opinions, taking account of everything they have heard and read, without being overwhelmed or brainwashed by the most vocal opinions. If we create little philosophers then hopefully they can create a positive future for us all.
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AuthorMiss Magical Mess is a pre-school teacher and P4C Level 2B facilitator. After a shaky start as a P4C facilitator (P4C with 3 year olds... are you kidding?) Miss Magical Mess created her own approach to P4C and enquiry model and is now a big fan. Archives |