I came across this article today on FB about a Women’s Wall in Kerala India. It struck me because it was such a short article and yet it was loaded with educational potential. I suggest you read it before continuing reading this article, don’t worry it’s only 182 words long. For starters we have here a wall being presented in the media as a good thing, when most of the time we’re told walls are bad. That by itself makes this a worthy topic of investigation. If I wanted to use this article to educate my hypothetical teenage children about how complicated a simple event like a protest can be I would probably wait until everyone was seated at the dinner table and read out to them this article in its entirety, as it was very short; and then listen to the initial reactions from my audience.
I imagine the initial discussion would be about the logistics and mathematics of organising a fifteen minute long protest involving 3 to 5 million women stretched out over a distance of 620km. Perhaps some doubts about how realistic such a feat is, or acknowledgement that this issue must appear to be important for the people involved. Then I might ask my audience why someone would organise such a protest with so many people like this. What message does it convey? Such a protest is not an appeal to reason, it is an appeal to might: look how many people are against you, see how powerful we are, watch out we are the majority. This is the whole point of democracy: if you can’t win an argument through reason and evidence, you simply “settle” the dispute with a show of numerical superiority. Thus a protest like this is essentially democratic in nature, as opposed to a hunger strike, pamphlet drop, banner march, or self-immolation; each protest method uses a different rhetorical approach. This protest uses intimidation from numbers as its strategy.
One of the most important responsibilities of a parent is choosing appropriate reading material for their children. Books contain a wealth of ideas, and while exploring different ideas is a good activity for adults to do on a regular basis, one needs to take into account that children’s minds are not yet sufficiently developed to evaluate ideas morally or logically. Children need protection from bad or infectious ideas. Ideas such as, “you are useless”, “you need to respect force”, “you are responsible for other people’s problems”, “you owe the government allegiance”, “the media are trustworthy”, “casual sex is harmless and fun”, “all religions are peaceful and good”, and so on. There are literally hundreds of very bad ideas being fed to children while their brains are not yet sufficiently developed to evaluate the merit of these ideas and filter out the harmful ones. For this reason, I urge parents to read whatever their children are reading and make sure you introduce intelligent challenges to these bad ideas to prevent your children from becoming slaves to self-destructive ideas. It is also useful for parents to read book reviews of popular books children might read so they get an idea of just how dangerous some insidious ideas can be if absorbed by children during the formative years of their intellectual development.
Four Birds Education 