What we can learn from our children - Ideas that connect an 18-year-old in Texas with his peers in Calcutta

 Ideas that connect an 18-year-old in Texas with his peers in Calcutta

Amid the trying circumstances we were faced with, long before the pandemic, schools across the country have not shied away from meaningful discourse on ideas that matter

Illustration credit: Telegraph Online Graphics

Shantanu Datta   |  TT   |  29.01.21: 

And you of tender years

Can't know the fears

That your elders grew by

And so, please help

Them with your youth

(Teach Your Children _ Graham Nash)

The young outnumber the old in today’s India, which like most parts of the world, is living through a time chequered by deep divisions. Fact, fiction, half-truths. Nationalism pitted against patriotism. We go through intermittent waves of outrage, often conveniently selective, amidst a sustained campaign of othering those who yearn for sanity; those who want to believe and look for some sense, truth even, in the madness that surrounds us all.

But then, what is truth today? That what we see on television, read in newspapers and websites, or latch on to on twitter and WhatsApp forwards as mere reflections of what we want to believe? Or is there the other ‘truth’, the unsullied one, the old-fashioned one that we know deep down to be real, the kind we don’t need ancient scriptures and holy books to tell us about? And just when we thought that the ‘truth’ had been buried for good, a teenager from Texas held up a beacon for us to see, as did a bunch of school kids in Calcutta, doing a deep dive into the introductory words of the Constitution to remind us what they stand for.

Jackson Reffitt assumed his father was planning “something big” in the lead-up to US President Joe Biden’s oath-taking. So, what did he do? He alerted the FBI even though he didn’t know what exactly his father, a gun-owning member of a far-Right militia, was going to do. He found out, like the rest of his country and the world, via television images on January 6 when rioters stormed the Capitol in Washington. Two days later his father returned home and warned him: “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor. And you know what happens to traitors. Traitors get shot.”

We don’t know how Jackson might have reacted immediately after the threat. After all, it’s not normal for an 18-year-old to be faced with a death threat from his own father. Yet, Jackson’s later conversations reveal a self-assured young man, full of hope and faith in the inherent goodness within everyone. “I am afraid for him to know,” he said, unsure whether his father knew he’d turned him in. “Not for my life or anything, but for what he might think,” he clarified in the hope that his relationship with his father could be repaired. “It’ll get better over time. I know we will.”

For Reffitt Senior, who was subsequently arrested, the lesson has just begun. He’s lucky he has his son as teacher.

In Calcutta, a group of children not older than Jackson, had their own lesson to impart at school. On the eve of India’s Republic Day, they got together to celebrate the Constitution, the document the nation bequeathed itself 71 years ago. The focus was on secularism, liberty and “we the people”, the three words with which the Preamble begins. India has to be a “secular society”, not just a secular state, said a 17-year-old during the online programme. If the raison d’etre was to take the Preamble out of textbooks and have the children talk about it as a living document of ideas and ideals, the effort was well worth it. For it was the elders back home who were forced to take note when a class XI boy articulated them in succinct prose. The most important aspect of secularism, he noted, “is mutual respect, acceptance and inclusion of every person in society despite religious beliefs”, his understanding coming from an earlier personal experience of having his tiffin thrown away because he had brought a chicken sandwich to a “vegetarian school.”

Amid the trying circumstances we were faced with, long before the pandemic, schools across the country have not shied away from meaningful discourse on ideas that matter. From a Third Theatre-style play on the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir to a pictorial depiction of human rights violations, these endeavours have done so much more than keep school children occupied during the lockdown.

It’s as though Reffitt in the US and the young adults of our country have together, unbeknownst to each other, spoken in unison. As the world lurches towards self-defeating extreme intolerance from one day to the next, these boys and girls have planted their own flag. One that flutters in the sky to remind us elders of our miserable failings, telling us that the choice between right and wrong is easy if we want it to be.