Waking up early and Pythagoras Theorem

I'm a father of twin daughters, and I am still figuring out what good parenting actually is.

Mummy scolded me today. Papa didn't buy me the toy. They woke me up so early. They made me drink milk.

Four entries from one ordinary day, all filed under the same heading: the world is against me.

Then she goes to school. And school (teacher), with a straight face, teaches her:

a² + b² = c²

(Ok, Ok. I know they are quite young to learn this, and they are still learning their A,B,Cs but this example seemed a better fit for the story. So bear with me on this)

I have nothing against the identity. It is true and it is useful. But consider what actually happened here. The child walked in carrying a live question, the most urgent question of her day: why did mumma scold me? And the institution we built specifically to answer children's questions handed her a fact about triangles.

She never asked about triangles. She doesn't even know why she is studying this. (At least, I didn't know. I tried asking my Maths teacher and she brushed me off saying I'm making excuses for not studying. What? I was the "topper". I genuinely wanted to know. But, I digress..)

I wrote earlier about what we choose to celebrate as learning, how we praise children for memorizing dinosaur encyclopedias while the skills that shape a life sit ignored. This is the other half of that thought.

Reading the ledger again

Look at the ledger once more, slowly this time.

They made me drink milk. That is nourishment. A mother's care, in its plain daily work clothes.

Papa didn't buy me the toy. That is protection. A judgment about what actually serves the child, which is affection even when it arrives as a no.

They woke me up early. Mumma scolded me. The same care, on discipline duty.

The child's complaint list is a list of love expressions, item for item. She is holding the evidence in her hands and reading it upside down. The entries are all accurate. Her reading of them is not, and nobody has offered her a better way to read. She has the events. But she does not have the wherewithal to build the right narrative from them.

These four entries are most of her experience of the world so far. Family is the first society she knows. Whatever lens she builds here, she will carry to the classroom, the playground, the office, her own family one day.

Recognition, not lectures

Now you can say that this is the job of moral education. But I feel this is education's primary job, and not some moral add-on.

The work is not to install values in children like software. The values are already operating all around her, at full strength, every single morning. Her home is a running laboratory of living together. She just does not have the theory to see it yet. She is seeing the events, but not how to connect them to see the co-existence around her. Show her, and the milk-forcing decodes itself. We don't have to tell her to hear what her mother is saying. If she recognises that what her mother is doing is for her health, she can accept and respect it naturally.

A school's real job, then, is to help her see the life she is already living. Explaining the world around her - the human beings, the values, the emotions - and not just the rocks, trees, plants and how many sides a triangle has.

The lesson material is present before she reaches the gate. She has her observations ready. Connect it for her in the right way.

What the omission costs

There is one more thing worth noticing. Watch a small child approach anyone: she approaches expecting justice and trust. She understands justice intuitively. She keeps asking why and genuinely waits for a real answer. She wants to do the right thing, but does not know yet what's right. She is an expectant one we left waiting.

And when the waiting goes on long enough, the ambient answer moves in. "Life is a struggle. Get yours before someone else does." Nobody teaches this in a classroom. (In way we do too, by making them compete with each other, but not directly) It gets installed by omission, in the gap where the real answer should have been. The ledger hardens into a worldview, and many of us then spend our adult decades trying to un-read it.

Keep the trigonometry

I am not proposing we burn the maths textbooks. Pythagoras should stay. The problem was never that we teach it. The problem is that we teach only it, and its cousins, and then act surprised that graduates can solve for the hypotenuse but cannot solve for the living.

We built half a curriculum and called it education. The missing half is simple to state: the family is people living together for each other. Society is the same thing at scale. A child is surrounded by this, soaked in it, scolded by it before breakfast and loved by it after Lunch. Education's work is to show her what is already there - in the right way.

Starting at home

And it's not just a job for the schools, but it starts with us, the parents. I'm still learning how to be a parent. So, schools would gradually learn too - how to be a school.

The children are watching.

They are reading us, long before they read anything else.