This is the kind of criticism I often hear from teachers, parents, and people involved in education. Other children ‒ it’s about those, who run in the museum, laugh loudly, jump in the trolley bus, push with backpacks and even, God forgive me, smoking and using swear words around the corner of the school. That’s just when it comes to the fact that a certain educational system works, for example, in Germany, then immediately there will be someone, who has to say “we just have other children”. And it is always has a negative connotation for some reason.
I love watching children at home and while traveling. I mentally compare them with my generation. Usually, they are different, someone creates some meanness, someone runs under my windows to try the first cigarette and starts coughing, and someone seriously goes in for sports and studying three languages. Actually, everything is as it was in my childhood, although, even better. I, remember my teenage adventures, I can really pray to all the gods so that neither my child nor these modern children will have to face it.
Usually, modern children have somewhat blurred authority. Well, their parents don’t teach them that a teacher is a saint just because he or she is a teacher, even if the teacher is a sadist. Speaking of respect, modern parents more and more often explain that an older person by age is not necessarily wise, intelligent, and worthy of respect just because one is older, even if he or she tore your jacket in hysterics.
I remember how my father told me that even if a teacher makes mistakes in his actions or words ‒ keep silent, endure, don’t speak, because the teacher is a teacher and he or she is older. Only after 18, it came to me that the teacher could be wrong, an older person could be stupid and mean, and you should defend your dignity, because you may grow up the same mean old sadist.
And my father also told me that teachers complained about his generation, they said, they were spoiled, so they would have been whipped in ancient times. We may conclude that ideal children simply don’t exist.
Although, no… there are… somewhere… abroad, more precisely in the imagination of parents, teachers, and people, who are close to upbringing.
Recently, I wandered through the streets of Krakow and looked closely at different age groups of schoolchildren and preschoolers. There were a lot of them, for some reason, in the city center, probably it was some period of excursions. There were also very young preschoolers, about 3 years old, all in green waistcoats, with two educators, as well as our preschoolers, they tweeted like sparrows, and someone wanted to run, someone wanted a bagel, someone wanted to pee just at that moment, and someone to catch the pigeon. But the educators laughed and smiled, banished the pigeons, took children to pee, calmed down, avoided bagels… And even no one shouted in a broken voice “Hey, stand in pairs, or I have no idea what I would do!”
Teenagers … Polish teenagers, just like ours, tried to bomb cigarettes from tourists, shouting, chasing, pushing, ridiculously flirting with girls. The girls tried to run to the store with cosmetics. But the teacher was alone with them and for some reason also without hysteria, and for some reason also smiled (he is probably sluggish). The teachers laughed merrily with the girls and said quietly something to the boys that they had ceased to curse and bomb cigarettes from tourists.
Somehow Nadiyka and I entered a large museum below the market square. There was just a tour of first graders. They ran around the hall, looked in everywhere, overcrowded the railings, called each other, and tried to crawl under the tape, which protected the closed areas. But the museum staff gently removed them from the railing, took from the closed areas and for some reason none of them screamed “Hey, stand quickly where you should, it is the Museum, and not a disco. And shut your mouths up!” The teacher didn’t shout, and her duet with a guide was a model of calm and endurance (I don’t know, maybe they give some tranquilizers for the teachers there)).
Our Nadiya was looking for a company. Therefore, it is not surprising that she quickly found herself in the epicenter of this children’s whirlwind, they looked at her pigtails, asked to say something, because Nadiyka’s Ukrainian language seemed strange to them, then they taught her to count in Polish, and tried to say “dyakuyu” (“Thank you” in Ukrainian which sounds similar to Polish Dziękuję – translator’s note) correctly. And all this happened with laughter and yelps. The teacher and the guide didn’t try to take Nadiyka away, and they didn’t tell me: “Take the child, we have a learning process here,” they asked Nadiyka where she came from, asked if she had coins, and at the same time told how people from Lviv used to trade on this square and that there is such a country ‒ Ukraine, and there are a lot of Ukrainians in Krakow, and then they compared coins, zlotys, and hryvnias. And it was interesting and fun for everyone, the noise did not tire you, it inspired.
Polish children were the same as ours ‒ different. Here they just have other adults… ones that still remember those times, when they were the same children, such, as if they have iron nerves and incredible endurance, such, as if they can respect a person, even when she is 3 years old and she wants to catch the pigeon and doesn’t want to go in the line. Even that abusive disobedient fellow is worthy of respect, maybe that’s why the systems work for them because children are the same all over the world, but adults… are others.
Tatusya Bo