Here’s an uplifting story from the vanguard of the culture war. As the New York Times reports:
‘At the Advent School in Boston, Erina Spiegelman, who is an instructional coordinator, recalled that a teacher last year asked a group of students the big question: ‘What is gender?’. The first answer came from a second-grader: ‘It’s a thing people invented to put you in a category.”
I have a daughter that age (second grade is the equivalent of Year 3) and I love her as much as any human has loved another, but she’s not an evolutionary biologist, and for me to present her very vague understanding of such a fraught, difficult and controversial subject as some sort of font of wisdom would be sheer self-indulgence. Other people’s children are like other’s people drug stories: they really mean a lot more to you than anyone else.
Yet there seems to be this strange fixation with repeating what children say on the issue of politics as if somehow their opinions were not just as interesting as a grown adult’s, but actually more so.
The ‘Woke 8-year-old’ who tells her progressive parent that Donald Trump is going to create the Fourth Reich – her thoughts being suspiciously like a Simple English version of the parent’s own musings on the subject – is such a cliché on social media that more often than not it’s done in jest.
Britain’s best politics newsletters
You get two free articles each week when you sign up to The Spectator’s emails.
Already a subscriber? Log in
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in