But what do youngsters learn about politics? | Opinion | EUROtoday

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Politics was not talked about in my home. It was later that I started to fill within the areas that contained some phrases that, inevitably, have been a part of the sound of the after-dinner conversations. Those phrases weren’t spoken by anybody in my household, they sounded on tv or on the automotive radio: terrorism, common strike, Berlin Wall, Transition.

But my mom did inform me after I was a baby that her mom heard the detonations of the conflict over the Alcántara Bridge and hid beneath the mattress, that my paternal grandfather was imprisoned and realized to learn and write in jail, that her sister caught polio when she was two years outdated as a result of the vaccines didn’t attain the kids on the southern outskirts of the town, so when the bearded males entered the instructing school and shouted slogans, she went residence as a result of she was bored with working for the morning and research at night time, that my father was chosen within the army to put vigil over the physique of the dictator in Madrid as a result of he was tall and blonde, that the 12 months I used to be born there was a coup d’état, that she was pregnant and had worry.

Isn’t that, the primary reminiscence, intimate and former, probably the most political? Aren’t these the involuntary info that construction my concepts and my place? Isn’t that, maybe, what makes me who I’m, what locations me from probably the most personal to the general public?

What I didn’t perceive then, after all, are the formulation of the rule of regulation. I barely deal in the present day with the laws that helps it, it took me greater than a few many years to study in regards to the mechanisms of dialogue in Parliament and what was so essential that they known as the Constitution. What can we are saying about understanding the sensitivity and variety of the territories, that many say that there are two Spains, that others say that there are three, others that 17, and that they emerge from a conflict that’s already distant, and that that duel was abruptly extinguished by cessions solely six years earlier than I used to be born.

Almost all the time forgotten, as a result of they don’t have the fitting to vote, girls and boys undergo politics from a defenseless place, with out explanations, removed from one other of the numerous codes of adults. Some study it by hardship. They sense, ultimately, that their college, their well being heart, the bushes that not present shade of their park, their security, are a part of another person’s choice wherein they haven’t any say.

These days we sit on the Christmas desk. The holidays will convey collectively unequals across the tablecloth, from the silent grandfather to that new member of the household round which the universe now revolves. People who love one another or who maybe have beloved one another will meet. And I’m wondering if we will discuss ourselves with out hurting ourselves, if now that we take extra rights and freedoms as a right we enable ourselves to ramble about their attainable regression, or if we’re extra politicized than then, after I was a lady, or one thing. Maybe it is simply that there’s increasingly more background noise on that tv.

And what is going to youngsters absorb from all that dialog. If we consciously take away them from the talk, we expose them to an more and more loud noise. If politics, no; however promoting, sure. If the legal guidelines, no; however the insults, sure. If they are going to perceive the violent silences of those that haven’t but responded at residence why they’ve a companion apart from the anticipated one or why they chuckle when another person says that they don’t wish to eat meat and that they haven’t any different possibility on the desk, why one rises when it’s stated that conflict is not talked about right here, and that conflict might be any conflict. I’m wondering if we will make them see that it’s higher if feelings come earlier than concepts, however that concepts are essential and might be expressed and should be defended, and that it’s higher if we handle to talk with out being fanatical, hurtful or conceited, no matter it could be. the fireplace that involves us from exterior.

Perhaps the phrases that stay in my son’s reminiscence are these: pandemic, inflation, amnesty, Palestine. And maybe they are going to be surrounded by super noise. They may be others. Or simply “many people saying many things to decide something.” I query whether or not I’ve to elucidate it to him, whether or not I’ve to reply his questions from my grownup bias or let him discover the that means of it himself later. Caring for childhood as that territory secure from ideologies, however filled with concepts. That empty archive, however open to pure reminiscence, probably the most valuable worth of our life, our place on the earth.

Because what do youngsters have to learn about politics and, above all, what do we all know?

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https://elpais.com/opinion/2023-12-31/pero-que-saben-los-ninos-de-politica.html