“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
– Albert Einstein
It was mystifying to me, but the request was reasonable and rational. After going through the enrollment process at age three, Hailee, her mom, and I met with the headmaster.
It would be a one-on-one with the parents.
I distinctly remember asking Mickey what the conference was about. She didn’t know either, but we would miss work to complete this final step. St. Philips in Sunny South Dallas was the ‘ish, and I am a stickler for rigor in preschool education.
Dr. Terry Flowers took the reigns of leadership in 1983, and the rest, as they say, was Black history.
He worked in the community and developed a plan to catapult the school into the forefront of
Black private schools. St. Philips specializes in teaching, cultural awareness, exposure to new worlds, and sound ethical behavior.
So, the brother I knew from being active in the community walked in, greeted us both, and after finishing all the niceties, hurled a question that left me flabbergasted. Dr. Flowers floored me.
He didn’t ask me how many fairy tales we told Hailee; he asked me if she had any fears!
“Has your child had any emotionally significant episodes?”
“Huh,” I murmured.
He remixed the question for me. “Has Hailee been through any significant trauma?” Damn. That threw me. It let me know that my child was in the right hands and made me even more sensitive to my conduct in the presence of Hailee and all the children.
Parenting requires thinking critically through every step of a child’s life.
Let me ask you: Have your children, grandchildren, students, relatives, or friends experienced any significant traumatic events?
I will leave the definition to you. But based on what you know, how many children do you know that have their childhood innocence left intact?
I try not to, but inevitably, I can’t stop worrying about our children. Everywhere I go. The State Fair, Chuck E. Cheese or any fun venues where children congregate; all I can think about is how beautiful our children are and contrast it to the ugliness in our society and the nightmarish future they face.
We dress them up—middle class, upper class, and no class. We spend every dollar we can so that they don the latest fashions and wear the latest hairstyles.
However, we can’t seem to undress sexual abuse and exploitation, poverty, domestic violence, mass killings, and threats of war.
As a nation, people, and often parents, we are duplicitous at best and hypocritical at worst. What we profess and what we practice are two different things. Sadly, we spend little time and less energy addressing the issues threatening their lives and livelihoods.
While I understand and accept Albert Einstein’s logic behind filling our children’s psyches with fairy tales; at some point, we as a city, state, nation, and world must begin to deal with reality.
Feeding them fairy tales may make them more intelligent but will not help them cope with the growing local and international chaos.
The lack of sound public policies to prevent poverty, increase access to health care, and end the “isms” (racism, sexism, paternalism, etc.) that supersede all the fairy tales we could ever manufacture or tell.
The atrocities that we are watching by actors in Israel and Palestine have robbed those children of any semblance of a normal and formative childhood. That strand of hatred will run for another three generations. Even worse, the spirit of mayhem and instability is spreading quickly throughout the Middle East.
From Uvalde to the Gaza Strip, our babies have been forced out of their childhood by our inability to frame public policy and international agreements.
Mass media and anti-social social media bring calamity and corruption around our protective barriers.
Too many of our young people are afraid to drive or live independently.
Worse yet, too many of them summon the courage to kill themselves because they fear what life may bring.
Einstein had a point, but the intelligence brought through imagination and fairy tales is no match for the world we have bequeathed to our children.
Fairy tale intelligence won’t cut it.
A long-time Texas Metro News columnist, Dallas native Vincent L. Hall is an author, writer, award-winning writer, and a lifelong Drapetomaniac.
