LISTEN TO THE CHILDREN
Veronica Pinheiro
15 November 2024
On 15 November 2024, the event is not 420 children from a public school talking to a teacher about their dreams for a living school. The event is: memories of a living school are awakened in 420 children and one teacher.
In February, one of the things that most caught my attention was the aggressive way in which the children reacted to their classmates' teasing, or how they simply used force to tell other children to stay away. I had never witnessed such young children leading such violent scenes.
I asked a girl where she learnt to beat people up like that. The answer was: ‘I was beaten up every day by other people, so I learnt how to beat them. By doing what everyone else does."
‘Everybody who?’. This was a question my mum always asked me when I used 'everybody' as the subject of a sentence. And then my mum would say that everyone is a lot of people. And that we should only observe the people we trust.
Like this girl, I was introduced to the many forms of violence at a young age, while my community was preparing me to be free and happy. Our elders were our masters and teachers. The ancestors were our lap and foundation. Love and kindness were cultivated on a daily basis, to the point where the violence that subjugated the bodies was unable to imprison them.
After listening to the girl who beat up the other children, I asked everyone else throughout the year why they reacted so impetuously. There were two answers: ‘I don't know’ or ‘I need to defend myself’. In the first week of school, I replied to a boy who wanted to know if I was the "keep order" type of person. I told him that I was learning to tread softly on the ground and that I had chosen to be a gentle person. By treading softly on the earth, we look for other ways to walk through the world. And one of them is to walk asking for permission to enter and leave places.
Listening to children is a form of asking for permission. Before telling children what we think about the violence they reproduce, we should try to listen to them. Listening to children was the best thing we could do in 2024. Throughout the year, we, the school's teachers, management and staff, tried to share an environment with the children where they wouldn't have to defend themselves. An environment where they could just be children.
Teacher Janaína was given one of the biggest challenges: she was in charge of a class of 32 students who were unable to say what they felt or wanted. It took many months of listening, breathing exercises and sharing other possible ways of inhabiting the school. We ended the year with appeased children. Janaína's work is admirable. The class is now able to play without fights. I spent two hours with the children in Janaína's class on 14 November, and I was thrilled to see them telling the stories they had created. I then played with them the games they had invented in the Reading Circle.
When I talk about the awakening of a living school, I talk because I have seen children living and smiling in a territory that normalises violence. They are living and can be happy as their memories of life are awakened. For the first time today, 14 November, not a single story written in the narrative-creation class mentioned violence. All, absolutely all of the stories written and told by the children today spoke of kindness, celebration and dreams.
For the first time, I left school on a Thursday, tired from playing and smiling so much. And this is only possible because the life contained in the memories of the territory and the territory-bodies has been calling us to dance and live in times of gentleness. I hope that the awakened memory continues to speak and be heard by my little companions.
