Delphic Maxim 127: Teach a youngster
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
127. Teach a youngster
Today’s maxim is actually quite a nice response to that which came previous: respect the elder. If respecting our elders is a reminder that we should acknowledge and appreciate experience, teaching a youngster is a reminder that experience and wisdom are important things to be shared.
There’s an old proverb, one that Hillary Clinton often invokes when talking about the education of young girls: “it takes a village”. Particularly in a cultural context like Ancient Greece, where the city-state was as fundamental a part of a person’s identity as their own family, the education of children was a collective responsibility. In fact, this is a pattern we see in many societies for which kinship was an integral and important part of collective identity. Many Aboriginal groups in Australia had extended kinship structures — vast families that not only maintained culture, history and economy, but which ensured the teaching of young children (and provided the associated love for those they reared).
‘Youngster’ is an interesting translation from whatever the original Greek may have been. I wonder why this word was chosen instead of ‘the young’ or ‘a child’? Youngster seems to connote a person who isn’t only physically young, but a young person with a particular disposition. A ‘youngster’ feels like someone playful, someone not fully matured- even jaded — by the world. A youngster is someone not only young at heart, but for whom the gravity of life doesn’t pull down too hard. It’s as though this maxim was written to deliberately contrast the age and seriousness of the elder with the youthful levity of the youngster.
But teaching doesn’t always have to be an act of seriousness — there can be levity in education as well. Actually, the more play the better — that’s been well known for a long time, from early teachers like Plato all the way through to twentieth century philosophers of education like John Dewey or Nell Noddings. Play is a learning activity, whether it’s physical play or intellectual play. One way to ‘teach a youngster’ isn’t just to be didactic and tell someone how it is: actually, it’s better to draw that kind of discovery out through creativity and play with knowledge.
Maybe the best thing that we can teach youngsters is that learning is a process of creativity and fun, that we can fuse the playfulness and joy of childhood with a genuine curiosity about the world and everything in it. I know from my own experience that I learn best when I’m having fun — and that playing with ideas, skills and creativity are one of my favourite ways to occupy my time. Why else would I spend fifteen minutes every morning practicing writing?
That’s some teaching worth passing along.
