Radical children

Epigraphs are often remarks torn out of context, and mine is no different. Hy Sabiloff in ‘The Child’s Sight’ is celebrating “the bliss of my senses”; he emphasizes the literal seeing and saying. I, however, intend his lines to suggest that children can get it right, can see the truth in a less I iteral sense. I want to argue, or more modestly, remind the reader, that in some important respects some children are less mystified than their teachers; and I shall try to indicate a few of the morals to be drawn from this observation. My reflections are in one way variations upon the welI-worn theme of student radicalism wilting into middle-aged conformity, but I am concerned with much younger children and more with the factual than the evaluative aspects of the case. I should say, though, that the facts in question are of that rather abstracted kind dealt with in philosophy and the philosophical hinterlands of the human sciences, the sort that are too often thought not to be facts at all but merely matters of ‘interpretation’.