The Greatest Gift For Your Kids : Diversity
When there are new students arriving, with new accents or even new languages, the children are kind, curious, and quickly take to one another. They clearly do not discriminate – they only care if you’d like to play?
Koh Lay Chin, The Dilated Pupil
Every year I find myself more and more mesmerised by how children learn. And then I see them learn, from up close, and it is completely amazing.
Their brains are ever-ready super computers. They have a delightfully whacky sense of humour. When they talk to each other, and ah, this is my favourite, you get a sense of just how much they have absorbed from their surroundings and by listening to adults.
I’ve gathered one thing from observing them – diversity is power for kids. It’s been said since time immemorial that knowledge is that power you want, but I venture to say that diversity is the power our children will need.
Each day I work with 6- and 7-year-old kids whose parentage or heritage comes from countries all over – Ireland, Rwanda, Malaysia, the United States, Australia, Grenada and many others. This, by the way, is a public school.
The other day during an ICT class, they were excitedly showing each other their parents’ different countries on Google Earth. They zoomed into the capital cities and tried to pronounce all the exotic-sounding names.
When there are new students arriving, with new accents or even new languages, the children are kind, curious, and quickly take to one another. They clearly do not discriminate – they only care if you’d like to play?
I work in a school with a Christian ethos, but in Religious Education classes the kids have just completed a whole term of learning about Islam. Not just one or two things about the religion, but more detailed information such as the five pillars, the Muslim greetings used, and explanations about things like zakat (almsgiving), wudhu (ablution) and respecting one’s Muslim friends when they are fasting during Ramadan.
A Muslim teaching assistant was invited to explain to the kids about her beliefs, and show them her prayer mat and hijab, and what they were for. At one point some kids giggled at an Arabic word that sounded funny to them. They were gently told that they should not laugh, and that people should respect faiths and beliefs different from theirs.
Most of the time the children listened intently, sometimes silently mouthing what they had heard. My heart swelled up so much my body could hardly contain it.
Next term, the children are learning about Judaism. Even I am excited about the classes.
The children learn so much more with a diverse group of friends and teachers, with such different ethnic backgrounds. One day, when a child heard me speaking Mandarin briefly, she asked if I knew how to speak Cantonese or (Bahasa) Indonesia or Tagalog? She had heard of these languages before, her classmate was Indonesian, she said.
