For me though, 'listening to [younger] kids' started when I was 15 or 16. I went to a mixed British boarding school when I was 11, and while there's a lot I could say about it, one thing that is very relevant to this blog is that by the time I had been at the school for about a year I came to a startling and terrifying realisation that none of the adults around me knew right from wrong. They were fallible, making mistakes, and often remaining unaware of it, and certainly in denial. There was no shortage of them thinking they knew right and wrong, but their actions showed they didn't. Around me was a tremendous amount of cruelty, non-listening, and bullying. Even the Housemaster, a man of fifty, acknowledged he used terror to control ten year old girls (girls who had to live under his care, miles from their homes - imagine that) and the school authority backed him up. That alone was proof enough for me.
Oddly, I was not so much outraged by this regime as surprised by it. Like most kids I thought adults knew what was true and good. I don't mean I expected this of all adults, not the ones we warn kids about staying away from, but I did expect it from the adults who did the warning - the ones who were supposed to be trustable. In the end I saw that they were just kids themselves, struggling.
And so, that day, I also saw that no none could advise me of what was right or wrong, or even what was truth. I had to become my own authority, my own ethical advisor, my own perceiver of reality - my own master. I stopped believing a great deal of what was said to me (the so called meta-narratives of life) and what was claimed to be real and important. What mattered to the ‘system’ no longer mattered to me because that was just another person’s made up reality.
I was the first kid I listened to.
