"By looking at the questions the kids are asking, we learn the scope of what needs to be done"
About this Quote
There is a quiet reversal of power in Buffy Sainte-Marie's line: adults don’t lead by lecturing, they lead by listening. The sentence treats kids’ questions as diagnostic tools, not naïve noise to be managed. “Scope” is the tell. It’s not about finding a single right answer, or polishing a curriculum, or offering comforting slogans. It’s about measuring the size of the unfinished business - social, political, environmental - that older generations have left behind.
Sainte-Marie has spent decades as a musician-activist pushing against the soft erasure of Indigenous lives in North American culture. Read through that history, the quote becomes less gentle than it first appears. Kids ask the questions adults dodge because children haven’t yet learned which truths are “impolite,” “complicated,” or bad for a donor base. Their curiosity becomes an indictment: if a child can spot the contradiction, the problem isn’t complexity; it’s avoidance. The line also resists the patronizing idea that young people are merely “the future.” Here, they’re a present-tense accountability system.
The intent is pragmatic and moral at once. Look at what the kids are asking - about land, violence, identity, climate, fairness - and you can map the real agenda, not the one in press releases. Sainte-Marie’s subtext is a challenge to adult institutions: stop scripting the conversation and start admitting what children already sense. The work begins where their questions won’t let us look away.
Sainte-Marie has spent decades as a musician-activist pushing against the soft erasure of Indigenous lives in North American culture. Read through that history, the quote becomes less gentle than it first appears. Kids ask the questions adults dodge because children haven’t yet learned which truths are “impolite,” “complicated,” or bad for a donor base. Their curiosity becomes an indictment: if a child can spot the contradiction, the problem isn’t complexity; it’s avoidance. The line also resists the patronizing idea that young people are merely “the future.” Here, they’re a present-tense accountability system.
The intent is pragmatic and moral at once. Look at what the kids are asking - about land, violence, identity, climate, fairness - and you can map the real agenda, not the one in press releases. Sainte-Marie’s subtext is a challenge to adult institutions: stop scripting the conversation and start admitting what children already sense. The work begins where their questions won’t let us look away.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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