"I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them"
About this Quote
Children arrive alert to nuance: they hear the music in ordinary speech, spot patterns in clouds, invent rules for games on the fly. Talent, in this sense, is not a rare gift but a native endowment of curiosity, mimicry, and daring. Insight is the quick, intuitive grasp of connections adults have learned to filter out. What dulls these capacities is not time alone but the gauntlet of institutions and expectations that reward compliance over discovery.
Beaten out is both metaphor and history. It evokes classrooms shaped by standardized tests, where the right answer eclipses the better question, and where grading systems quietly teach that risk is dangerous. It hints at discipline regimes that police imagination as misbehavior, and at home and street environments where economic strain or literal violence makes play feel unsafe. For Black and brown children especially, adultification and suspicion can tamp down spontaneity long before adolescence. Gendered scripts do similar work, steering girls away from audacity and boys away from vulnerability.
Rita Dove, whose poems often attend to the fragile hinge between childhood perception and adult constraint, knows how culture narrows the field of possible selves. Her portraits of ordinary lives show how memory keeps a subterranean current of wonder even as surface roles harden. The line is not nostalgia for innocence so much as an indictment of systems that squander human capacity and then call the scarcity natural.
The implication is practical and ethical. If talent and insight are common, the task is not to manufacture them but to stop erasing them. That means time for ungraded play, permission to fail, adults who listen rather than correct, curricula that invite metaphor and story, and social policies that reduce the ambient fear that stifles experimentation. The arts are not enrichment but oxygen. Protect the conditions where a childs first astonishments can mature into craft, and you get not only better artists but better citizens.
Beaten out is both metaphor and history. It evokes classrooms shaped by standardized tests, where the right answer eclipses the better question, and where grading systems quietly teach that risk is dangerous. It hints at discipline regimes that police imagination as misbehavior, and at home and street environments where economic strain or literal violence makes play feel unsafe. For Black and brown children especially, adultification and suspicion can tamp down spontaneity long before adolescence. Gendered scripts do similar work, steering girls away from audacity and boys away from vulnerability.
Rita Dove, whose poems often attend to the fragile hinge between childhood perception and adult constraint, knows how culture narrows the field of possible selves. Her portraits of ordinary lives show how memory keeps a subterranean current of wonder even as surface roles harden. The line is not nostalgia for innocence so much as an indictment of systems that squander human capacity and then call the scarcity natural.
The implication is practical and ethical. If talent and insight are common, the task is not to manufacture them but to stop erasing them. That means time for ungraded play, permission to fail, adults who listen rather than correct, curricula that invite metaphor and story, and social policies that reduce the ambient fear that stifles experimentation. The arts are not enrichment but oxygen. Protect the conditions where a childs first astonishments can mature into craft, and you get not only better artists but better citizens.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|
More Quotes by Rita
Add to List
