Censorship by any other name

A very long time ago I read Santayana’s Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography. One observation has remained in my mind ever since. Santayana was  waiting for a train, and was in earshot of a small boy and his father. I cannot remember the exact question that the boy asked his father, but it was something along the lines of, ‘Does the railway line go on forever?’ Father was not prepared to enter into the spirit of this boyish – and far from stupid question – and consequently treated Son as daft. Santayana said nothing, but in his book tartly remarks on the effective suppression of the imagination and nascent enquiring mind of the young by such obtuse and deadening response.

The Yorkshire Schoolmaster at the Saracen's Head. 
Halbot Brown illustration for Nicholas Nickleby 

Well, I recently witnessed a similar form of ‘suppression’ in the setting of a pub in Brighton. I was sitting next to two men who were holding a general conversation such as is commonplace in pubs. After some twenty minutes or so a father and his son – aged about ten – came in. Son was given an orange juice, and – clearly keen to ‘explore’ the pub – came over to where I was sitting, and tried to say something to the two conversing men. He was brusquely dismissed. I put my hand out, and said that it was alright to talk if he wanted to. But clearly ‘the damage had been done’ and he returned to his father’s side. The two men then came up with this truly enlightened bon mot: ‘Never interrupt a conversation.’ This they repeated, so good did it sound to their ears. I commented that, ‘He was only trying to be friendly’, but this was met with an uncomprehending stare that probably mirrored that of Eugène Terre’Blanche. When I left the pub, I told the father that his boy had been upset by the two ‘conversationalists’. ‘Oh, really’, he replied (!). Clearly, there are many instances where all you can do is shake the dust off your feet when you leave... 

However, these were some men and a father (and of course there will be some women and mothers as well. But we need not end on a depressing note. An age ago in a park in Wandsworth I heard a small girl ask her father, “Daddy, do the birds sing because they're happy?” I did not catch the father's reply, but I could see from his body language that he fully entered into the spirit of his daughter's delightful question; and I'm sure that he encouraged her and nurtured her imagination – which must surely be one of the best definitions of education.