Women Talking2022

Salome:
Why would boys of 13 and 14 be left behind? Why wouldn't they leave with us?

Agata:
Surely, we don't have to be afraid of the boys of this age.

Ona:
August, you're the boys' teacher. What is your feeling about this? Do boys of that age pose a risk to our girls and women?

August:
Yes. Possibly. Boys of 13 or 14 are capable of causing great damage to girls and women. And to each other. It is a brash age. They are possessed of reckless urges, physical exuberance, intense curiosity that often results in injury. Unbridled emotion, including deep tenderness and empathy, and not quite enough experience or brain development to fully understand or appreciate the consequences of their words or actions. They are like the yearlings. Young, awkward, gleeful, powerful. They're tall, muscular, sexually inquisitive creatures, with little impulse control, but they are children. They are children and they can be taught. I'm a two-bit schoolteacher, a failed farmer, and above all a believer. And I believe that with guidance, firm love and patience, these boys are capable of relearning their roles as males in the colony. I believe in what the great poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought were the cardinal rules of early education. 'To work by love and so generate love. To habituate the mind to intellectual accuracy and truth. To excite imaginative power.' He said, 'Little is taught by contest or dispute, everything by sympathy and love.' I believe the boys should be allowed to leave with the women... Providing the women choose to leave.