the mouths of babes

I am, at the moment, a Park Ranger at the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.
One of the things about being a Park Ranger that is equal parts frustrating and rewarding is giving tours to children. Frustrating, because as much as I love children, holding their attention for 30 minutes can be difficult, especially if they are undisciplined (or hungry, or tired, or over-sugared, or whatever).
Rewarding because for those 30 minutes, I am their teacher, and I can share history with them, and because, true to the King and I lyric, they sometimes teach me.
I sometimes despair that all my young visitors will take away is new knowledge of chamber pots and other charming artifacts of Victorian hygiene, even though I try to keep the focus away from such things. (The Victorians themselves, I feel sure, would be greatly disgruntled to hear me discussing Victorian sex lives and toilet habits, but I suppose it's what they deserve for being such prudes that we are still paying for it 100 years later).
But sometimes, they clearly are getting more. The look on a girl's face when I tell her that women used to have to give all the money they earned to their fathers or husbands, that they couldn't own property or vote tends to be a look of sheer incredulity. It is somewhat satsifying to see these young children, boys and girls both, seem both doubtful and scornful that anyone ever thought women shouldn't be allowed rights equal to men. I can't help but wonder if Lizzie Stanton and her fellow fighters would be happy that these rights are taken for granted, or worried that taking them for granted is the first step towards taking them away. But I feel, as do their teachers, that it is important for these children to know that the rights and freedoms they have today were hard-won by men and women of vision and courage, and that the world has not always been perfect.
One of those men of vision and courage, who I rarely talk about on my tour, is Sen. Charles Sumner. Sen. Sumner's picture hangs on the wall near the front window of the house, and so sometimes I get asked questions. Today, one of my guests, who know that Frederick Douglass' father was white, asked if that was him. I informed him that he was Sen. Sumner, a famous abolitionist, who got into a fist-fight on the floor of the Senate. The students were confused. I told them that the Senator had made a speech against slavery and had made another member of Congress angry, and so had been hit. "Why would you hit someone just because you didn't like what they said?" asked a child. My heart leapt for joy at this question. I tried to explain that slavery gets people emotional, and that 150 years ago people were more likely to settle things with violence. The children were not satisfied with this answer, because it apparently still seemed profoundly stupid. One of them raised her hand and said "I know a better way they could have dealt with it, they could have talked about it instead of using violence." I said "yes, that's true and very smart." These are the children I want leading us someday.
No, not every child who walks through our doors has such pacifist sentiments. They push to get a peek in the room, they roll their eyes and snap at each other. But the mere fact that this whole class seemed to agree that violence was no solution at all made me very, very happy.