Children come up with the strangest ideas. Not weird in the alien-abduction sense, but strange in the manner a mirror suddenly starts talking back to you. Their thoughts arrive unfiltered, unedited, without the soft cushioning adults add to make life less awkward. They say things straight, like arrows shot by someone who doesn’t yet know arrows can hurt.

I was teaching grammatical gender to a student the other day; masculine, feminine, the usual linguistic drama. King and queen. Lion and lioness. Actor and actress (still hanging on by a thread). The lesson was proceeding smoothly, like a well-behaved classroom chart.

And then, just when I was congratulating myself for being an efficient educator, the child paused. It wasn’t a distracted pause of someone thinking about lunch, but a deep, furrowed-brow pause. Probably like philosophers must have paused before stating existential crises. “Ma’am,” he said carefully, as if testing the weight of the word, “there can’t be a feminine gender of thief.”

I waited. Teachers learn early that silence is sometimes the most powerful punctuation mark. “How can girls be thieves?” he continued, genuinely puzzled. “Only boys or men are thieves.”

There it was. A sentence so innocent it could have been wrapped in bubble wrap. A thought so sincere it didn’t know it had just exposed the wiring behind the world.

Children, you see, don’t think outside the box. They don’t even know there is a box. Their minds are open terraces, thoughts wander in, settle down and make themselves comfortable without asking permission.

This wasn’t a moral judgment; it was a conclusion drawn from observation. Somewhere in his short life, thieves had faces, voices, genders. Somewhere, stories had quietly done their work. Cinema villains. TV headlines. Video games. Somewhere, the world had whispered a pattern, and he had faithfully joined the dots. Children absorb ideas the way white shirts absorb curry; deeply, permanently, without discrimination.

I smiled and explained, gently, that thieves can be anyone. Men, women, people of all kinds. Crime, unfortunately, is very inclusive. He nodded, accepting the information politely, though I could tell the thought would continue fermenting somewhere in his mind, like yeast in warm dough.

What stayed with me wasn’t the grammatical confusion, it was the emotional logic behind it. Children don’t just learn language; they learn values bundled inside language like surprise toys in chocolate eggs. They notice who is described as strong, who is described as dangerous, who is described as capable of wrongdoing. They notice who is forgiven and who is feared.

And then they form theories. Children are walking think tanks with untied shoelaces. They come up with bizarre ideas, yes…but also important ones. They ask questions adults stopped asking the moment life handed them an EMI.

I once had a child ask me why adults tell children not to lie but then lie on phone calls all the time. Another wondered why girls’ clothes have fewer pockets. One solemnly announced that time must be circular because holidays always come back. Another time, a six-year-old girl once interrupted a story-telling lesson with a question so unexpected that it nearly tiptoed past us. She wasn’t troubled by divine weapons or cosmic justice. She wanted to know something far more domestic.

“Ma’am,” she asked, genuinely distressed, “what happened to the elephant’s mumma and papa when his head was cut off and transplanted on Lord Ganesha?”

The room froze. Adults are very good at celebrating miracles and very bad at accounting for collateral damage. The child wasn’t questioning faith, she was questioning loss. While we admired the magnificence of Lord Ganesha, she was worrying about two parents who didn’t get a footnote in the story. Her morality didn’t care for symbolism; it cared for consequences.

Children don’t edit stories to preserve comfort. They read them like auditors of emotion, asking who paid the price and who never got to be divine. These thoughts arrive casually, like someone dropping a philosophical grenade on the carpet and walking away to drink milk.Their feelings are just as unfiltered. They feel injustice like a personal insult. They grieve loudly, laugh unapologetically and love with the intensity of people who don’t yet ration affection like it’s a scarce resource.

Adults, meanwhile, spend years learning how not to feel. We edit our reactions, water down our discomfort, normalise absurdities. Children refuse to normalise. They poke the obvious and ask why it looks funny.

The boy wasn’t being sexist. He was being observational. The world he sees has already begun to tilt in subtle ways, and he noticed the tilt before he learned to ignore it.That’s the thing about children, they notice everything we think they don’t. They just don’t yet know which thoughts are considered inconvenient.

Teaching them grammar is easy. Teaching ourselves to listen and call out something that’s wrong is harder.

Because sometimes, in the middle of a lesson on nouns and genders, a child will accidentally hand you a mirror and say, Look. This is the world you’re building.

And you realise that the most bizarre thoughts are often the most honest ones, still untouched by excuses, still asking questions without fear of sounding foolish.

Adults call it innocence. I think it’s courage.

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