Colman Noctor: Should we be teaching children about equity instead of equality?

We need to remind ourselves to 'catch them being good' and remember to reward a child's good behaviour

Equity is the reason younger siblings may pick up the slack when a teenager doing the state exams is allowed to do fewer chores while they are studying. Picture: iStock

Children are driven by concepts of fairness, equality and justice. The primary school child is often led to believe things like ‘I am taller than you, therefore I am better than you’, or ‘she’s the oldest, so she’s the leader’. These random allocations of power and status are not nuanced, they are taken as fact.

Many children do not grasp how the concept of equality works. Their simplistic ideology is that everybody must get the same. However, this is not always effective.  For example, if a child falls over in the playground and cuts their knee they will get a plaster, however, because one child gets a plaster for their cut knee does not mean that the whole class must get one. Perhaps a better ethos to teach children is that if any of them need a plaster at any stage, there will be one there for them.