{"id":414796,"date":"2026-04-24T07:18:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T07:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/414796\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T07:18:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T07:18:07","slug":"children-must-learn-their-letters-their-numbers-and-then-6000-facts-about-animals-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/414796\/","title":{"rendered":"Children must learn their letters, their numbers \u2013 and then 6,000 facts about animals \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, I took my kids to the zoo<\/a> for the first time in many years. It was, in fact, the first ever time for my four-year-old daughter. She was ebullient about this outing, repeating aloud her stated favourite animals with the cold concentration of a January sales shopper reciting what shops they\u2019re hitting first. \u201cGiraffes, zebras, tigers. Giraffes, zebras, tigers.\u201d Her brother has been to zoos a few times, and in the manner of all very-nearly-eight-year-old boys, masked his enthusiasm with a world-weariness that immediately evaporated once we crossed the turnstiles and found ourselves inside.<\/p>\n

As their excitement reached fever pitch, I continued driving into the ground a joke I\u2019d been making throughout our journey there. Namely, my repeated insistence that the animals I was most looking forward to seeing were not those typically seen in zoos. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think I read that they have some pigeons over there,\u201d I said with fascinated solemnity, pointing in the exact opposite direction of all the signs blaring more exotic animals directly in front of us. This caused them both to hop on the spot in mock-anger, my daughter screaming in delighted disgust, my son pointing to the zoo map with angry jabs of his finger. \u201cAh,\u201d I said, thanking him. \u201cYes, you\u2019re right. Let\u2019s head here instead \u2013 that\u2019s where they keep their wasp.\u201d I kept this up for, oh, three whole minutes before we found ourselves padding into the giraffe enclosure, where we were immediately struck dumb.<\/p>\n

The degree to which adults fetishise animals for children is odd, when you think about it for any length of time at all. In the first few years of life, it\u2019s considered not just useful, but fully mandatory, that every single child must know their letters, their numbers, and then 6,000 facts about animals; the sounds they make, the food they eat, the habitats in which they live. If an alien were to visit an educational setting filled with three- to six-year-old earthlings, they would likely conclude that Earth\u2019s three most prized professions were writer, mathematician, and zoologist. <\/p>\n

At 40, I consider myself someone with a fairly keen interest in the natural world but, in real terms, this basically means I watch a few TikTok videos about weird insects every week, and inhale whichever excellent David Attenborough series is released every two years. It is, therefore, remarkable to consider that the average four-year-old would almost certainly beat the average 40-year-old in a quiz on animal facts \u2013 and that they would do this, without any conceivable doubt, were the subject restricted solely to dinosaurs.<\/p>\n

In puzzling over this across my time as a parent<\/a>, I\u2019ve come up with many theories. Is it that learning about animals is excellent for visual learning purposes, since it provides thousands of differentiable data-points to compare, contrast and memorise? Might it be that learning and repeating the sounds they make is a useful cognitive shortcut to speech, auditory processing, and call-and-response communication? Or is there something about the inherent attractiveness of animals to children which predates all these top-down benefits, perhaps something grandfathered in from a time when schoolkids had more contact with animals than my own city-dwelling kids might today? Or are kids just smarter and better than us and, thus, realise that animals are worth spending your whole life obsessing over?<\/p>\n

Standing in the giraffe paddock, the latter argument seems to have something going for it. I was rendered silent by their alien proportions and gangly angles, their fuzzy little ossicones, geometric markings and two-foot-long black tongues. Then came the tiger enclosure, with a male swishing its way through long grass, its stripes rendering it near invisible beneath the dappled canopy, to meet its partner, whose camouflage was so complete it had been sitting right in front of us without our even noticing. Turtles, zebras, gorillas, gibbons, several snakes \u2013 at every turn, some new marvel to be joyously pulled toward.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0My wife and I felt shame when told our child needed glasses. We\u2019d ignored the warningsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Perhaps, when considering the oddness of our approach to teaching kids so much about animals, it\u2019s more accurate to emphasise the oddness that we adults are not so regularly reminded of their awe. Sweaty and exhausted after three hours of trekking, my kids spot the gift-shop-branded exit, festooned with cuddly toys, candyfloss and ice cream. I tell them we can go in a minute, but not just yet.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s one last paddock over here,\u201d I tell them, my eyes wide with wonder, \u201cand I\u2019m pretty sure they have a worm.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, I took my kids to the zoo for the first time in many years. It was,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":414797,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,631,61,60,709,1786,178173],"class_list":{"0":"post-414796","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-for-you","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-magazine","13":"tag-parenting","14":"tag-seamas-o-reilly"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}