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The Paul Rosenfels Community Social Progress through Personal Growth |
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The Paul Rosenfels Community Social Progress through Personal Growth |
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"I hated the raw oppression of being a kid once I
became self-aware. I don't like "alpha" people as a rule, and in the
random enclosed societies of schools you have to deal with them. I
didn't like being stuck with strangers, period, either. I also didn't
like being told what to do. And of course school, and childhood
itself, is about the authority of all grownups. I knew as well as any
of them what was worthwhile. But, because I was a kid and they were
bigger and had more power than me, I was cheated.
"I remember making some promises to my adult self when I was still a
kid, or extracting some promises from my adult self. I promised not to
forget how arbitrary and unfair adult rules are. I promised to remain
true to the principles I grasped, that adults sometimes pretended to
know but hardly ever behaved in accordance with. I wanted to have a
life of adventure. I didn't want anybody telling me what to do. I knew
this was the most important thing, and that all would be lost if I
pretended otherwise, like grownups did."
— Richard Hell, I Dreamed I Was a Very
Clean Tramp [2013]
"It's what you ask kids to do, isn't it? Shut up and be
quiet? . . . They're still telling kids, 'Do as your told.
Respect your elders. Have respect for authority.' That's starting to
change now. That world's slowly washing away. But there's a lot of
people, especially in the police, and the classroom, or whatever, that
regret its passing. But you know what? I think, just let it all be
washed away. Because children shouldn't be asked to take grown-ups on
trust. And they shouldn't learn to be silent."
— Daniel Mason, adult victim of child sexual abuse, from
George Gently [BBC Mystery Series, Series 2, Episode 1, Gently
with the Innocents, by Mick Ford]
The author Hendrik Willem Van Loon enjoyed sprinkling his extremely popular children's books with long words that would get his readers scurrying to their dictionaries. This always irked the enlarged minds of children's librarians — worshippers of uniformity and conformity in all things — who thought books should be written to strict "grade levels" and not offend their own tidy sense of order and decorum. When they complained bitterly to Van Loon, he would smile and say that he would gladly continue to violate their "grade level" theory because children enjoy scurrying and because scurrying is good for them.
| PETER SAGAL | What was the reaction to your book,
The Phantom Tollbooth  , when it came out?
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| NORTON JUSTER | It was kind of unanimous: it was not a children's book. The vocabulary was too difficult for kids. The situations and the things I talked about were way out of their understanding. The word play and the punning, they would never get. And to top it off, they told me that fantasy was bad for children because it disoriented them. |
| SAGAL | Speaking as a child who liked fantasy, that was the point! I should say, when you talk about word play, the book is filled with these elaborate sort of tricks and games and jokes. For example, there's the cart that moves when nobody says anything because it "goes without saying". It goes to the banquet where everybody has to "eat their words". There's the Island of Conclusions which you can only get to by "jumping to". |
| JUSTER | Well, the one thing you have to
understand, which I think we don't, even to this day, is that we
constantly underestimate what kids will understand or what they can
deal with. And I think that's what I was trying to get at in the book:
that they understand a lot more and the really fortunate ones
carry that special understanding into their adulthood. And if you lose
that, I think you lose something very important.
— Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me |
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We are not gods, we are products of mere biology. And, because we only ever experience one isolated consciousness, it's difficult for us to see that other selves are as real, as important, as we are. That's why parents treat their children as pets, and children treat their pets as toys. We're blind to important features of the "other", a blindness that undermines our attempts to be good to them, to take greater responsibility in this world. We make up rules like "Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself", rules which serve to highlight and name this problem but don't really do anything to solve it. But at least we can take solace in remembering how superior we are to those savage beasts — red in tooth and claw according to Tennyson (and Freud) — who God placed on His Earth for no other reason than to provide us with food and furs. For of one thing we can be certain: dumb brutes can neither feel nor think.
At least not the way we do.
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Why are children stupid? Because dinosaurs couldn't tell that mammals were smarter than they were, only that they were more troublesome. And these days schoolteachers can't tell when a student is brighter than they are, only that he is more irritating. And parents are gullible enough to think that the annoyances of schoolteachers they know nothing about trumps the love they feel in their hearts for their own kids. As a result, bright kids hate their parents, despise schoolteachers, and . . . love dinosaurs.
 | A Letter to Jeff [1997] |
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Truth is a work in progress.
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