ALAN writes:

My old friend Serendipity came to visit me one day recently. I was looking for old newspaper articles when I came across something entirely different from what I was looking for, but of equal interest.  It was an article about a six-year-old girl whose guardian brought her to the office of a nerve specialist in St. Louis “to find out what was the matter with her.” This was in 1908.

Turned out nothing was the matter with her.

What the matter was this: Too much, too soon.  

“She is simply suffering from nervous exhaustion,” the doctor said to a reporter.

“Life to that child is nothing but a continuous stereopticon view. Fancy living in front of a moving-picture machine all the year round! I wager that your nerves would go to pieces, and that’s just what is happening to this baby. She has been around the world once and she is never in one place more than two months at a time and frequently not more than two weeks.  Can you imagine how harassing that would be to you?

“Well, a child’s nerves are a thousand times more sensitive than a grown person’s. The constant turmoil of traveling is not tranquilizing. Besides this, the child is receiving not only the new impressions of travel, but the new impressions of life itself.  A child brought up in the country, never going out of its own village, finds something new and exciting every day—some new plant or weed by the roadside, some quality in man or beast that she hadn’t discovered before.

“The country child has time enough to ponder over these things and to assimilate her thoughts and impressions, but the American child of wealth never has time to assimilate anything…   It is rushed from one thing to another. No genius can develop under such circumstances….

“They have the best-trained nurses for the child, but what they seem unable to give it is a quiet home life….”

[Margaret Hubbard Ayer, “No Wonder the Rich Child has Nervous Prostration”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Feb. 9, 1908, p. B8]

****

In the 1940s, American philosopher Richard Weaver wrote about the effects on American life of what he called “The Great Stereopticon.” By that term he meant newspapers, motion pictures, and radio, whose combined effects were propelling Americans toward greater stupidity, sensation-seeking, and moral-philosophical-cultural degeneracy.  I venture the guess that Mr. Weaver would agree with the remarks made by that nerve specialist in 1908.

Imagine what the doctor might say about parents a hundred years later who plant their babies in front of television screens, allow them to stare at screens throughout their childhood, and then buy them even more screens “to help them learn better.”

In 1957, an advertising agency executive remarked: “Children a generation ago were lucky to see one comic cartoon a week…at the Saturday afternoon movie. Today’s youngsters choose from a dozen…morning, noon, and night. Television today is telescoping into the space of a few years the entertainment interests that once extended over a lifetime. Are we using up our interest so fast that boredom sets in with abnormal and destructive swiftness?” [Quoted in Eric Sloane, The Seasons of America Past, Funk, 1958, p. 16 ]

And now, 60 years later, Americans provide their children with cartoon entertainment around the clock, every day of the year and everywhere they go.

“Imagine living in front of a moving-picture machine all the year round!” 

Today it would be harder for Americans to imagine not doing so.  But there is no evidence that they can imagine the harm that staring at screens wreaks upon children’s imagination and ability to learn.

Observe that the nerve specialist’s remarks about overburdening children with too much travel and too many changing scenes to absorb came 80 years before perceptive thinkers like Marie Winn, Joseph Chilton Pearce, and Neil Postman began to address those questions.

“She has been around the world once and she is never in one place more than two months at a time and frequently not more than two weeks.”

Attachment to place—to some particular place, home, town, village, or city—is probably wholly alien to many American children today, like the situation of that little girl in 1908.  That is partly a consequence of the motor vehicle and Americans’ penchant for flitting about the landscape.  The movement and speed and noise made possible by the motor vehicle would appeal to the increasing stupidity of modern men, philosopher Anthony Ludovici wrote in 1947 in “Back to the jungle:”

“Thus, after centuries of civilisation and of increased safety from the dangers that once threatened Man when he ventured abroad, we are, as I wrote in The Daily Express in December 1928, back in the jungle again. The common man, woman and child of civilization, on leaving home, are now much less certain than they were 2000 years ago of surviving the outing. And this is due wholly and solely to the introduction of the internal combustion engine, for road transport, at a moment in history when humanitarianism and the respect for individual freedom and human life and dignity were at their lowest ebb.”

“Well, a child’s nerves are a thousand times more sensitive than a grown person’s.”

A hundred years earlier before the doctor’s observations above, Wordsworth wrote, in his preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) and apropos “the discriminating powers of the mind”, that “the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another in proportion as he possesses this capability.”

The world is a source of inexhaustible wonder, and the curiosity of children can be awakened by the smallest things.  They love to talk about such things, if given the chance.  Yet modern parents commonly disregard that fact in their haste to push their children to learn and accommodate more and more, faster and faster. American life today is filled to overflowing with “gross and violent stimulants” to such a degree as might impel Wordsworth or that thoughtful nerve specialist in 1908 to conclude that modern people are a population gone imbecile.

“The country child has time enough to ponder over these things…”

To “ponder over things” is one way children learn to deal with concepts and form the basis for thought.  There is and can be no such thing as “collective thought.” Thinking is an intensely individual act. It can be forbidden, prevented, or erased, but it cannot be forced or rushed. “Thought does not bow to authority,” Ayn Rand wrote.  Nor, I would add, does it accommodate speed or coercion.

“…and to assimilate her thoughts and impressions…”

The purpose of most modern schools and all “progressive schools” is to prevent children from having any thoughts. Racketeers in the schooling industry and its subsidiary rackets are united in their hatred of childhood and child nature. Their common goal is not the encouragement of childhood curiosity and thought but the prevention of such things, often accomplished with the assistance of the medical racket and the pharmaceutical racket.

“No genius can develop under such circumstances….”

In 1966 I arrived at the conclusion that Americans were moving way too fast, and I particularly objected to that trend in schools.  “Just why is everything being made to go faster and faster?”, a young woman asked in the 1960s about the speeding-up of lessons in American high schools. I wanted to know, too. I never found a persuasive answer. Concept-formation cannot be rushed. Learning to read and write cannot be rushed.  American teachers knew this a hundred years ago:

“To gain new words and new ideas, the student must compel himself to read slowly….  Thoughts cannot be read so rapidly as words. To get at the thoughts…the student must scrutinize and ponder as he reads. Each word must be thoroughly understood; its exact value in the given sentence must be grasped.”  [ Dr. Edwin Lewis, A First Book in Writing English, 1897]

“They have the best-trained nurses for the child, but what they seem unable to give it is a quiet home life….”

Modern life is a conspiracy against quiet. “Sometimes, when one’s mood darkens, the suspicion creeps in that there is a conspiracy here, a conspiracy to soften the brains of the American people, with someone who does not wish this nation well behind it. At the very least….there must be torture masters who go about, with whips and chains, making certain that the ‘background music’ is on, that the volume is high, and that no respite is permitted…

“….What is the objection to quiet?….”

[Edwin Newman, I Must Say, Warner Books, 1988, pp. 65, 69 ]

Quiet is hated because it is a precondition for thought, and there is nothing that modern Americans hate more than the terrible burden of thinking. That is why people wear tee-shirts and place signs on their lawns with trendy slogans and ready-made phrases. It spares them the ordeal of thinking. That is why modern supermarkets are torture chambers of relentless noise. That is why the five great rackets of modern life —Television, the Cell Phone, the “entertainment” industry, the automotive industry, and the mass communications industry — can never be quiet or allow their victims a moment of quiet. Keep this in mind the next time you walk into a supermarket or a shopping mall.

— Comments —

Caryl Johnston writes:

Bravo, Alan!

Modern times–America today: technology has abolished both Time and Place.

And we rush forward for more…like Gadarene swine….

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