ALAN writes:
The absurd things teachers and schools do to children in the name of “education” could be added to your list of absurdities we are expected to swallow and celebrate.
A month ago, by chance, I discovered the book Our Children’s Songs (Harper Brothers,1877, 207 pages). It consists entirely of the lyrics of songs that Americans in those years were smart enough to know children could enjoy. The songs are divided into categories: Songs for the Nursery, Childhood, Girlhood and Boyhood (!), and Hymns. Extensive lyrics appear in small print in two columns on each page, accompanied by pencil sketches throughout. It comes from an age long before Americans would become mesmerized by screens.
What should be noteworthy to us is the frame of mind in which that book was published and used. Unlike all modern books “for”‘ children, the book does not aim at the eye. It aims at the ear and the imagination. It does not aim at sensation or spectacle. It aims at conceptualization and comprehension. It aims at a child’s ability to understand words and become comfortable with them; to learn how to speak them and sing them; to learn that they have concrete meanings; to form in imagination their own “pictures” of what such words suggest to them.
Photographs are not needed for children to learn such things. The development of conceptual thought does not depend on pictures but may be reduced or delayed by such pictures. Not to mention the effect of motion pictures on that capacity — or the effect of such motion pictures when pounded into children’s heads, day after month after year, from babyhood onward and throughout childhood. Children cannot be “educated” by such torrents of pictures, but they certainly can be indoctrinated, kept ignorant, or limited to dealing with concretes instead of learning conceptual thought.
Learning to speak and hearing parents read stories aloud are excellent ways to encourage the development of childhood imagination. Bombarding them with picture books “for” children and encouraging them to watch television, cartoons, and DVDs are excellent ways to sabotage the development of childhood imagination. Of course those books are not “for” children. Rooms full of such books in public libraries are not “for” children but “for” those who practice political advocacy and agitation sugar-coated by the words “education” and “librarianship”, just as nearly all TV programs and DVDs “for” children are created and promoted for the same reasons, sugar-coated by the words “amusement” and “entertainment”.
As indicated by that book, Americans once were smart enough to teach children how to speak, read stories aloud to them, and encourage them to sing. Today they are stupid enough to neglect those things. Instead, they encourage babies and children to gaze at screens. What does that prove to them? It proves how “sophisticated” and “advanced” they are, and gives them an excuse to look down upon their ancestors as unsophisticated, ignorant, and “old-fashioned”. There is nothing quite like the arrogance of today’s hipsters, drunk on technology, short on ethics, and bereft of common sense.
Two groups of American grown-ups, 150 years apart. Yet which group could comprehend the other? Which could understand the other’s frame of mind regarding how children should be thought of and treated? Which could understand the radical moral-philosophical difference between the kinds of songs they regarded as fitting for children: Those in 1877 incorporating long-established moral standards of thought and conduct — and those today, laced with sassiness, irony, sarcasm, and profanities, yet excused or approved by today’s hipster parents and teachers. How could parents and teachers in 1877 comprehend a frame of mind in which parents consider being hip-and-cool their proudest achievement and a fine example for their children?
But it would be wrong to think that modern Americans have “lost” that earlier frame of mind in which their ancestors understood the importance for children to learn how to sing and speak clearly and sensibly. The truth is they have never possessed it. That frame of mind is part of the wisdom of their ancestors to which modern Americans are militantly deaf and blind. In its place, they see nothing wrong in immersing their children in round-the-clock noise and filth that many of them are stupid enough to call music. They accept ready-made “entertainment” for their children as agreeably as they accept ready-made phrases into their vocabulary.
I suggest an Orwellian Ministry of Truth could not have engineered a better means for indoctrinating children and neutralizing their capacity to develop conceptual thought than what most schools and teachers are doing to them today, not for them.
The Scottish writer Willa Muir recalled taking part in singing games during her school years in Scotland in the early 1900s. Such games were transmitted orally from generation to generation of schoolgirls. They were deeply satisfying, she wrote. She compared them with Scottish ballads. Six decades later, she wrote:
“…..The Ballad Culture is not like a mass-culture, for that term seems to me an abstraction connoting a mass of humanity which is merely recipient and submits to purposive manipulation by various agencies….”. (Willa Muir, Living With Ballads, Hogarth Press, 1965, p. 260).
“Mass culture”, “merely recipient”, and agrees “to be manipulated”…. Isn’t that a good description of TV Culture? Observe the difference in frame of mind between the 1870s and today: People then created their own entertainment; it was local; singing or reading poems, books, or periodicals engaged imagination and the mind. There were no screens. Today people neglect the local and agree instead to be manipulated by entertainment created by distant agencies, little or none of which requires imagination or the mind. They gaze at screens everywhere.
Imagine parents and teachers in 1900 being offered the chance to see spectacles in color on giant screens, every day and every night; spectacles that require no energy or thought — in place of singalongs that helped to strengthen their families; activities that required energy and thought. Would they have made that deal? Would they have agreed to be manipulated by the distant agencies that promote those spectacles? Their descendants do, and they applaud themselves for it. No wonder they are morally and philosophically bankrupt.
