Standards That Prize Humanity and Nature

Sharna Olfman’s All Work And No Play

A child possesses a self, which imbues her with the desire to give her life meaning, purpose, and a moral compass.
A child is motivated to learn by the desire to be grounded in her family, in her community, and the natural order, and yet at the same time to express herself and place her own personal stamp on the world.

Her thinking is infused with emotion, sensory and bodily kinesthetic experience, artistry, imagination, and soulfulness. It is through this uniquely human prism, in the service of uniquely human needs, that she processes information.

Thus, it is a tragic irony that we idealize the disembodied, emotionless computer and try to teach our children to think according to its operating principles. In such schools, real psychological growth ceases, and the educational system encourages a growing cynicism and despair.

Who Sold Our Youth?

WOLE SOYINKA

THE CHILDREN OF THIS LAND

The children of this land are old.
Their eyes are fixed on maps in place of land.
Their feet must learn to follow
Distant contours traced by alien minds.
Their present sense has faded into past.
The children of this land are proud
But only seeming so. They tread on air but—
Note—the land it was that first withdrew
From touch of love their bare feet offered. Once,
It was the earth of their belonging.
Their pointed chins are aimed,
Proud seeming, at horizons filled with crows.
The clouds are swarms of locusts.
The children of this land grow the largest eyes
Within head sockets. Their heads are crowns
On neat fish spines, whose meat has passed
Through swing doors to the chill of conversation
And chilled wine. But the eyes stare dead.
They pierce beyond the present through dim passages
Across the world of living.
These are the offspring of the dispossessed,
The hope and land deprived. Contempt replaces
Filial bonds. The children of this land
Are castaways in holed crafts, all tortoise skin
And scales—the callus of their afterbirth.
Their hands are clawed for rooting, their tongues
Propagate new social codes, and laws.
A new race will supersede the present—
Where love is banished stranger, lonely
Wanderer in forests prowled by lust
On feral pads of power,
Where love is a hidden, ancient ruin, crushed
By memory, in this present
Robbed of presence.
But the children of this land embrace the void
As lovers. The spores of their conjunction move
To people once human spaces, stepping nimbly
Over ghosts of parenthood. The children of this land
Are robed as judges, their gaze rejects
All measures of the past. A gleam
Invades their dead eyes briefly, lacerates the air
But with one sole demand:
Who sold our youth?

CHILDISM: Confronting Prejudice AGAINST Children

Jane Addams of Hull House was among those most aware that a prejudiced way of thinking had determined how the philanthropic child-savers of her era viewed children. Writing in 1899, Addams examined the philanthropists’ “industrial view”. This was the name she gave to the view that what is good for industry, and the adults running and profiting from industries, is good for everybody. When these philanthropists pushed children into adult roles of employee, satisfying their “charitable” conscience, the development of these children was arrested. Ultimately, their deformed development added yet another illiterate member to the community and thwarted the promise of a capable & contributing individual. The whole society suffered.

Childist philanthropists were wealthy and influential industrialists and bankers who established educational foundations in the family name. The Rockefeller Educational Trust, the Ford Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation were dedicated to taking over the public school system literally, by financing it. They created a system of schools that would turn out workers for their industries and commercial enterprises. To this end, they also took over teacher-training programs at most of the country’s major universities.

Eventually, 19th Century American Common Schools, which began as one-room schools without age differentiation, much less tracking of abilities, turned into huge factory-like institutions directing students toward their future occupations on the basis of class, gender and race. Children were schooled to fulfill adult needs and to fulfill particular low-level positions in adult enterprises, not to develop their potentialities and their characters. These role-reversal children were eliminated from life opportunities, manipulated into preset roles in the workforce, and deprived of encouragement to independent thought. Their schools practiced all types of Childism at once – eliminative, manipulative, and identity erasing, all under the rubric of “tracking”.

Americans must now reject similar policies and programs that “rescue” children by segregating them into the current equivalents of the Jane Addams era child-savers’ categories. Good research exists showing the harmful effects of programs in which children are placed out or indentured into prison-like institutions, in which “education” means standardization and identity erasure.

Childist adults are those who do not assume their obligation or responsibility to cherish and educate society’s children. Nothing takes precedence over the obligation these children as adults will have to them. At its basis, childism is a legitimization of an adult’s or society’s failure to prioritize or make paramount the needs of children over those of adults, the needs of future adults over the needs of the present adults. It is role reversal at the level of a principle. We need to recognize that the narrow focus in our modern field of study known as Child Abuse and Neglect has been to the exclusion of providing for the developmental needs of children and making them participants in decisions affecting them. This narrow focus has produced a huge distortion in the USA. We have been relying on concepts that ultimately cannot serve the purpose of protecting our children, because children whose development is not being supported, cannot ever be protected.