Progressive Promise of the 1950’s: The family re-constituted through mass consumerism
Crisis of Childhood: the widing gap between the progressive dream and
reality
Experiencing the Crisis
•
Generation Gap: children
are more interested in their own imaginary world than adult reality
•
Break with Traditions,
Morality and Activities of the Family - not neat or orderly
•
Spoiled, Rude and lazy
(substitution of peer relations for
respect) - not civilized
•
The Rise of Popular
Culture/ media and the waning
interest in knowledge and education
Culture of Narcissus: Crisis or Moral Panic?
•
Traditional family
ideals
–
Learning civility
–
Nurturing and Love
–
Sharing and Cooperation
–
Responsibility and
contribution
–
Self Sacrifice
–
Empathy and
understanding
–
Equality
•
Postmodern cultural
values
– Autonomy Individuality
– Competition and
survival
– Self-confidence
and self assertion
– Getting what you
want
– Maximize pleasure
and fun
Signs of Alienation
• Violence,
gangs drugs bullying lack of social skills
• Child
abuse, depression and suicide
• Poverty
• Obesity,
and sedentary lifestyles
• Crime,
disobediance, anti-authoritarian kids
• Failure
of schools to prepare for citizenship (literacy and work ethic)
Nanette Davis: the kids aren’t
ok
•
Remember Social Justice:
structure and distribution of risks and benefits to families persists (class
and education?)
•
Risk Perspective:
understanding the stresses and contradictions experienced by children in
contemporary society
•
Loss of Compassion: it has less to do with the
ideology of innocence than with a
loss of caring and compassion
Hockey Violence: From Play to Professionalism
• Should
children’s hockey leagues allow body checking
• Health
and safety (risk) considerations in children’s public leisure
• Are kids hockey careers in the making or
just having fun?
Home Alone: Deconstructing the Modern Fairy Tale
•
Class Conflict: powerful
and powerless (poor as victims/
other)
•
Dysfunction of the
Family: siblings
•
Abandonment of children:
the erosion of affective bonds and involvement
•
Blurring the Generation
Gap: Adultified child and the Incompetent Adult
•
Child as hero: from fear
and incompetence to triumph over chaos and adversity
THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE?
Who rocks? Who sleeps?
critiquing children’s cultural industries
• Mediatization
of Childhood
– Children as
Targets: the Commodification of Childhood
– End of street
cultures and kids culture making
– Consumerism: Popular culture vs folk
culture
– Gendered
segmentation: Star Wars vs Style Wars
– Colonization of the Imagination-Disney
– technologies and
virtualization of life
Kincheloe and Steinberg: The Powers that Rock the Cradle
•
The advent of electronic
hyperreality has revolutionized the ways knowledge is produced in this culture
and the ways children come to learn about the world. Parents and educators need
to appreciate the nature of this revolution and its role in identity formation.
… adults may come to appreciate the fact that postmodern children’s
confusion and identity disorientation may be a reasonable reaction to the
incongruity between kinderculture and schoolings positioning of
children.” pg 27
The Role of Media in Cultural Change
•
Oral Culture:
–
Community Festivals/
Religion, Folk Tales, Saga’s, Games
–
Role of Memory; the art
of conversation; voice and rythym
•
Books/ Schools
–
the creation of autonomous zone of
children’s literature
–
The cultural agenda: knowledge, skills and
appropriate literatures
•
Rise of Mass Mediated
Culture:
–
Adapting folklore and
generating a shared popular
culture
–
Blurring the boundaries
between adult and child knowledge
–
Eroding the Basis of
Parental Authority and Family micro culture: programming the V-chip
–
Ideological:
Sanitization/ Contamination of Folk tales
–
Commodification of
Culture - audiences rather than children
Why give story books for kids?
•
Literacy: stories motivate reading -- the importance of reading as preparation for life pragmatics - the functional citizen in
a consumer democracy is literate – reading readiness and the harried
child:
•
Cannon:
–
A) civilized child knows their cultural
background and identity (aesop, folk tales, grimms, etc
–
B) the Greats: passing on our own values,
aesthetic experiences and taste
•
Entertainment: Giving children pleasure, entertainment and their
own inner world of delight – the secret world of children’s culture
– imagination, peer groups, self development
•
Bonding: Rituals of reading to children – stories and
bonding of child and parent ie intimacy and familial styles; modeling to
perpetuate the value of literacy and language
•
Theraputic:Helping children prepare for and deal with their
world through knowledge about social relations etc – peers and fears
Book Industry: Making Stories
•
Production and
Distribution: 250 Million in Sales
–
30 Million Canadian; 500
books
–
Publishers, reviewers,
writers, illustrators, Story-tellers
–
Schools, Libraries, Bookstores, Festivals
•
Best Selling Books: 1999
(B.H.)
•
Guide to writing book
for kids?
•
Guide to Reviews
•
http://publishing.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uoguelph.ca%2Fenglit%2Fccl%2F
•
http://www.umanitoba.ca/cm/videos.html
•
http://www.bookcentre.ca/
History of Books for Children
•
First books - adapting
oral culture: sagas, ballads, tall tales and rhymes: alphabet books -
illustrated ; Nursury rhymes, fairy stories, and folk stories like Mother Goose
•
1600 Reformation -
religious tracts in English - argument and moral judgement - (pilgrims
Progress) - saintly lives
•
1700 -Schooling - ‘the greats’: literacy
both broadens scope and creates an emphasis on self control - a disciplining of
consciousness and training for civility (reflexive culture)
•
1800-Children’s
Literature- fantasy, imagination, fairy tales, folk tales and adventure stories
- the cannon of kidlit: Alice and Pooh -
delights of the imaginary world (sprites and animals; mystery and gentle
humour
•
1930-Mass Market
-Children’s popular culture - comics and relevant tales for kids- mickey
mouse and life in modern times
Folklore, Oral Culture and Children’s Sensibility
•
Language: Rhymes, Songs
and Actions -Nursery wisdom
•
Folklore and
anthropomorphism - brer rabbit to mickey mouse
•
Funny scary tales - ghosts and forbidden
knowledge - Grimms and the Wild things
•
Humour and Philosophy: Children’s own
story telling (Opies, Sutton Smith):Non sense traditions: (grade threes talking
about the Y2K Bug) - “Batman smells”
–
Language which is not dead/ (Dennis Lee
- Alligator Pie)
–
mythic consciousness -
life and death, good and evil, etc.
Folk Stories: Telling Tales
•
Myths and Legends:
Stories that explain great questions (Fancy Nancy)
•
Parables and Fables:
Stories that moralize (Aesop)
•
Tall Tales and Jokes:
Stories that delight and entertain (Shaggy Dog)
•
Tolkein: why is the folk
story relegated to childhood?
•
A type of thought which
breaks the opposition of real and imaginary worlds
•
Return to the
‘suspended disbelief’ of the tall tale - Anglo Saxon culture lost
its folk story and he set out to create one in Lord of the Rings
Neil Postman: The Literacy Agenda for Childhood
• The
printing press created a new definition of adulthood based on reading
competence, and a new definition of childhood based on reading incompetence
• “in
a literate world children must become adults by attaining the cultural secrets codified in unnatural
symbols”…
• “but
in a post-literate world there is no need to distinguish sharply between child
and adult for there are few secrets, and the culture does not need to provide
training to understand itself…”
Schooling and Literacy
•
Postman - Books as Tools
for Socialization: language, knowledge and literacy
•
The delay of maturity
due to training and knowledge acquisition = developmentalism
•
The disciplines of
knowledge - linear and verbal intelligence is rational: decoding and
abstractions
•
The forbidden knowledge
and power - erosion of the boundary between kids knowing and adult knowing
•
why suppress children’s awareness
of sexuality, politics and
conflict?
Lady Fenn 1783: stories as
motivation to learn
•
In making amusement the
vehicle of instruction, consistes the grand secret of early education…
entertain them with agreeable surprises but no deceit; tell them plain simple
truth -- there is no need for deceit; the world is full of wonders.
•
A pocket companion of
young mothers .. To assist them in
delightful task of forming in
those children an habit of amusing themselves in a rational manner during their leisure hours”
The Rise of KidLit: the stuff of dreams and the garden of verse
•
Darton: literature for
children
•
Newbury: Goody Two Shoes
etc.
•
Lamb, Greenaway,
Stevenson, Carroll,
•
Grimms, Milne, Anderson
•
Adventure, Heroes,
Myths, Animals, Sprites
Shift in power/ Shift in Values
• Decline
in moral tales - rise in value of fantasy (the child’s own world)
• Rise
in knowledge and literacy- creating the childs own cultural and peer
environment
• Books
as entertainment- the measure of good book is the childs enjoyment
• Reading
is a life style choice (gender differences and decline in entertainment
preferences - class and literacy, gender and literacy)
The Uses of Enchantment: Bruno Betteleheim
•
For a story to truly
hold the child’s attention it must entertain him and arouse his
curiosity. But to enrich his life, it must stimulate his imagination; help him
to develop his intellect and to clarify his emotions; be attuned to his
anxieties and aspirations; give full recognition to his difficulties, while at
the same time suggesting solutions to the the problems which perturb him. In
short it must at one and the same time relate to all aspects of his personality
and this without ever belittling but on the contrary, giving full credence to
the seriousness of the child’s predicaments, while simultaneously
promoting confidence in himself and in his future. (pg 5)
Cultural Therapeutics: don’t sanitize folkstories
•
Bettleheim, Tatar,
Estes: psychological function of
fantasy - Fantasy is about feelings not ideas
•
Why animistic thought is
good-bringing to consciousness and the disciplining of emotions with fantasy -
Freudian internalization (but eventual ego will replace fantasy)
•
Identification with hero helps working through paradoxes
and traumas and conflicts (abandonment, fears, power etc)
•
Templates for complex
understanding of moral behaviour and social relations - rules and codes of
social life ie empathy, subjectivity of other (childhood thought is amorphous
but complex)
•
Not use illustrations
because it robs the fantasy experience of its power
Zipes: Grimms and contamination of folklore
– Bridge with
traditional culture - magic, animism and imaginary elements of stories
celebrated
– Innocence as
sanitized of sex and violence
– Age appropriate
levels of knowledge/ complexity - the developing child
– Self-restraint and
moralizing context of behaviour (mischievous but not anarchic)
– Wacky humour but
not satirical (little Richie Rich or Toad of Toad Hall)
– whimsy - the
evocation of the possible in the imaginary rather than the given world -
fantasy over reality
Oral vs Visual cultures
• Children’s
books are visual
• Different
modes of consciousness or ways of knowing and processing information(the role
of images in story telling, instruction, and fantasy)
• Cultural
shift from literate/ book to synesthetic or multimedia
• Learning
styles and information orientation - the literate rote vs the discovery modes
of learning
– retention vs
application vs problem solving
Transitions in Aesthetics
• Visual
Narrativity: From Mother Goose to Folklore (Aesop and Grimms)
• Primers
to Pedantry (moral guideance)
• Fantasy
and Imagination: suspended disbelief and the imaginary world
• Constrained
Thematics: the walled garden
Out of the Bath Shirley
• Modern
Children’s Writers: recognizing the primacy of Children’s
Experience
• Reading
to kids, Reading for kids, Reading by kids
The New Cannon in Multi-cultural society? Asha’s Moms
• Appropriate
books: Popular vs elite tastes and aesthetics rather than kids own taste
– Wacky humour
– Anxiety and
Conflict
– Complexified
world: gender and class
– End of the
normative order and cannon
– Recognition of
cultural diversity
Ways of Interpreting the History of
Children’s Literature
•
Darton: templates
of the imagination: focus on the qualities, themes and characters of writing
for kids - taste, quality, and literary aesthetics (cf
•
Tatar: Narrative,
Folklore and Legacy of Children’s culture-the articulation of
children’s lives
•
Bettleheim/ Estes:
Cultural Theraputics:”to help children find meaning in life”
Psychic adjustments of the child- healing narrative, fantasy and the
imagination
•
Postman:
Literacy, Schooling and Knowledge Deprivation-the erosion of
“enlightenment aspirations”
•
McLuhan: Media
and Involvement - oral and visual cultures
•
Innis: the
changing matrix of institutional interest in producing books for kids - church,
schools, market as alignments of power