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8PATHOGENIC TRENDS IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
Children in the United States are being challenged by a confluence of environmental factors that include widespread poverty, the disintegration of the family, inadequate access to medical care, unregulated and substandard daycare facilities, the pervasive presence of screen technologies, and trends in education that are profoundly insensitive to their developmental needs. Overcrowded classrooms increasingly serve as prep schools for standardized testing and the tech industry, and uncensored information garnered from the web is taking precedence over social and emotional growth. Twenty percent of all children in the United States live in poverty and this number rises to 40 percent among children of single mothers. We have the highest divorce rate in the world (twice as high as the next closest country - Sweden) and children comprise the largest group without health insurance. As residents of the wealthiest country in the world, we ought to feel a collective sense of shame and outrage. Many vulnerable children may be succumbing to psychiatric illnesses which they might have avoided in healthier and more supportive environments. In addition, as caregivers and teachers become more stressed, they may be quicker to label children under their care as disturbed whose personalities, profile of talents, or developmental timetables are not an ideal fit with the environment.
Trends in Early Childhood Education: No Time for Play
In addition to the environmental stressors itemized above, trends in early childhood education in the U.S. are also playing a significant role in undermining children's psychological well-being. Over the past three decades, politicians, parents and educators alike, have been dismayed
by the poverty of American children’s academic skills. As a consequence, play-based curricula are being sidelined in preschools and kindergartens in favor of early academics, computer based learning and standardized testing. These trends, which have been codified in President George W. Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind act, conflict with established principles of child development.
According to Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial stages, the central challenge for young children is the development of initiative through fantasy play. Children the world over engage in vivid fantasy play between the ages of three and five. These activities are not mere diversions, but vital exercises that spark creative potential. When we force children to foreclose on the stage of initiative, and then prematurely push them into the stage of industry, we may indeed succeed in getting some children to read, write and complete math equations precociously. But we may also be creating a cohort of children who lack spontaneity, creativity, and a love of learning.
In addition, as Stanley Greenspan’s (1997) compelling research demonstrates, emotional awareness is not merely a form of intelligence, but rather, a cornerstone of all aspects of intellectual development. Children who are not emotionally engaged with the material they are learning and by the teachers who instruct them, cannot grow intellectually. Teachers who facilitate healthy play in the early childhood classroom, provide an ideal means of integrating social, emotional and intellectual growth in a stage appropriate way.
School reforms did not just drop out of the sky. Over the past few decades, American children have not been performing well in international tests comparing children’s math, reading and science competency.
I too believe that our public school system should undergo reform. However, the creation of standards and accountability must be grounded in principles of child development and humane pedagogy. If the mandate of the public school system is to support children’s capacity to become thoughtful, caring, creative citizens capable of exercising independent judgment and free will then treating age appropriate play-based curricula as expendable diversions in preschool and kindergarten, is not the answer.
Perhaps though, it is a quintessentially American answer, in a culture where "faster is better”. There is a well known anecdote about Jean Piaget - the famous Swiss cognitive psychologist - that he did not like to speak to American audiences because after he had described the natural pattern of children’s development, Americans would invariably ask, "Yes, but how can we get them to do things faster?”
Piaget taught us that development unfolds over time in recognizable stages that nonetheless allow for considerable individual variation. In each of these stages, a child’s understanding of her world is qualitatively different, and in the preschool and kindergarten years, children think and learn optimally through play. We embrace stage theories that pertain to our children’s physical development: they must be able to sit before they can stand, stand before they can walk, and so on. At the same time, we understand that the child who enters puberty at 16 as opposed to 12 is nonetheless normal, and may tower over us five years hence. However, we have no such patience with respect to cognitive abilities. Woe to the American child who reads and writes at seven, rather than five! She will almost certainly be subject to at least one diagnostic label, even though, seven is the normative age for beginning reading instruction in a majority of European countries. (More on this point below).
If this seems to be an idealistic or romantic notion - that four, five and six year-olds should be learning through play, let us consider the following research which gives us a window into the choices that countries whose children are faring particularly well in international comparisons are making. It was after all, these international comparisons that catalyzed our most recent educational reforms. In a highly respected international survey conducted recently by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Finland came in first in literacy and placed in the top five in math and science among 31 industrialized nations. The rankings were based on reading, math and science tests given to a sample of 15-year-olds attending both public and private schools. U.S. students placed in the middle of the pack.
Finland's recipe for success? Children here start learning to read in grade one at seven years of age on the theory that play is the most effective learning tool in the early years, and sets the stage for a lifelong love of learning. Preschool for six-year-olds in Finland is optional. At first, the seven-year-olds lag behind their peers in other countries in reading, but they catch up almost immediately and then excel. Also, from grades one through nine, after every 45-minute lesson, students are let loose outside for 15 minutes so they can burn off steam with physical or musical activities. Art, music, physical education, woodwork and crafts - subjects that are increasingly deemed expendable in U.S. public schools -are required subjects throughout the grades. Although there is a standard national curriculum, teachers in Finland are held in very high regard, and have considerable authority to devise and revise curricula suitable to individual students.
While the U.S. continues to slash play from its preschool and kindergarten curricula, several European nations including those in the
United Kingdom, are reforming their school systems in ways which echo Finland’s choices; increasing the age at which children begin formal academic subjects, utilizing play-based curricula in the early years, and eliminating standardized testing in the early grades. The catalyst for these changes is a growing, research-based recognition of the success of developmentally appropriate curricula that do not arbitrarily divide children’s cognitive, social, and emotional needs.
In December 2000, the British House of Commons Education select committee issued a report stating that there was "no conclusive evidence that children gained from being taught the 3Rs before the age of six.” Furthermore, creative play and small class size were deemed essential in early childhood education. The report expressed the following concerns about early academics:
"The current focus on targets for older children in reading and writing inevitably tends to limit the vision and confidence of early childhood educators. Such downward pressure risks undermining children’s motivation and their disposition to learn, thus lowering rather than raising levels of achievement in the long term....Inappropriate formalized assessment of children at an early age currently results in too many children being labeled as failures, when the failure in fact, lies with the system.”
(House of Commons, 2000).
Research submitted to the committee from the British Association for Early Childhood Education underscored this point of view:
"Comparisons with other countries suggest there is no benefit in starting formal instruction before six. The majority of other European countries admit children to school at six or seven following a three year period of pre-school education which focuses on social and physical development. Yet standards in literacy and numeracy are generally higher in those countries than in the Uk, despite our earlier starting age.”
(House of Commons, paragraph ii)
It is unfathomable that the U.S. is moving its approach to education further and further away from that of the very countries whose academic achievements it strives to emulate, and in a manner that ignores decades of child development research.
The Nature of Play: Having established that play is advantageous to development in the early years, we will now turn our attention to how creative play translates into developmental and academic gain. While many kinds of play, and many play experts compete for our attention, I will focus on make-believe play - also referred to as dramatic, sociodra-
matic, creative and imaginative play - as seen through the theoretical lenses of Lev Vygotsky and Jeffrey Kane.
Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist whose work on cognitive development from the twenties, finally found its way to the U.S. in the seventies with an immediate and profound impact on the disciplines of child development and education. According to Vygotsky;
"in play it is as though [the child] is a head taller than himself’ as he learns to symbolize objects and events, delay gratification, practice self-regulation, assimilate adult roles, exercise imagination, practice motor skills, and develop emotional, social and verbal literacy.” (1978)
Vygotsky’s observations are most relevant to sociodramatic play -when two or more children construct and act out play scenes together. In contrast to the relative freedom of solitary play, in social play, children must work out a shared set of rules and symbols. They must come to an agreement that the blanket represents their home, the block structure is a stove and that Sally will be the "daddy” They must work out a shared understanding about what a "daddy” or a "mommy” is and does, and how the actors embodying these roles may or may not interact with one another. In order to remain welcome in the play group, they must subordinate their ideas and impulses to the shared ideas of the group. Paradoxically, while we idealize make-believe play as a liberation from the constraints of reality, in fact, social play leads the child to discover through direct experience, why rules of conduct exist, why impulse control is necessary, and what the functions and roles of the different adults who populate their world are. In playing out their scenarios, children must "abstract” the defining features of "mommies” and "babies” and "bakers” and "husbands”, as well as the rules that guide social discourse. Children do not always utilize roles that exist in reality. Their play might just as easily be about superheroes and fairies. In these instances, children are likely exploring and developing their emotional lives, their fears, anger, love, and longing.
The work of Jeffrey Kane, an educational philosopher at Long Island University, has special relevance to what play experts have termed "dramatic play,” meaning solitary make-believe play. Our media drenched culture rarely provides children with quiet, unscheduled time, alone, in natural settings. As we explore Kane’s ideas, we will come to see that this is a profound loss indeed. In a chapter that he contributed to my anthology All Work and No Play....How Educational Reforms are Harming Our Preschoolers (2003), he questions the value of disembodied facts that are learned rather than discovered which we term "ab-
stract knowledge”. He reminds us that when children play at being mother, a kitten, or the wind for that matter, they do not merely mimic their role models, but they become them in their play. Through the exercise of their imaginative capacities, and the full use of their bodies and senses, they experience directly what it feels like, and means, to be a mother, or a kitten or the wind. This type of play provides young children with lessons that are infinitely deeper and more age appropriate than the fact sheets or internet "field trips” they might encounter in an academic preschool.
While preschool children who formally study the properties of - for example - butterflies, might spout an impressive array of scientific facts, the child who has the gift of time to observe the dance of a butterfly in its natural environment, and to imagine herself as that butterfly in her play, will have a much richer learning experience. How might this close encounter with a single butterfly in its natural habitat be a superior lesson to an hour spent in a classroom, memorizing the names and identifying features of 20 different butterflies? Or observing the same 20 butterflies, mounted on a wall at a museum? The child, left alone to gaze and wonder at and then embody the butterfly in her play, trusts the discoveries of her senses and her bodily experiences. She begins to understand what it means to be a butterfly in relationship to other natural delights in her environment, and in the process acquires a deep empathy with her subject. And, she is acquiring the potential to make new scientific or artistic discoveries by developing her imaginative capacities, as opposed to memorizing other people’s decontextualized discoveries whose meaning and relevance may elude her.
When we have never played in natural settings, when we have never imaginatively lived as a tiger or a rabbit, but have only been taught atomistic facts about mammals in school or "Disney” versions of these creatures override our own imaginings, then like Plato’s cave dwellers, our knowledge of the animal world, will be a shadow knowledge handed to us by others, as opposed to knowledge gained first hand, that is deeply experienced and trusted. Is it any wonder then, that so many students forget what they have learned in physics and history the moment their exams have ended? Most likely their knowledge was a surface knowledge, not richly experienced, understood, appreciated, or assimilated into the broader context of life. While conventional lessons may build upon our earlier free-form discoveries, they cannot replace them. I would venture to say, that we never outgrow the need for education that is experiential and contextualized. In the absence of a deep empathy for and understanding of our place in nature, we feel no qualms about using science and technological discoveries as vehicles for dominating, and
mining nature for resources, destroying our ecosystem and our health in the process.
Language and Literacy: I would like to focus briefly on how play facilitates language and literacy in light of the intensity of the current focus on early reading in preschool and kindergarten settings. It is a sad irony, that make-believe play, which has so much to contribute to language development and literacy is viewed as a hindrance rather than a tool. The building blocks of literacy are so much more than letter recognition and phonics. Children must also acquire a rich vocabulary, the ability to understand and follow a narrative, the capacity to empathize with the characters they encounter - to imagine themselves into the circumstances of their lives, diverse experiences that help them relate to what they are reading, the ability to "see” the characters in their minds eye, and the patience and desire to read.
Make-believe play facilitates many of these building blocks. First, sociodramatic play, requires children to articulate their ideas to the group, while at the same time they are introduced to new modes of expression and vocabulary that are quickly assimilated because they are learning in such an engaging context. Second, make-believe play is an exercise in empathy, as children learn what if feels like to be different characters, and what their needs and motives are. Third, make-believe requires children to visualize, the characters and scenarios that populate their play. The capacity to empathize with and visualize the characters and scenarios in a book, whether it be a work of fiction, history or biology, are the difference between a reading experience that lies flat on the page, or one that is deeply experienced, understood and assimilated by the reader. And finally, make-believe play teaches children to create and follow a narrative, just as they must do when reading or writing a story. Without these foundational experiences, some children may suffer from a condition that Jane Healy (1998) terms "alliteracy”. They read fluently, but cannot understand or make use of the material they have read, and they take no pleasure in reading.
Wired Classrooms
In addition to the disappearance of play from the early childhood classroom, another trend - which has far reaching consequences for children’s development - is that computers and the internet have become de rigeur in the kindergarten. This trend has become so pervasive and reflexive, that educators do not trouble to ask whether computer and internet technologies enhance learning, but rather, which technologies
and programs should be purchased and how to fund these purchases. Tragically, the wiring of American schools is being funded by slashing budgets, space and time for creative play, the visual and performing arts, music, field trips, and physical education. Even library budgets are being eliminated in support of the purchase of technologies. Apparently, in our ‘race to read', books need no longer apply!
Despite the fantastic sums of money spent on classroom technologies by all levels of government, private industry, and parents, the quality of research on the benefits of computers in the early childhood classroom has been scant, of low quality, with results that are inconclusive at best. In contrast, there is considerable research to support the educational value of play, the arts and humanities, physical education and small classroom size. What then, we are compelled to ask, is driving the push to wire the classroom? As I explore in my anthology All Work and No Play, the immediate catalysts for these trends, are 1) the technology industry for whom children form an inordinately profitable market and 2) politicians; in part because of campaign pledges from the technology industry and in part because of the desire to train children to be competitive in the technologically driven global economy.
We have come to accept the sound bite that ‘computers and the internet are the great levelers that will give children from all walks of life access to excellence in education and the good life'. Many parents, even those with very limited resources believe that if they don't provide their children with access to computers at home and at school, they are disadvantaging them. They feel that their children are making productive use of their time when they are using educational software, surfing the net or even playing computer games as opposed to watching television. Whereas a decade or so ago, it was rare to see a toddler sitting in front of a computer screen, today, software designed specifically for toddlers and even infants has become a successful market niche.
What is the effect of being bombarded on the one hand, with rapid-fire images and starved on the other for sensory experience in the three dimensional world, the human touch, and interpersonal connection? Healy concludes that heavy computer use prior to the age of seven years may generate a range of emotional, social and intellectual deficits. It is intriguing to note that many of these symptoms dovetail with key features of Autistic Spectrum Disorders. These include 1) diminished language skills, 2) interpersonal difficulties, 3) an inability to play symbolically, 4) difficulty integrating multimodal sensory experiences, 5) impoverished affective capacity, and 6) a poorly developed theory of mind.
Temple Grandin, an autistic professor and author on the subject of Autism, states that she finds an analogue of her own wiring in the com-
puter. "I use Internet talk because there is nothing closer to how I think”. What is the effect of imposing on children, a cyber world that recreates a ‘best fit’ environment for autistic individuals?
Trends in American Society
Thus far, I have suggested that certain trends in education are insensitive to children’s psychological needs, and may be contributing to the recent upsurge of psychiatric disturbance. This begs the question: What underlying currents in American culture are fomenting these changes? Why have so many policy makers, parents and educators become obsessed with teaching three year-olds - barely out of diapers - to read, in increasingly uniform, high tech settings? We will now examine features of American life that are directly or indirectly influencing what is happening in the classroom.
Trends in the Workplace
Throughout most of human history, women have worked and raised children. Until the time of the industrial revolution in the early to mid 19th century, work took place predominantly in the home or in the community. Work was visible and meaningful to children (e.g. baking, farming, gathering) who worked and played alongside their elders and peers. As paid work became increasingly removed from the home, requiring specialized training, women were initially limited to the domestic sphere and were denied access to higher education. Those who were not suited to their narrowly prescribed lives, sometimes went mad in their efforts to adapt to untenable conditions or welcomed the numbing effects of alcohol and more recently, valium. In the first decades of the 20th century, children’s well-being was at times purchased with their mothers’ sanity. With the exception of a few ‘glass ceilings’, women are now free to work at virtually any profession. While these changes are essential and only for the good, concomitant changes to ensure the integrity of family life, did not occur. Today, it is children whose psychological well-being is compromised. Tragically, we have traded one untenable set of expectations in family life for another.
The Cult of Individualism: The quintessentially American valorization of rugged individualism has served American pioneers and successive waves of immigrants fleeing oppression very well. In the 1960s and 70s, the lure of self-actualization led feminists in North America to pursue individual rights for women as exemplified by the Equal Rights Amendment, while their sisters in Europe focused on family rights. As a conse-
quence, many Western European nations have established exemplary systems of universal health care, regulated and subsidized daycare, parental and child sick leave, family friendly work policies, and a living wage. The social policies of these countries (Sweden is an excellent example) loudly proclaim that women’s contributions to the work force are valued, and that children are their nations’ treasure.
In stark contrast, the structure of the work force in the United States is still designed for the (now mythical) middle-class male in a traditional marriage with a ‘stay at home’ wife to maintain his home, cook his meals and see to the needs of the children. In consequence, many working mothers find themselves working long hours in order to keep their jobs or advance to more challenging ones, and then coming home to do a second full-time shift with their children. Without the protection of a living wage or a welfare system, many parents are forced to cobble together two or three full-time jobs, and to leave their children in unregulated, and unsafe care.
Contrary to predictions that technology would create a leisure society, we are in fact working longer hours, and earning less than our parents or grandparents. With our cell phones, email and fax machines, we are never more than a click away from the office, and so for many, the work day has become a multi-tasking juggling act that never really ends. Rather than leveling the playing field, it seems that the divide between rich and poor in the postindustrial world is becoming a yawning chasm and the gap between the middle-class and the poor is narrowing. As television and the internet continue to promote relentless consumerism and immediate gratification, and successive administrations continue to impoverish aid to struggling families, parents are increasingly less able or willing to take responsibility for their children. And so, without the safety net of community or family, many children are fending for themselves: children are becoming miniature adults and adults are becoming more childlike.
Women’s liberation and the technological revolution were meant to improve the quality of life. Instead, many of us are working more, and feeling increasingly time pressured and unhappy. If anything speaks to our current malaise it is the fact that Americans consume "nearly as many psychotropic drugs as does the rest of the world combined, including about 80 to [90] percent of all the Ritalin in the world ... and a majority of all the Prozac.” (DeGrandpre, 1999, p. 174) It seems that increasingly we rely on drugs to cope with the stress of living.
How do parents resolve the cognitive dissonance imposed by the desire to be successful in their work and responsible parents when the
structure of the workplace makes it so difficult? One increasingly visible response is to deny that childhood is a distinct developmental phase and that children have special needs. When we deny the existence of childhood, it also becomes easier to configure the preschool as a form of job training and to allow educational software and the internet to take our place as sources of mentoring and wisdom in our children’s lives. The recent spate of books that privilege the importance of peer over parental influence, children’s fashions, music, make-up, and uncensored access to information through the internet, both reflect and hasten the disappearance of childhood.
The waning belief in childhood as a distinct phase of life helps us to make sense of two seemingly contradictory trends. Many parents working long hours, may 1) enroll their children in a host of structured and competitive after school programs - witness the ‘hurried child syndrome’ - or 2) they may render their children silent and invisible by offering them a variety of screens (television, computer etc.). On the one hand, we have the child, who like the winning race horse spends every waking hour perfecting her skills. On the other hand we have the child who is immersed in a world of virtual reality or a sea of information that she is not equipped to process. In either case, the child’s developmental imperatives are not being respected.
In fairness to hard working parents, our postindustrial society provides them with few if any guidelines. Rapid technological advances that radically alter our lifestyles, combined with the advent of the nuclear (as opposed to the extended) family, often leave us devoid of role models. The highly technical and abstract nature of most labor renders it incomprehensible to children who consequently, cannot readily participate in work that is deemed valuable or essential to the well-being of the family or community. Instead, we create work for children in the form of skills development, be it dance classes or foreign language study, and we provide them with endless entertainments. This creates a culture of egocentrism in which children are groomed to be the best at several activities to further their own sense of worth, but that have no immediate bearing on the welfare of society.
While we as a society are denying childhood, children are informing us that their developmental needs are being ignored at our peril. The exponential rise in the number of children who are diagnosed and drugged for an ever widening spectrum of pathologies, including AttentionDeficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), depression, anxiety, learning disabilities, autistic spectrum disorders, bipolar disorder and stress-related illnesses such as asthma and allergies, tell us that we must examine the values that inform the choices we are making for our children.
Screen Nation
Our cultural love affair with technology has rapidly transformed children’s environments into ones that are dominated by screens. We use screens to babysit, educate, mentor and silence our children. As a parent, it is striking to me that there is virtually no public place that I can take my children that does not offer them some form of screen entertainment whether it be the department store, shoe store, furniture store, hair salon, grocery store, or museum. Even our local library - the last bastion of literacy - has banks of computers designated for children. Inevitably, gaudy cartoon images and electronic voices permeate the children’s section and all of the children who are old enough to leave their mothers’ laps are staring at computer screens.
Rapid-Fire Culture: Richard De Grandpre coined the phrase ‘rapid-fire culture’ to describe our exponentially accelerating pace of life. Technologies allow us instant global communication and information, to reach any destination in the world within a day, or to be dazzled by increasingly complex computer generated virtual realities, providing intense levels of stimulation to the relatively passive consumer. De Grandpre reminds us that our brains are wired to respond to novelty and to tune out steady sources of stimulation. Thus for example, we might stop ‘hearing’ the steady noise of traffic, or ‘seeing’ a light that has been flickering in the background. In the past, there were natural brakes on how much we could consume, or how fast we could pace ourselves. But today’s technology gives us unlimited access to speed and novelty. Thus, De-Grandpre suggests that "rapid-fire culture has transformed the American mind ... by promoting sensory adaptation in a world of constant sensory consumption[.]” (p. 204) The increased use of stimulants in our society including coffee (note the proliferation of coffee bars), and recreational drugs like cocaine, crack, hallucinogens with stimulant properties like ecstasy, and the methamphetamine epidemic in the southwestern United States support De Grandpre’s theory.
Pre-schoolers comprise the single largest TV audience, watching an average of 54 hours per week. When we add to this figure, time spent watching computer games, the implications are staggering. This could indeed explain why some children may lack the patience or discipline for the slow pace of the classroom and come to rely on Ritalin to provide the level of stimulation that their brains have grown to crave.
Screen Rage: Psychiatrist Marilyn Benoit (2000) is struck by the poor frustration tolerance that many youngsters have today. She believes that it is directly related to their high tech lifestyles:
"[c]hildren now live in an ecology of technology ... as [p]arents provide more elaborate video games, TVs and entertainment centers in their children’s rooms, where the kids can cocoon themselves in their multimedia environment. Those same kids go to the ATM with the parent and see real money emerge from a machine with the use of a plastic card and the touch of some buttons. ... Many children are now on the internet receiving almost instant responses to queries. Groups can form instant ‘chat rooms,’ creating rapid virtual social gatherings. A recent cartoon by Mike Twohy in the Washington Post (1/11/00) depicted a young boy leaving the family dinner table in anger while shouting ‘Fine - I’ll go talk to my chat room family!’ The instant solution is available through the capability of technology to readily substitute a new social entity and gratify his perceived needs. The emerging mantra of this technological era is ‘wait no more’.’’
Benoit is deeply concerned about the potential link between "technology, instant gratification, poor frustration tolerance, lack of empathy, and aggression.” She notes a troubling increase in the diagnosis of explosive children who are "unable to cope with the slightest of frustrations, and lash out aggressively. They are entitled, demanding, impatient, disrespectful of authority, often contemptuous of their peers, unempathic and easily ‘wounded’.”
While Benoit remains circumspect about the relationship between screen technologies and the recent spate of school shootings, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (2000) is not:
"Michael Carneal, the 14-year old killer in the Paducah, Kentucky, school shootings, had never fired a real pistol in his life. He stole a. 22 pistol, fired a few practice shots, and took it to school. He fired 8 shots at a high school prayer group. He hit 8 different kids with eight shots, five of them head shots and the other three upper torso. I train numerous elite military and law enforcement organizations around the world. When I tell them of this achievement they are stunned. Nowhere in the annals of military or law enforcement history can I find an equivalent ‘achievement’. Where does a 14-year-old boy who never fired a gun before get the skill and the will to kill? Video games and media violence.”
While some people take comfort in a reported decline in the murder rate in recent years, Grossman points out that fewer deaths are occurring due to more sophisticated life saving techniques, but in fact at-
tempted murder "has gone up from around 60 per 100,000 in 1957, to over 440 per 100,000 by the mid-1990s, and these same increases are occurring in Canada, South America, Japan and several European nations. Grossman, a psychology professor at West Point who has done extensive research on "how we enable people to kill”, points out that "most healthy members of most species have a powerful, natural resistance to killing their own kind. ... [Even when we] "are overwhelmed with anger and fear . we slam head on into that hardwired resistance against killing. During World War II, we discovered that only 15 - 20 percent of the individual riflemen would fire at an exposed enemy soldier. ... When the military became aware of this, they systematically went about the process of ‘fixing’ this ‘problem.’ And fix it they did. By the Korean War around 55 percent of the soldiers were willing to fire to kill. And by Vietnam the rate rose to over 90 percent.”
Grossman points out that all of the elements used in desensitizing soldiers so that they can kill on the battle field - brutalization, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning - exist in children’s lives through media exposure, "but without the safeguards.” Brutalization refers to the process of breaking down existing mores and norms to accept new values. According to Grossman, we achieve this with our children through massive exposure to violence. The average American child witnesses 200,000 acts of screen violence - including being shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized and degraded - and 16,000 murders by the time they are 18. This process begins in the early years before a child is able to "discern the difference between fantasy and reality”. The American Medical Association has published definitive research on the relationship between TV violence and murder rates. "In nations, regions or cities where television appears there is an immediate explosion of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling of the murder rate. Why 15 years? That’s how long it takes for a brutalized two year-old to reach the ‘prime crime’ years.”
The second technique for desensitizing soldiers to murder is classical conditioning in which violence comes to be associated with pleasure. Our children "watch vivid images of human death and suffering and they learn to associate it with: laughter, cheers, popcorn, soda.” The third technique used by the military is operant conditioning or stimulus-response training. When World War II soldiers learned to fire at a bull-seye target, they were often unable to perform on the battle field.
"Now soldiers learn to fire at realistic man-shaped silhouettes that pop up in their field of view hundreds of times, so that they will reflexively shoot to kill ... when they are in combat and somebody pops up with a
gun[.] ... [E]very time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video game, they are learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills.”
Add to this the celebrity status that high school shooters are achieving, and we put gasoline on the fire.
A Socially Patterned Defect: Erich Fromm coined the phrase socially patterned defect; a pathogenic belief system that becomes normative and sets the stage for behaviors and lifestyles among the majority that impair our capacity for reason and love, but receive such intense and widespread social validation that they do not give rise to inner conflict. In other words, they are ‘ego syntonic’. Nazi Germany and the Apartheid regime in South Africa are recent examples. In every society that embraces socially patterned defects, the overwhelming majority internalize the belief system and live relatively unconflicted lives. A few heroic individuals actively rebel against the social norms. But others become symptomatic because they are unable to conform or to rebel without suffering inner turmoil.
I suggest that there is a socially patterned defect in contemporary American culture; our uncritical embrace of new technologies. Admittedly, there are parents who are very wary of their children’s exposure to the media and the internet and actively try to limit it. Meanwhile however, our children are falling ill. Many become dispirited, anxious, hyperactive or simply unable to relate to others in reaction to hours of exposure to screens and the burgeoning constraints of the classroom. In other cases, perfectly healthy children are being diagnosed because their spontaneous inclinations to play render them unable or unwilling to conform to their environments (e.g. the four year-old who won’t sit still and do desk-work who is given Ritalin to be less disruptive).
Whereas socially patterned defects such as sexism and racism encountered growing opposition in the 20th century, our immersion in screens may not be as tractable in the 21st. First, very few individuals actually experience it as a problem and therefore screen culture is growing, not receding. Second, as Healy suggests, screen immersion may be hardwiring our children’s brains, creating an addiction to screens. Finally, many scientists now predict that there will come a time in the not too distant future when we no longer have control over our technologies as the fields of genetic engineering, robotics and nanotechnologies merge and ‘evolve’ independently of our efforts and intentions.
Scientists from leading universities including Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Harvard, and Princeton among others, are predicting a time within this century when our machines will
"become knowledgeable enough to handle their own maintenance, reproduction, and self-improvement without help. When this happens, the new genetic takeover will be complete. Our culture will then be able to evolve independently of human biology and its limitations, passing instead directly from generation to generation of ever more capable intelligent machinery.” (Moravec, 1988, in Bowers, p. 25).
It is chilling to realize that our species may soon be replaced by machinery, and that this is greeted as a positive development in some quarters. How is it that a scenario that passed for macabre science fiction a few decades ago is being heralded as the ultimate in progress and emancipation? How have we come to so devalue our humanity? One piece of the puzzle can be found in our cultural adoption of computer based models of intelligence as the standard to which we aspire. In so doing, we neglect our capacities for feeling, intuiting, spirituality and morality and we stop cultivating our ability to express ourselves and be transformed by our active participation in music, dance, visual arts, theatre, poetry and prose.
As we continue to redesign our children’s home and school environments to reflect this bloodless definition of ‘human’ potential, with multiple screen entertainments, and the use of the internet and educational software as surrogate parents and teachers; as we slash the arts, humanities, field trips, and physical education from the curriculum, we may indeed be setting the stage in the not too distant future, for a generation of children who don’t privilege reality over virtual reality, human intelligence over machine intelligence. We may be creating a cohort of children for whom merging with their machines may feel less foreign and frightening than a stroll on a nature trail with all of its messy unpredictability.
In a recent article for Wired magazine, Bill Joy, co-founder and chief scientist for Sun Microsystems and the co-chair of President Clinton’s 1998 blue-ribbon panel on the future of information-technology research, reiterated the prediction that we are only decades away from designing artificial life forms that may overtake our species. In addition, he cautioned that we will also have the capacity to produce self-replicating knowledge-enabled weapons of mass destruction. Our desire and capacity for invention is a defining quality of human nature. But it is not our only defining quality. We also have the capacity for journeys of equal depth and complexity in the realms of spirituality, community building, artistry, and communion with nature. Our privileging of scientific discovery over these other modes of development are threatening our very survival. Future generations will need more than ever to redress this imbalance if
they are to possess the creative, ethical, and spiritual vision necessary to develop a guiding set of values on which the wise and humane use of technologies is predicated.
Conclusion
It is a striking paradox that as adults feel increasingly entitled to place their individual needs first, we are creating educational environments that do not respect children’s individuality or their special status as children. We introduce complex concepts long before they are ready to master them, deny their need for play, subject them to uniform curricula and assessment, and transform their world from one that is three dimensional and experiential to one that is dominated by two dimensional virtual reality. Then we label and drug the children who do not fit in. Our preoccupation with the genetic and neurological explanations of mental illness, and corresponding indifference to the impact of the environment, speaks to our increasingly mechanized conceptualization of human nature.
If we value our humanity, and wish to overt the nightmarish scenarios that many scientists are marketing as utopias, we must engage in some collective soul searching to decide what type of world we want our children to inhabit. We must humanize our classrooms and curricula, and stop diagnosing and drugging the very children whose creativity, energy and budding intellect render them incapable of adjusting well to the narrow constraints of a technological society. Because it is these very children who might grow up to provide us with the vision and wisdom which future generations will require.
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2. Bowers, C. A. (1999). Why culture rather than data should be understood as the basis of intelligence. In J. Kane (Ed.), Education, Information, and Transformation: Essays on learning and thinking (pp. 23 - 40). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
3. DeGrandpre, R. (1999). Ritalin nation: rapid-fire culture and the transformation of human consciousness. New York: W.W. Norton.
4. Greenspan, S. I. (1997). The growth of the mind: and the endangered origins of intelligence. Cambridge: Perseus Books.
5. Grossman, D. Teaching kids to kill. In C. Clouder, S. Jenkinson & M. Large (Eds.), The Future of Childhood. London: Alliance for Childhood.
6. Healy, J. M. (1998). Failure to connect: how computers affect our children’s mind-and what we can do about it. New York: Simon & Schuster. paragraph 2
7. Kane, J. & Carpenter, H. (2003). Imagination and the Growth of the Human Mind. In S. Olfman (Ed.) All Work and No Play: How Educational Reforms are Harming Our Preschoolers, Praeger, Westport, C.T.
8. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Play and its role in the mental development of the child. In J. Bruner, J. Jolly, & K. Sylva (Eds.), Play: Its role in development and evolution (pp.537-554).
РЕЗЮМЕ
Педагоги, родители и политики США выражают все возрастающее беспокойство по поводу плохих знаний у американских детей по математике, естественным наукам и чтению. Всеобщий резонанс имело введение формального обучения, компьютерной грамотности и стандартированного тестирования на все более раннем возрастном этапе. Таким образом, дошкольные учреждения перестали быть средой, стимулирующей творческую игру и уроки сотрудничества, а все больше становятся источником стресса.
