childhood
-
Children are neither black tablets nor budding plants. They are markets; that is to say, consumers whose needs for products roughly the same as the needs of adults… The point is that childhood, if it can be said to exist at all, is now an economic category. There is very little the culture wants to do for their children except to make them into consumers.
Neil Postman -
“Information revolution” … has made it impossible to keep secrets from the young - sexual secrets, political secrets, social secrets, historical secrets, medical secrets; that is to say, the full content of adult life, which must be kept at least partially hidden from the young if there is to be a category of life known as childhood.
Neil Postman -
(Editor: Rousseau made two powerful contributions to the idea of Childhood). The first was in his insistence that the child is important in himself, and not merely a means to an end… Rousseau’s second idea was that child’s intellectual and emotional life is important , not because we must to know about it in order to teach and train our children, but because childhood is the stage of life when man most closely approximates the “state of nature”.
Neil Postman -
There were two intellectual strains of which the idea (Editor: of childhood) was composed. We might call them the Lockean, or the Protestant, conception of childhood, and the Rousseauian, or Romantic, conception. In the Protestant view, the child is an unformed person who, through literacy, education, reason, self-control and shame, may be made into a civilized adult. In the Romantic view, it is not the unformed child but the deformed adult who is the problem. The child possesses as his or her birthright capacities for candor, and understanding , curiosity, and spontaneity that are deadened by literacy, education, reason, self-control, and shame… To Rousseau, education was essentially a subtraction process; to Locke an addition process. But whatever the differences between these to metaphors, they do have in common a concern for the future. Locke wanted education to result in a rich, varied, and copious book; Rousseau wanted education to result in a healthy flower. This is important to keep in mind, for a concern for the future is increasingly missing from the metaphors of childhood in the present day. Neither Locke not Rousseau ever doubted that childhood requires future-oriented guidance of adults.
Neil Postman -
Television erases the dividing line between childhood and adulthood in two ways: it requires no instruction to grasp its form, and it does not segregate its audience. Therefore, it communicates the same information to everyone, simultaneously, regardless of age, sex, level of education, or previous condition of servitude.
Neil Postman -
As television begins to render invisible the traditional concept of childhood, it would not be quite accurate to say that it immerses us in an adult world. Rather, it uses the material of the adult world as basis for projecting a new kind of person altogether. We might call this person the adult-child… Television promotes as desirable many of the attitudes that we associate with childishness - for example, an obsessive need for immediate gratification, a lack of concern for consequences, and almost promiscuous preoccupation with consumption.
Neil Postman -
Childhood innocence is impossible to sustain, which is why children have disappeared from television… All the children on televisions shows are depicted as merely small adults, in the manner of thirteenths - and fourteenth-century paintings… You will see children whose language, dress, sexuality, and interests are not different from those of the adults on the same shows.
Neil Postman -
With the assistance of modern contraceptives, the sexual appetite of both adults and children can be satisfied without serious restraint and without mature understanding of its meaning. Here, television has played an enormous role, since it not only keep the entire population in a condition of high sexual excitement but stresses a kind of egalitarianism of sexual fulfillment: sex is transformed into a product available to everyone - let us say, like mouthwash or under-arm deodorant.
Neil Postman
