Breaking the Walled Garden of Childhood
A very long time ago I attended a conference at which one of the other participants was the late John Holt, a prominent and unconventional writer on education. The part of his talk I still remember was his description of the Victorian ideal of the walled garden of childhood, the idea that children needed to have their innocence preserved by being walled away from the corrupting influence of the real world. As he put it then, some children want nothing more than to climb over that damned wall.
The walled garden of childhood is an attitude that is all too common in the modern world. The Internet is a wonderful educational tool but a lot of parents assume that their children must be protected, by monitoring or filtering, from seeing too much of it. What psychological damage would be done to a six year old from seeing a picture of two humans engaged in sexual intercourse that was not done, over the centuries, to six year old farm children observing cattle engaged in the same activity for real has never been explained to me.
It goes along with the hostility to children working. The image of the boy with a newspaper route has been largely supplanted by Dickensian fantasies of juvenile slave labor in dark satanic mills. The prejudice is not even limited to paid employment. Libraries, at least the one my daughter briefly volunteered at, take it for granted that any teenager who volunteers is doing so to fulfill a requirement or get a box checked in a college application and should be let go as soon as that objective is fulfilled. The idea that someone younger than eighteen might want to actually do something useful is ruled out ab initio.
Discussing this with my daughter, she mentioned how surprised she was as a young teenager to discover that something she did — playing harp — could actually be of use to people as an accompaniment to dancing. Later, as a college student, one of her complaints was that she was writing papers that nobody, aside from the professor who graded them, would ever read. Given the opportunity to do a winter term project of her own design she chose to translate a renaissance Italian cookbook, a translation that is now up on my web page to be used by people interested in historical cooking. The walled garden is for playing in. What she wanted was to do things.
One exception used to be the Society for Creative Anachronism, a historical recreation organization that I have been involved with for a very long time. I was taught to use a sewing machine by a twelve year old girl; a few years later she was the moving spirit behind a puppet theater. But that has gradually changed. More and more over the years, children who come to SCA events are expected, not to help set up the hall or cook the dinner or run the event, but to attend "children's activities."
I have long held that there are two fundamental views of children: That they are pets who can talk, or that they are small people who do not yet know very much. The wrong one is winning.
This was fascinating! Thank you for your unique perspective. My son was very interested in learning computer programming when he saw me and my husband constantly doing this for work. I found him Scratch. He refused to even try it, because it was obviously for kids, with cartoon characters. He started working through a book I bought for my middle schooler niece called Python programming for Kids by Sande and Sande, and taught himself so much. I let him use my laptop (I supervised, with me being rather paranoid about the Internet as he was seven) and he taught himself so much. He typed in programs slowly and tinkered with them. Great start. He does research in computer science now after an undergrad in math and CS, and it sort of began with this day I just wrote about.
> What psychological damage would be done to a six year old from seeing a picture of two humans engaged in sexual intercourse that was not done, over the centuries, to six year old farm children observing cattle engaged in the same activity for real has never been explained to me.
The sexual images you see on the internet are not selected from the same distribution as those possibly seen by children in the past. They’ve gone through an evolutionary process selecting for the most extreme forms of emotional arousal.
Watching an act of voluntary loving intercourse may not be too bad for a kid. I’d still prefer they didn’t, and yeah maybe I’m just squeamish. I trust my instincts on this one. But what about watching a simulated, or real rape? Definitely not something I want my kids exposed to.
I agree that the walled garden idea is bad and much of school is a series of exercises in absurdity. But I still care about what my kids see on the internet, because of the algorithms designed to attract and addict them.
Overall, I want them to have experiences that will help prepare them to be functional adults. I think what happens in the physical world, when they pursue their own interests, is much more likely to be of value than exposing them a machine evolved to keep people emotionally aroused and perpetually glued to it.