WHY ARE WE TEACHING KIDS THEY’RE ON THE BRINK OF DISASTER?
STILL SAYING THE DARNDEST THINGS, ONLY IN A MUCH DIFFERENT WAY
Fifty years ago, American TV personality Art Linkletter hosted Kids Says the Darndest Things segments on his House Party show, a CBS radio and television feature that ran for 25 years between 1945 and 1969. During the segments, Linkletter interviewed precocious children under the age of 12, mostly about their family lives and the foibles of their parents.
There were no child climate experts to interview, no nineyear- old boys in drag to document as they participated in pageants wearing heavy eye makeup and lipstick, no F-word spewing and dildo- waving preteens in movies like Good Boys to muse about.
Even as late as 1998, when comedian Bill Cosby briefly revived Kids Say the Darndest Things, the result was another stream of often hilarious malapropisms, neologisms, downright silly childish observations along with cloying and sometimes boring repartee on how the world works in the minds of seemingly articulate children.
In one widely viewed segment of the Cosby version now on Youtube, a five-year-old tells him that a cut on his finger has healed and gone away. Cosby asks where it went. “England,” replies the child.
Nowadays, in 2019 media, children not yet in their teens are asked much more serious questions and their answers treated as important declarations of deeper understanding. Today’s kids are more likely to be interviewed and polled for their views on equality, diversity, plastics, climate change, composting and transgender issues. Or they are asked whether they intend to go on strike or march for a ban on fossil fuels and whether the voting age should be lowered to 16.
What are we doing to children? Kids of all ages are growing up as anxious political activists, appearing in the media as representatives of causes and ideologies, participating in strikes, walkouts, speaking engagements, lectures and ideological battles over issues they cannot possibly understand.
At a time when the world is safer and more beneficial to children than any in history, they are being taught that they live on the brink of a variety of existential threats.
Last March, CBC Radio’s The Current dedicated a segment to the views of a pre- teen girl on the hottest issue of the century. The program’s host, Laura Lynch, asked Sophia Mathur of Sudbury, Ont., what she thinks of — as an 11- year- old— when she thinks about climate change:
Mathur: Dying. Because I think it’s just going to be such a big catastrophe if we don’t do anything, because climate change is going to cause droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, tornadoes and that’s going to affect people’s lives. I don’t understand why we’re not doing anything …
Lynch: What do you say to the people of my generation who you feel haven’t done enough or anything at all?
Mathur: You need to listen to the IPCC, the Paris Agreement, the Nobel Prize economist. They’re experts. You say climate change is not real when people are saying that it’s real, people that have studied this and know all about it.
Lynch: You’re 11 years old. Most kids who are 11 years old should be having fun and not worrying about what’s going on around them. Why do you feel this is important for you to do?
Mathur: Because our lives are at risk and I’m just going to say that striking is somewhat fun. It’s fun to interact with people and have them tell their stories to me, how they got affected by climate change.
No laughs in this version of kids saying the darndest — aside, perhaps, from the observation that going on strike is somewhat fun.
Young Sophia Mathur is of course following the trail- blazing Greta Thunberg, the 16-yearold Swedish wunderkind who has been elevated by the media to become one of the world’s leading intellectuals on various global issues, from climate change to inequality and other high- fashion ideas circulating within the green left. After addressing the World Economic Forum, the EU Parliament and other august organizations over the past year, Greta is in New York where she led a student strike on Friday and held centre stage at the United Nations Climate Action Summit on Monday.
Like Sophia from Sudbury, Greta became absorbed by climate change when she was very young. At the age of eight, the story goes, she became terrified after viewing videos at school depicting starving polar bears and plastic in the oceans. Her anxiety was so great that she convinced her parents to join her in a crusade to ban fossil fuels.
Climate terror, it seems, is one of the most common problems among children and teenagers. In a letter to Maclean’s magazine in response to the publication’s recent sensational cover story on the looming climate- driven destruction of the planet, a mother from Toronto said she “had a recent conversation on this topic with my teenage daughter, and the look of pure anguish and frustration on her face is something I can’t get out of my mind.”
A new Washington Post/ Kaiser Foundation poll found that 70 per cent of American teenagers live in some kind of fear about climate. A 16- year- old is quoted saying “It’s like a dystopian novel. To grow up seeing the world fall apart around you and knowing it’s going to be the fight of your lives to make people stop it.”
Students and children across North America and abroad also apparently experience unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety about crime, gun violence, economic issues, inequality and the future state of the world. Why are children and teenagers participating in strikes, walkouts, speaking engagements, lectures and ideological battles over issues like this?
It should come as no surprise: That’s what they’ve been told to fear and taught to believe.
It’s worth looking back at a curious illustration of the change in attitudes about the role of children in society.
Two decades ago, Jonbenet Ramsey, a six- year- old girl, was found murdered in her home in Boulder, Colo. The murder itself, which remains unsolved, was at times overshadowed by a critical storm over the fact that JonBenet participated in children’s beauty pageants, dressed up by her parents to look like a sexy movie star. Such pageants were widely portrayed as an indicator of parental craziness and, more importantly, a sure sign that American society was careening over a cultural cliff. Former CBS TV anchor Dan Rather called the children’s pageants a form of kiddie porn.
One of the harshest ideological critics of beauty pageants for girls was Henry A. Giroux, Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest and professor of critical pedagogy at Mcmaster University in Hamilton, Ont. In global education circles, Giroux is a widely cited critic of North America’s “corporate conservative” education regimes. In a 1998 essay, Nymphet Fantasies: Child Beauty Pageants and the Politics of Innocence, Giroux described Jonbenet as a victim of a form of institutionalized child abuse. The pageants, he said, revealed “how regressive notions of femininity and beauty are redeployed in this conservative era to fashion the fragile identities of young girls.”
Fast- forward to 2019 and a CBC documentary in which boys aged nine and 10 become the featured performers in a drag pageant at a Montreal club. The boys, under parental supervision, don tight dresses, high heels, heavy lipstick, mascara and large wigs to perform in a competition at a gay Montreal club, lip- synching and shaking to Lada Gaga’s hit Born This Way.
The event was met with relative indifference.
So far, Giroux has not publicly pronounced on the Drag Kids phenomenon. When asked by email for his views on it in the context of his earlier beauty-pageant criticisms, he replied: “Different context and unfamiliar with it. Nothing to say except maybe to quote Freud, ‘ Only in America.’ ”
But Giroux’s influence on the state of children today goes well beyond pageants then and now. From his perch at Mcmaster, he has become one of the godfathers of radical modern pedagogy across North America. Giroux’s message, delivered through a volcano of books ( 65 so far), articles and interviews, is at the heart of the current rise of children and teenagers as activists and political players. They are the anxiety- filled victims of the politicization of children’s education.
KIDS OF ALL AGES ARE GROWING UP AS ANXIOUS POLITICAL ACTIVISTS.
BEING TAUGHT THAT THEY LIVE ON THE BRINK OF A VARIETY OF EXISTENTIAL THREATS.
In a 2000 book — Stealing Innocence: Corporate Culture’s War on Children — Giroux argued that child beauty pageants were a perverse product of corporate control of the education system. He called for a radical reformation of education and how society treats children. Educators, said Giroux, need to reclaim the school system. “They must find ways to connect the politics of schooling with political struggles that take place across multiple social spheres and institutions.”
Over the past few decades, variations on Giroux’s prescription for the radicalization of children’s education — by converting students into social and political activists — have been gaining ground. Giroux advocates that emphasis on the private good should be replaced by “a notion of the public good that links democracy in culture with democracy in the wider domain of public history and ordinary life.”
It is no surprise that the Toronto District School Board and others across Canada are encouraging participation in climate strikes by allowing students to follow Greta and take a day off, assuming parental permission.
Such politicization of students has been underway for some time. In the 1970s, The Lorax — a Dr. Seuss children’s book — began to shape young minds and educators. As described in Wikipedia, The Lorax is a fable about the plight of the environment and how corporate greed causes degradation that can only be prevented by activism, presumably by children. The book is said to have played a key role in the growth of green activism. The Lorax is also featured in a new Dr. Seuss touring exhibit set to open in Toronto next month.
The Lorax is not alone. There is no shortage of scary environmental children’s books on the market — and no shortage of activists, teachers and cultural education specialists eager to instil climate fear and other social concerns in the minds of children.
Books for kids on climate — with titles such as Mother Earth Needs a Band- Aid!, The Problem of the Hot World, What is Climate Change, What Every Child Should Know about Climate Change, The Lonely Polar Bear — are filled with the same images and ideas that drove Greta Thunberg to panic. And more are on the way, including A Wild Child’s Guide to Endangered Animals, Kids Fight Plastic, and Earth Heroes.
Also being rushed into publication are two Greta Thunberg bios for kids, including Greta’s Story: The Schoolgirl Who Went on Strike to Save the Planet, from Simon & Schuster, and We Are All Greta: Be Inspired to Save the World.
Whether children from six to 16 have the neurological and psychological capacity to deal with the radicalization of their education is, at minimum, a debatable subject. In her book The Teenage Brain, University of Pennsylvania neurologist Frances Jensen notes that while the brain of a 16- yearold is learning at peak efficiency, “much else is inefficient, including attention, self- discipline, task completion, and emotions.”
That adolescent brains are not quite up to a full grasp of the information they are exposed to is perhaps indicated in the picket sign held by a climate- striking Vancouver student: “BURN INCENSE NOT COAL.” That’s cute, but impractical if you’re cooking a meal or heating and lighting your home.
As the now 25- year- old authority on teen brains, Justin Bieber, put it recently: “There is an insane pressure and responsibility put on a child whose brain, emotions, frontal lobes ( decision- making) aren’t developed yet.”
This is not to say that children should have no voice in key issues.
At the age of 17, Malala Yousafzai became the youngest person to receive a Nobel Prize. The Pakistani children’s and women’s rights activist had risen to world prominence after she was shot in the face by a Taliban assassin. She had been a child activist before the shooting, but after plastic surgery in the United Kingdom she became a world-renowned teen activist for the rights of girls and women to education.
But Malala is worlds apart from Greta in understanding and experience. Malala is a courageous rebel against a repressive political and education system she experienced firsthand as a youth. Her book, I Am Malala, is an articulate and moving personal and political chronicle of the plight of children and women in her home country. It became an international bestseller.
Likewise, the anti- gun activism of the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., rings true. After 17 of their fellow students were shot, they launched a March for Our Lives to draw attention to an issue that was immediate and personal.
Greta and her young disciples, on the other hand, are reacting to alarming streams of agitprop on many subjects and from many sources targeted at children and teens these days.
The CBC Kids News podcast, aimed at children aged nine to 13, promotes climate alarmism, drag culture and other themes, including an item on “Why your back- toschool outfit could be bad for the planet.” Girl Guides of Canada recently released a study on the gender pay gap among 12 to 18 year olds, with girls who babysit being paid $15 an hour while boys get $ 18 for maintenance and gardening work.
While Mcmaster’s Giroux continues to warn about the menace of “corporate culture” and the “appropriation of innocence” for corporate purposes in a market-driven world, much of the educational and media effort today seems dedicated to manipulating children and turning them into agitators, and giving 16- year- olds the right to vote, to bring about a radical reordering of society.
Later this year, the old CBS Kids Say the Darndest Things format is set to be revived again. The promo makes it look as silly as the originals. Some surprises may emerge. A grandfather I know tells the story of his own grandson that suggests kids are still kids. As a part of a grandfatherly exchange about the uses of oil, he asked his grandson: “Where do you think the plastic material for this smartphone comes from?” The darndest answer: “The ocean?”