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Childhood is expendable on the road to wealth
By Wan Lixin |
June 4, 2009, Thursday
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THE lead opinion story in Shanghai Daily on Tuesday carried a grim headline, under a macabre cartoon: "Saving stolen kids from black market."
This was an unusual story on a day (the day after Children's Day) when it is customary or even obligatory to publish pictures of neatly dressed kids in red scarves laughing and dancing, radiating health, innocence, happiness, and vigor.
In real life, children are more valued for their precocious intellectual development than innocence, which is just a byword for ignorance.
Innocence can even be a source of concern for parents, as it might entail personal danger.
The Xinmin Evening News reported on Monday about a campaign to teach middle school student how to foil kidnapping attempts.
During a ceremony in Lujiazui in Pudong a student representative called for all students to follow these rules:
Do not accept food or toys from strangers; when lost, do not cry and thus attract the interest of kidnappers, but do cry out if someone tries to take you away by force; if abducted, do not lose heart, do not be bullied by kidnappers, and always look for the first opportunity to escape.
All sensible suggestions, but I am doubtful if these measures can be very effective, because kidnappers are forever perfecting their arts while practicing them.
One test shows how futile these precautions may be.
Nearly all parents have warned children who are left at home not to allow strangers in.
But a reporter carried out a test involving dozens of children in their homes and what with a little falsity and a little improvisation, he not only managed to enter the homes but also led the children to the streets.
When school textbooks are trying to inculcate such qualities as trust, honesty, faith, and good will, young people's personal safety requires such qualities as cynicism, skepticism, and doubletalk.
In other words, we are obliged to initiate them into the sophistication of the adult world.
During a recent unescorted kindergarten outing, my son exchanged all the food he brought - packaged milk and some food we believe to be nutritious - for a few potato chips from his friend.
The deal was not made in the spirit of rational transaction, but they are children after all.
But would there be a time when we not only need to caution our children against taking food from strangers, but also from their classmates?
We heard some parents are not only having their children tutored in music, math, painting, but also MBAs tailored to kids.
Consider the recent scandal in which a tax bureau official in Yibin, Sichuan Province, spent 6,000 yuan (US$882) to have sex with a girl under 14. We need to be reminded that some of the victim's classmates turned out to be accomplices in negotiating the deal.
In Lu Xun's "Madman's Diary" (1918), he issued an appeal to "save the kids," from the "cannibalistic feudal ethics" (a watchword of the iconoclasts during the May Fourth Movement).
Little did he foresee the forces that have taken over since the "feudal ethics" have been banished.
The basic problem posed by children is their dominant attributes, such as aimlessness, spontaneity, forgetfulness, curiosity, generosity, impressionability, and daydreaming, which are contrary to the traits required to succeed in a market economy.
This makes childhood an inconvenient stage that cannot be fully reduced to economic terms.
Thus, to shorten this nonproductive period of uncertainties, some parents are working hard to leverage their children's prospective earning power, by buying them tutorials, cram sessions, and anything supposed to be "educational."
According to Neil Postman in his insightful "The Disappearance of Childhood," modern entertainment - movies, TV, computers - are destroying the enchantment that childhood once held.
Entertainment has become the pursuit of many adults, while children are working hard in hopes of a good material life in the future.
The adults are becoming childish in their entertainment, romping and frolicking, while children are becoming adult-like, with their time overscheduled and many secrets of adulthood prematurely revealed to them.
Exploited
In trying to keep ahead of the next fella, children are leaving their childhood far behind.
On the day before Children's Day, I called one of my classmates, and at the end of conversation I casually asked after his daughter. He became immediately apologetic, because she "does not study well."
During the recent two-day wedding of a cousin, the only relative who failed to turn up was a junior high school student who had to be tutored on holidays.
Children are neglected and unappreciated as children, but exploited as future producers (by their parents) and consumers (by advertisers).
Some critics have called, and rightly so, for restoring June 1 as Children's Day for children because these days the segment of the population most excited by the holiday is not children, but advertisers.
Children are impressionable and gullible, and these are traits capitalized by the advertising industry.
I tried to search a book on children at an online library, but the first result is "Advertising to Children in China."
At the gate of any kindergarten is a regular gathering of eager agents ready to get your children into Tsinghua, Beida, or Harvard.
In all public places and around public transport are video devices overwhelming passersby with seductive, flirtatious, and hysterical advertising images and noises - has it ever occurred to our regulators that at least our children need to be protected from them?
This was an unusual story on a day (the day after Children's Day) when it is customary or even obligatory to publish pictures of neatly dressed kids in red scarves laughing and dancing, radiating health, innocence, happiness, and vigor.
In real life, children are more valued for their precocious intellectual development than innocence, which is just a byword for ignorance.
Innocence can even be a source of concern for parents, as it might entail personal danger.
The Xinmin Evening News reported on Monday about a campaign to teach middle school student how to foil kidnapping attempts.
During a ceremony in Lujiazui in Pudong a student representative called for all students to follow these rules:
Do not accept food or toys from strangers; when lost, do not cry and thus attract the interest of kidnappers, but do cry out if someone tries to take you away by force; if abducted, do not lose heart, do not be bullied by kidnappers, and always look for the first opportunity to escape.
All sensible suggestions, but I am doubtful if these measures can be very effective, because kidnappers are forever perfecting their arts while practicing them.
One test shows how futile these precautions may be.
Nearly all parents have warned children who are left at home not to allow strangers in.
But a reporter carried out a test involving dozens of children in their homes and what with a little falsity and a little improvisation, he not only managed to enter the homes but also led the children to the streets.
When school textbooks are trying to inculcate such qualities as trust, honesty, faith, and good will, young people's personal safety requires such qualities as cynicism, skepticism, and doubletalk.
In other words, we are obliged to initiate them into the sophistication of the adult world.
During a recent unescorted kindergarten outing, my son exchanged all the food he brought - packaged milk and some food we believe to be nutritious - for a few potato chips from his friend.
The deal was not made in the spirit of rational transaction, but they are children after all.
But would there be a time when we not only need to caution our children against taking food from strangers, but also from their classmates?
We heard some parents are not only having their children tutored in music, math, painting, but also MBAs tailored to kids.
Consider the recent scandal in which a tax bureau official in Yibin, Sichuan Province, spent 6,000 yuan (US$882) to have sex with a girl under 14. We need to be reminded that some of the victim's classmates turned out to be accomplices in negotiating the deal.
In Lu Xun's "Madman's Diary" (1918), he issued an appeal to "save the kids," from the "cannibalistic feudal ethics" (a watchword of the iconoclasts during the May Fourth Movement).
Little did he foresee the forces that have taken over since the "feudal ethics" have been banished.
The basic problem posed by children is their dominant attributes, such as aimlessness, spontaneity, forgetfulness, curiosity, generosity, impressionability, and daydreaming, which are contrary to the traits required to succeed in a market economy.
This makes childhood an inconvenient stage that cannot be fully reduced to economic terms.
Thus, to shorten this nonproductive period of uncertainties, some parents are working hard to leverage their children's prospective earning power, by buying them tutorials, cram sessions, and anything supposed to be "educational."
According to Neil Postman in his insightful "The Disappearance of Childhood," modern entertainment - movies, TV, computers - are destroying the enchantment that childhood once held.
Entertainment has become the pursuit of many adults, while children are working hard in hopes of a good material life in the future.
The adults are becoming childish in their entertainment, romping and frolicking, while children are becoming adult-like, with their time overscheduled and many secrets of adulthood prematurely revealed to them.
Exploited
In trying to keep ahead of the next fella, children are leaving their childhood far behind.
On the day before Children's Day, I called one of my classmates, and at the end of conversation I casually asked after his daughter. He became immediately apologetic, because she "does not study well."
During the recent two-day wedding of a cousin, the only relative who failed to turn up was a junior high school student who had to be tutored on holidays.
Children are neglected and unappreciated as children, but exploited as future producers (by their parents) and consumers (by advertisers).
Some critics have called, and rightly so, for restoring June 1 as Children's Day for children because these days the segment of the population most excited by the holiday is not children, but advertisers.
Children are impressionable and gullible, and these are traits capitalized by the advertising industry.
I tried to search a book on children at an online library, but the first result is "Advertising to Children in China."
At the gate of any kindergarten is a regular gathering of eager agents ready to get your children into Tsinghua, Beida, or Harvard.
In all public places and around public transport are video devices overwhelming passersby with seductive, flirtatious, and hysterical advertising images and noises - has it ever occurred to our regulators that at least our children need to be protected from them?
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