Thursday, June 15, 2006
These are the days
My daughter looks through the newspaper every school day, looking for an interesting article to bring in for discussion in class. I think this is great, as it gets us talking about the news as she searches for something appropriate.
This morning she was looking at the editorial page, and read the headline for an opinion piece that said (I paraphrase) Children Today Don't Know How to Enjoy Silence. She read it out and looked at me like, "Wha?". I told her that they frequently run this kind of garbage in the papers because old people like to imagine that kids today are an infinitely diminished species of creatures from the days when they (the hardy, intelligent, resourceful, well-behaved generation) were young.
It gets tiring sometimes, hearing how kids today are so addicted to video games and TV and sugar and fat that they can't concentrate, don't read, don't converse, don't enjoy the outdoors, blah, blah, blah. As I told my daughter today, people who write and say those things are old and have lost touch with children. The children I know are almost uniformly readers, good conversationalists, funny, smart and well-behaved. If anything they're far too controlled by the adults in their lives so that they lack the opportunity to be alone together, get up to no good, light fires, smoke, beat on each other, eat tons of candy and generally act like the little shits who are now all grown up and writing opinion pieces in the paper.
My daughter looks through the newspaper every school day, looking for an interesting article to bring in for discussion in class. I think this is great, as it gets us talking about the news as she searches for something appropriate.
This morning she was looking at the editorial page, and read the headline for an opinion piece that said (I paraphrase) Children Today Don't Know How to Enjoy Silence. She read it out and looked at me like, "Wha?". I told her that they frequently run this kind of garbage in the papers because old people like to imagine that kids today are an infinitely diminished species of creatures from the days when they (the hardy, intelligent, resourceful, well-behaved generation) were young.
It gets tiring sometimes, hearing how kids today are so addicted to video games and TV and sugar and fat that they can't concentrate, don't read, don't converse, don't enjoy the outdoors, blah, blah, blah. As I told my daughter today, people who write and say those things are old and have lost touch with children. The children I know are almost uniformly readers, good conversationalists, funny, smart and well-behaved. If anything they're far too controlled by the adults in their lives so that they lack the opportunity to be alone together, get up to no good, light fires, smoke, beat on each other, eat tons of candy and generally act like the little shits who are now all grown up and writing opinion pieces in the paper.
# posted by becca : 8:56 AM
