Crain - Reclaiming childhood: letting children be children in our achievement-oriented society

Reclaiming childhood: letting children be children in our achievement-oriented society — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Reclaiming childhood: letting children be children in our achievement-oriented society" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...57

Table of Contents

Many colleagues contributed to this book. Discussions with Roger Hart, Robin Moore, and Louise Chawla increased my knowledge of the ways children benefit from rich contact with the natural world. I also am grateful to Howard Gardner, Jeffrey Kane, Douglas Sloan, Lillian Weber, Peter Sacks, Hubert Dyasi, Joy Turner, and Margaret Loeffler for their personal encouragement and insights into childhood.

Many of the ideas in this book took shape during the nine years in which I served on the Teaneck, New Jersey, Board of Education. During this time, a number of us in the community held intense discussions on how we, as adults, can best help children grow and learn. I am particularly grateful for the contributions by my friends Beverly and Alan Lefkowitz, Lloyd Houston, and by my wife, Ellen.

I also am indebted to the staff at Times Books, and I would like to express special thanks to Erika Goldman. Her editorial advice and commitment to the major theme of this bookan appreciation of childhoodhave been invaluable.

I wish to thank those who gave permission to include material from my earlier works:

Montessori Life for portions of The Childs Tie to Nature (Summer 1993), How Nature Helps Children Develop (Spring 1997), and Children Facing School: Sally Brown and Peppermint Patty (Spring 1999).

Mothering magazine for excerpts from Our Unobtrusive Presence (Winter 1987).

Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice for parts of The Importance of Nature to Children (Summer 2000).

Pearson Education for excerpts from Theories of Development: Concepts and Applications, 4th edition (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2000).

In addition, Gary Lawless granted permission to quote from his poem, When the Animals Come to Us, First Sight of Land (Blackberry Books, 1990). Howard Gardner gave permission to reproduce the childs drawing on page 5 and Kays poem on page 116 of Artful Scribbles (1980). The University of California Press granted permission to reproduce portions of figures 125 and 128 in Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (1954/1971) and poems in Kornei Chukovsky, From Two to Five (1925/1971). Routledge gave permission to include poems from Timothy Rogers, Those First Affections: An Anthology of Poems Composed Between the Ages of Two and Eight (1979). The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., granted permission to reproduce drawings of faces on page 94 of Rhoda Kellogg, Analyzing Childrens Art (1969). And Jane Meyerding gave permission to quote from Barbara Demings poem, Spirit of Love, in Jane Meyerding, editor, We Are All Part of One Another: A Barbara Deming Reader ( New Society Publishers 1984).

Portraits of Natural Children

Appendix A

A Child of Nature: Huckleberry Finn

I wont be rich, and I wont live in them cussed smothery houses. I like the woods, and the river and Ill stick to em too.

HUCK FINN

MARK TWAINS The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is perhaps the best-known novel in American literature. Its merits and faults have been widely discussed. But it deserves another look for what it can teach us about the childs feeling for nature.

Huck lives on the fringes of society. A motherless boy, whose father is incapable of guiding him, he fends for himself. As Twain introduces him in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer:

Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty hogsheads [barrels] in wet; he did not have to go to school or church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he could go fishing or swimming when and where he chose . He was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make life precious, that boy had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg.

Huck is between twelve and fourteen years old. Some scholars believe that Twain made Huck this age so Huck would be old enough to move about freely in the adult world, while his relatively uneducated status would permit him to see the world with the innocence and openness of a somewhat younger child.

Huck, to be sure, isnt completely isolated from society. He plays with the other boys and has assimilated the language and folklore of his rural subculture. He has even internalized the conventional conscience of the pro-slavery South. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn he is tormented by guilt because he is helping Jim escape slavery and he almost turns Jim in. But in the end, Huck follows his heart, rather than societys teachings, and he helps Jim. Huck is an eager, free, and open boy who is entirely without pretense. As he narrates his story, we feel we are listening to a real child who tells us just what he sees and thinksnot what anyone might expect of him. He is a natural child.

Huckleberry Finn opens with Huck in the process of being sivilized by the Widow Douglas. One night, when life in the widows house is becoming more than he can stand, he gives us this beautiful and haunting picture of the night.

I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldnt make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something thats on its mind and cant make itself understood .

Hucks description is superstitious, and, more notably, it is animistic. When, for example, Huck says that leaves rustled ever so mournful and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, he attributes emotions and intentions to the leaves and wind. Most of us, living in a modern, scientific society, view animism as irrational and childish. Indeed, the esteemed developmental psychologist Jean Piaget considered animism to be one of the common defects of childrens thinking. Animism, he said, reflects childrens inability to distinguish their own subjective states from the rest of the world.

But the matter isnt so simple. Some psychologists, especially those in the Gestalt tradition, have pointed out that animistic sensibilities are valued by artists. Poets and painters dont try to separate themselves from the rest of the world. Instead, they try to feel an underlying unity between themselves and the world so they can sense the expressive qualities of things. They want to feel the joy of a songbirds melody, the sadness of the weeping willow, and the mournful sound of the wind rustling in the trees.

From a poetic standpoint, then, Hucks assumption that he is in personal communication with nature is valuable. When Huck says that the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldnt make out what it was, we might consider his attitude irrational and childish, but its an attitude that many adult poets have longed to recapture. In a 1942 poem, Hermann Hesse said,

Sometimes, when a bird cries out,
Or the wind sweeps through a tree,
Or a dog howls in a far-off farm,

Next page

1234567...57

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Reclaiming childhood: letting children be children in our achievement-oriented society»

Look at similar books to Reclaiming childhood: letting children be children in our achievement-oriented society. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Anthony Ekanem

Childhood Nutrition: What Every Parent Should Know

A. C. Harwood

The Way of a Child

Gary Chapman

How to Really Love Your Adult Child: Building a Healthy Relationship in a Changing World

Janis Clark Johnston

It Takes a Child to Raise a Parent: Stories of Evolving Child and Parent Development

T. Berry Brazelton

The Irreducible Needs Of Children: What Every Child Must Have To Grow, Learn, And Flourish

David Elkind

Parenting on the Go: Birth to Six, A to Z

Johann Arnold Christoph

Their Name Is Today: Reclaiming Childhood in a Hostile World

Tieger

Do What You Are

Heywood

A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times

Barbara Barron

Nurture by Nature: Understand Your Childs Personality Type - And Become a Better Parent

Daniel J. Siegel

Parenting from the Inside Out

Dr. Shefali Tsabary

The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children

Discussion, reviews of the book Reclaiming childhood: letting children be children in our achievement-oriented society and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.