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From: Perry Nodelman <perry_nodelman>
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 11:17:59 -0500
On 24-Jul-09, at 9:13 AM, James Elliott wrote:
> Children change as they grow. But Children and adults do have very
> different attitudes and abilities to separate things. Adults can
> bring a different level of critical thinking (not criticism) to what
> they read than children do.
They can, some of them--and some of them can't, and many of them don't. Meanwhile, in my experience and that of many others recorded in the research literature on these matters, children involved in the appropriate kinds of dialogues with adults about books and life can and do think critically. And reams of discourse on internet news sites and such reveals that many adults can't or choose not to. There is no evidence i'm aware of that adults as a group are more capable of this kind of thinking than are children as a group.
>
> I don't think there is any argument that children and adults see
> things on different levels (or that there is any generalization
> involved). It's a fact of mental and societal development.
This "fact" has been much challenged over the last three or four decades by, for instance, a wide range of development psychologists, who have taken a more careful look at the kinds of experiments Piaget based his developmental theories on, and found them significantly flawed. I'd encourage anyone interested in learning more about these matters to take a look at the discussion of them in The Pleasures of Children's Literature, the textbook for children's literature courses I wrote in collaboration with Mavis Reimer. There's a chapter there called "Cultural Assumptions about Childhood" which outlines the scholarship that reveals the extent to which commonly held ideas about developmental stages are socially imposed upon children rather than being inherent and inevitable. (The chapter's a little out of date, since the book was published back in 2003--but it offers a good place to start.). Apart from the ways in which we work together as a society to turn children into the less capable children we imagine them to be, there is little evidence that the differences between childhood and adult thinking represent anything more than different amounts of experience--and in the real world, like it or not, many children have more varied and more complex and more unsettling and therefore more thought-provoking experiences than many mote sheltered adults ever get around to having.
Perry
_____________ Perry Nodelman http://pernodel.wordpress.com/
Book Trailers: The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3t7JAfPQeA The Ghosthunters2: The Curse of the Evening Eye http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qapDE1Kwnis The Ghosthunters I: The Proof that Ghosts Exist http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw0ow7oQV7k
Received on Sat 25 Jul 2009 11:17:59 AM CDT
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 11:17:59 -0500
On 24-Jul-09, at 9:13 AM, James Elliott wrote:
> Children change as they grow. But Children and adults do have very
> different attitudes and abilities to separate things. Adults can
> bring a different level of critical thinking (not criticism) to what
> they read than children do.
They can, some of them--and some of them can't, and many of them don't. Meanwhile, in my experience and that of many others recorded in the research literature on these matters, children involved in the appropriate kinds of dialogues with adults about books and life can and do think critically. And reams of discourse on internet news sites and such reveals that many adults can't or choose not to. There is no evidence i'm aware of that adults as a group are more capable of this kind of thinking than are children as a group.
>
> I don't think there is any argument that children and adults see
> things on different levels (or that there is any generalization
> involved). It's a fact of mental and societal development.
This "fact" has been much challenged over the last three or four decades by, for instance, a wide range of development psychologists, who have taken a more careful look at the kinds of experiments Piaget based his developmental theories on, and found them significantly flawed. I'd encourage anyone interested in learning more about these matters to take a look at the discussion of them in The Pleasures of Children's Literature, the textbook for children's literature courses I wrote in collaboration with Mavis Reimer. There's a chapter there called "Cultural Assumptions about Childhood" which outlines the scholarship that reveals the extent to which commonly held ideas about developmental stages are socially imposed upon children rather than being inherent and inevitable. (The chapter's a little out of date, since the book was published back in 2003--but it offers a good place to start.). Apart from the ways in which we work together as a society to turn children into the less capable children we imagine them to be, there is little evidence that the differences between childhood and adult thinking represent anything more than different amounts of experience--and in the real world, like it or not, many children have more varied and more complex and more unsettling and therefore more thought-provoking experiences than many mote sheltered adults ever get around to having.
Perry
_____________ Perry Nodelman http://pernodel.wordpress.com/
Book Trailers: The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3t7JAfPQeA The Ghosthunters2: The Curse of the Evening Eye http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qapDE1Kwnis The Ghosthunters I: The Proof that Ghosts Exist http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw0ow7oQV7k
Received on Sat 25 Jul 2009 11:17:59 AM CDT
