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Center for the Study of Children's
Literature and Media |
Transcripts for August 1999 Programs #1-2 |
Program #1
30 August 1999 -- Text Books
Our children will be skipping off to school in a few days, if they aren't already there, and trudging home with their backpacks stuffed with text books. China is the source of probably the oldest text for young people -- in continuous use, in one form or another, for over two thousand years. It's called "The Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety," and is a series of didactic examples of commendable behavior, taken from ancient Confucian teachings about the honor and respect that children should pay to their parents and their ancestors. Some of the sacrifices that young people make on behalf of their folks would seem gruesome by contemporary Western standards. In one of the tamer of these paragons, an eight year old boy named Wu Meng, from a humble family without even the means to buy a mosquito net, allows the insects to bite him so that his parents can rest. The Pilgrims gave us one of the most popular books in colonial America, The New England Primer, a text that is also filled with examples of filial piety. In it, the "dutiful child" -- the young resident of Ply-mouth or Boston -- was asked to keep a dozen promises, among them: "I will honour my Father and Mother. I will obey my Superiours. I will submit to my Elders." By the time we reach the Dick and Jane books, we are on more familiar ground; now parents are the providers of all material and emotional comfort and children are obliged to do very little in return other than to be pleasant and appreciative. Some days, that may seem to be as much as we can hope for in our raucous, rough and tumble society, where manners and courtesy, let alone filial piety, can often seem to be forgotten gestures of the ancient past. And then one hears about the recent case of a young man from Florida State University in Tallahassee, Daniel Huffman, who gave up a promising football career in order to donate one of his kidneys to his ailing grandmother. His story of filial piety is currently being made into a movie. Thank goodness. And they didn't even have to invent a happy ending: In actuality Daniel's generosity saved his grandmother and earned him a full scholarship. Of course, it always comes down to the fact that we've got to try to be the paragons ourselves, and make our own lives the solid texts that we hope our children will read and learn from and follow. That's an even older text than Confucious, and just as hard to write.
Program #2
31 August 1999 -- What's Cool
I remember how it was in third grade, when I wore a pair of trousers to school that had flannel lining which you could see if the cuffs were rolled up, like mine were. I didn't live that down until almost sixth grade, and have never quite shaken the feeling that if I wasn't careful, I might be caught in a fashion mistake and end up being square instead of cool. It didn't help later having a sixth-grade teacher who gave all of us fragile-egoed new middle-schoolers weekly examinations of our color-coordination and hygene (she checked our fingernails and behind our ears). The ranks were really thin on those inspection days, and it's a wonder that any of us survived her withering critiques. Today, as we know, those tags of "cool" or "geek," "phat" or "freak," "jock" or "nerd" -- or whatever the terms are that designate what's in and what's out and who has the power of labelling in the pecking order of the schoolyard -- are with us still -- with a vengeance. High schools are seething with feuding factions, as we have seen so tragically in recent years. Even elementary school kids are aware of the importance of having the right stuff, the brand names and objects that give off the glow of status and insulate you from the sharpest beaks. In some ways it's easier to be cool today than it used to be in the days before television turned the children's product market into a multi-billion dollar industry. Most kids now see thousands of messages every day about how they should look and dress, what they should eat, and say, how they should move their hands and wear their hats, what to listen to and collect, how to spend their leisure time and pocket money. But it's also tougher than ever in these flush years to be one of the kids whose parents can't afford those well-advertised objects of desire -- computer games, unlimited internet access, cell phones, pagers, an allowance that supports endless Pokemon or Barbi or Star Wars action figure acquisition, vacations at theme parks, computer camps, and private coaches to help you with your vocal range or your batting stance. Young people need to hear that Steven Spielberg, who was making movies since he was a kid, or that Maurice Sendak, who spent most of his free time drawing and reading, were called nerds. And how about Bill Gates? That the nerds will have their revenge and some day run Hollywood and the computer world, that they will become our best writers and artists, scientists and thinkers is little consolation to the kid who has the wrong sneakers and lunch box. But they need to hear it a thousand times a day: follow your bliss, no matter how uncool it is.
