1. Ch 2: The Death of Childhood
Children deprived of childhood
Growing violent crime
Early sexual activity
Disintegration of family life
Safety & innocence lost
The Hurried Child by Elkind (1981)
Growing up too fast too soon
Children without Childhood by Winn (1984)
Growing too fast in the world of sex and drugs

2. Elkind’s Argument “Stress” in Children’s Lives
Psychological disturbance caused by divorce
Rise in pregnancy and venereal disease
Escape thru drug-taking, crime, suicide, religious cults
Children being Hurried by parents, schools and media

3. Elkind’s Argument (p.22)
The media both reflect and produce this ‘hurrying’… By simplifying their access to information, it opens them to experiences that were once reserved for adults: ‘scenes of violence or of sexual intimacy that a young child could not conjure up from verbal description are presented directly and graphically upon television screen.’

4. Elkind’s Argument (p.22)
Following Piaget’s model of child development… children will only truly learn when they are ready to do so. Forcing them to skip developmental stages will make it much harder for them to establish a secure sense of of their personal identity, and hence leave them unprepared for the difficulties of adolescence.

5. Winn’s Argument Echoes many Elkind’s concerns
“Loss of control” on the part parents, a “decline in child supervision”
Previously in lower classes, now widespread in middle-class children
Media indoctrinating into the “secrets of adult life” – primarily sex & violence

6. Winn’s Argument (p.23-25)
Regardless of what they watch… television deprives children of play, and of other forms of healthy interaction. It is used by too many parents simply as a ‘babysitter’.
* These two authors’ diagnoses and prescriptions for change are rather different.

7. Winn’s View (Position of Moral Conservative)
Diagnoses:
Decline in nuclear family
Growing financial independence of woman
Loosening of sexual standards
Diminished role of organized religion
Moral backlash
… parents should be actively reinforcing these boundaries between adults and children. They should be doing less preparing and more protecting… reassert their authority, and thereby restore to children the right ‘to be a child’.

8. Winn vs. Elkind Moral backlash against ‘permissiveness’
Aware of ‘Golden Age’: Children to be prepared for future ‘slowly and painfully’
Need to reinforce boundaries between adult and children
Concerned about ‘Self-expression’ in child-rearing
Aware of ‘Golden Age’: Children relatively docile as dependent being
Need to give children time to learn and grow

9. Literacy Myths The Disappearance of Childhood by Postman
No Sense of Place by Meyrowitz
A is for Ox by Sanders
Kinderculture by Steinberg & Kincheloe
All four books: Villain of the piece - the electronic media (one-dimensional analysis)

10. Literacy Myths: TV vs. Print
Electronic Media (TV)
‘Total disclosure’
Visual
Irrational
Makes ‘backstage’ behavior visible
Reintegrates children and adults
Print
Requires literacy
Symbolic & Linear
Cultivates abstraction
Logic thinking
Segregates children and adults

11. Author’s and Others’ Argument (pp. 33-40)
Childhood -- Ultimately representations
Technological determinism -- Oversimplification
TV supplanted reading? Or equivalent activities
Audience passive & defenseless? No intellectual?
Electronics requires particular ‘literacy’
Protection with resistance to media (turning off TV)?

12. 下週
第7-8組報告
請自行張羅報告需器材
請注意自己報告時的”專業形象”