“Today, one of the great aims of education is that you should always have something to do, and it should always be very meaningful,” Juster said, looking as dispirited as his young protagonist. “Kids now are all about technology. They’re very busy, very regimented.”
“I don’t know how I would write ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ today,” he says. “Or even if I would.”
“I don’t know how I would write ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ today,” he says. “Or even if I would.”
I've been saying this for years. As parents we feel that we have to constantly enrich our children's lives by sending them for various classes and activities. My view is that kids need time to daydream, to process everything they've seen and experienced that day, and from that processing comes wondrous things.
Without it, it's like they're spectators of their own lives. Too much is happening, too quickly, for them to make sense of it, to learn enough from it that they can incorporate it into themselves.
"Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth” broke open the mold of anodyne kids’ books like “Dick and Jane.” Publishers said that kids would never go for a book whose vocabulary stretched to include such choice morsels as “macabre,” “dissonance” and “dodecahedron.” They were wrong."
This is something else I've said for years: we don't give kids credit for the intelligence they possess. We dumb things down to "their level" for various reasons, but we're doing them a huge disservice. Kids are much brighter than we think they are, but they don't know it, and even if they do, they'll believe you because you're the parent, the teacher, the grown up.
No comments:
Post a Comment