Distinction

One of the perks of being a parent is getting to watch your favorite children's shows on OPB once again. On the cusp of a little Reading Rainbow watching with David I saw a commercial that involves Super Grover writing his initial into an insignia. The message of the commercial was to support your child's progressive endeavors by pinning artwork on the fridge and constantly giving them support and approval. The tag line at the end, the "We are OPB and you need us in your life" message, was something along the lines of "OPB: preparing children for learning and life." It was here that I got lost in the message in that I dared to read into the distinction between the two.

Obviously the message was intended to use alliteration to drive the point in that this brand of television is good for you, but I found the example a little misleading. The first impression I got from this was that life was something different or removed from childhood, or that it was the next step away from childhood. It dared me to ask "Then what is it that children are living now? When does their life begin?" For one it insinuates that children are indeed not involved in life right now, they are instead in secular limbo, waiting for their turn to take rank among us. This, in my opinion, isn't a very constructive sentiment to make. It ignores the children that do have "real life problems," such as AIDS, abuse, hunger, social troubles, or a myriad of other troubles. It also manages to marginalize adults.

The question begging to be asked is "When does childhood end?" Does it end when you become a teenager? At your bar mitzvah? When you turn sixteen? When you graduate high school? What about college? When exactly are you no longer a "children?" Taken in perspective of education I am still a child, one who is two weeks away from entering the "real world." Is it then that my life begins? I've always had such a bleak picture of adulthood, usually painted for me by adults. Now that I'm here I can't say I'm too disappointed. I, for one, like knowing things, and there is no more efficient way of obtaining knowledge than through the passage of time. I also like being developed. I am no longer in a constantly-changing body with raging hormones, constantly circulating wardrobes, and the accompanying discomfort. I am now as I will be for a long time, and I am quite happy with that. It's one less thing to worry about (I'm the guy that shaves his head so that he doesn't have to dedicate brain power to the frivolity of hair styling). At this point in my life I have less interference in my personal freedoms (rather, I have less obvious interference, all of the covert assaults on my freedom are still well in tact and will undoubtedly trickle down to my children), and all things considered I am quite happy where I am.

What then changes? Part of the issue is that we characterize childhood in a certain way: play and education. Children are always at play, meaning they are completely devoid of seriousness, obligation, responsibility, or worry. Childhood is also largely defined by stages of the educational process. As often as children are asked their age they are also asked their grade. Probably more so. Age means relatively little in the face of grade level, which along with a gradated number also implies a certain level of achieved intellect. To me, these views of childhood are inefficient and damaging. I, personally, prefer to see childhood by merely one trait: learning.

If you look at how children play, they do so to learn. Their goal in play is not to torment mommy and daddy into buying them larger quantities of fancier toys. Play is a beautiful and wonderfully efficient mechanism that combines positive emotional reinforcement to acquired knowledge. Kicking a ball a long distance gives the actor a sense of pride or accomplishment that accompanies the knowledge of how to maximize the efficiency of acting upon your physical environment, however that lesson may be an equally profound learning experience if the actor were to kick the ball into a hornets' nest. The same valued learning is the reason we go to school. I will, however, impose a distinction at this point between learning and education. To learn is to adopt knowledge, whereas an education is a systematic approach toward inserting knowledge into the learner. My syntax should give you very little doubt as to which method I prefer and which I would exercise caution towards.

This brings up a socially demeaning concept though. When have I stopped learning? I love to learn. I love to discover things. I love reading books and experimenting and talking things out between friends. I have never abandoned a desire to learn things which, by my definition, must make me a child. But I've already been there, and I came to the conclusion that I've never left childhood. I was sitting in the bath the other day, examining myself (visually, thank you), to discover that I have chest hair. This is nothing new, I've had chest hair for years. But it seemed odd, somehow foreign. I look different, but I don't feel different. Inside, I'm the same person I was when I was ten, and somewhere in time I got big and grew hair. The child is never gone. I don't care what all of those discordant 60's folk tunes say, you never stop being a child. It's the same conundrum that accompanies birthdays. You watch the seconds pass from one day into the next and all of a sudden you are legally able to drink alcohol without the supervision of a parent or guardian. In that one second it is highly unlikely that your body or mind matured to a point that rendered you incapable the prior second and prepared in the next, yet that is the way we distinguish age in our society: through these rites of passage. The same goes for New Year's Day as well. A ball dropping signifies the infancy of a new year, in which case the entire planet undergoes a superficial baptism that will be soiled shortly after the third bottle of champagne is spilled. Such is the consequence for creating artificial boundaries of time. We are not satisfied to let the river flow into the sea, instead we need to dredge the land into a canal that functions by a segmented system of locks.

In the end, it helps to stop making distinctions between childhood and adulthood, as well as abandon the implied superiority of one over the other. For lack of a better word, I still see myself as that child, but I never felt like a child when I would have been considered one. I never felt myself pertaining to the negative connotations of childhood. In that case I would rather just embrace self. When we begin to tear down these notions of superiority through chronology we open ourselves up to learning from those younger than us. The lessons can be as simple as the culinary delight of mixing yogurt and peanut butter, or as profound as learning when to stop being a fascist disciplinarian.