The Disappearance of Childhood

Informative, alarming, and aphorisitc, The Disappearance of Childhood is a triumph of history and prophecy.

Author: Neil Postman

Publisher: Vintage

ISBN: 9780307797223

Category: Social Science

Page: 192

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From the vogue for nubile models to the explosion in the juvenile crime rate, this modern classic of social history and media traces the precipitous decline of childhood in America today−and the corresponding threat to the notion of adulthood. Deftly marshaling a vast array of historical and demographic research, Neil Postman, author of Technopoly, suggests that childhood is a relatively recent invention, which came into being as the new medium of print imposed divisions between children and adults. But now these divisions are eroding under the barrage of television, which turns the adult secrets of sex and violence into poprular entertainment and pitches both news and advertising at the intellectual level of ten-year-olds. Informative, alarming, and aphorisitc, The Disappearance of Childhood is a triumph of history and prophecy.
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Children and the Politics of Culture

C H A P T E R I The Child as Laborer and Consumer: The Disappearance of Childhood in Contemporary Japan NORMA FIELD When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry “'weep! 'weep! 'weep!

Author: Sharon Stephens

Publisher: Princeton University Press

ISBN: 9780691224893

Category: Social Science

Page: 376

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The bodies and minds of children--and the very space of children--are under assault. This is the message we receive from daily news headlines about violence, sexual abuse, exploitation, and neglect of children, and from a proliferation of books in recent years representing the domain of contemporary childhood as threatened, invaded, polluted, and "stolen" by adults. Through a series of essays that explore the global dimensions of children at risk, an international group of researchers and policymakers discuss the notion of children's rights, and in particular the claim that every child has a right to a cultural identity. Explorations of children's situations in Japan, Korea, Singapore, South Africa, England, Norway, the United States, Brazil, and Germany reveal how children's everyday lives and futures are often the stakes in contemporary battles that adults wage over definitions of cultural identity and state cultural policies. Throughout this volume, the authors address the complex and often ambiguous implications of the concept of rights. For example, it may be used to defend indigenous children from radically assimilationist or even genocidal state policies; but it may also be used to legitimate racist institutions. A substantive introduction by the editor examines global political economic frameworks for the cultural debates affecting children and traces intriguing, sometimes surprising, threads throughout the papers. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Norma Field, Marilyn Ivy, Mary John, Hae-joang Cho, Saya Shiraishi, Vivienne Wee, Pamela Reynolds, Kathleen Hall, Ruth Mandel, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, and Njabulo Ndebele.
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The Moral Status of Children

The first of these questions is unique to the debate on children : it focuses on the supposed disappearance of childhood . What are the implications of the thesis of Neil Postman32 and others33 for the moral status of children and ...

Author: Michael D. A. Freeman

Publisher: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers

ISBN: 9041103775

Category: Social Science

Page: 404

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1. The moral status of children.
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Theatre as a Medium for Children and Young People Images and Observations

In his book The Disappearance of Childhood (1982/1994) he argues that childhood is disappearing and provides a theory as to why this is happening. He analyzes how the charm, innocence, and curiosity of children are degraded and then ...

Author: Shifra Schonmann

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

ISBN: 9781402044403

Category: Education

Page: 224

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This book is a journey into the dual territory of educational and theatrical settings. It advances the knowledge in these settings by touching upon provocative questions, by dealing with the limitations and challenging the new possibilities of theatre for young people. It is an attempt to bring intellectual rigor and some theoretical perspectives drawn from recent theatre and aesthetic theory to the field of theatre for young people.
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Born to Buy

As modernity evolved into its “post” phase, childhood was bound to change. Those changes have been widely interpreted in the language of a disappearance of childhood because postmodernity has been characterized by more porous boundaries ...

Author: Juliet B. Schor

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

ISBN: 9781439130902

Category: Social Science

Page: 304

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Ads aimed at kids are virtually everywhere -- in classrooms and textbooks, on the Internet, even at slumber parties and the playground. Product placement and other innovations have introduced more subtle advertising to movies and television. Companies are enlisting children as guerrilla marketers, targeting their friends and families. Even trusted social institutions such as the Girl Scouts are teaming up with marketers. Drawing on her own survey research and unprecedented access to the advertising industry, New York Times bestselling author and leading cultural and economic authority Juliet Schor examines how a marketing effort of vast size, scope, and effectiveness has created "commercialized children." Schor, author of The Overworked American and The Overspent American, looks at the broad implications of this strategy. Sophisticated advertising strategies convince kids that products are necessary to their social survival. Ads affect not just what they want to buy, but who they think they are and how they feel about themselves. Based on long-term analysis, Schor reverses the conventional notion of causality: it's not just that problem kids become overly involved in the values of consumerism; it's that kids who are overly involved in the values of consumerism become problem kids. In this revelatory and crucial book, Schor also provides guidelines for parents and teachers. What is at stake is the emotional and social well-being of our children. Like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Born to Buy is a major contribution to our understanding of a contemporary trend and its effects on the culture.
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Conflicting Paths

CHAPTER SIX The Disappearance of Childhood in Our Own Time ? វ “ TROUBLED times force teens to grow up fast , ” blares the front page of the Sunday Dallas Morning News , March 8 , 1992. “ You don't have to be a parent to be alarmed by ...

Author: Harvey J. Graff

Publisher: Harvard University Press

ISBN: 0674160665

Category: History

Page: 426

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We grow up--so simple, it just seems to happen--and yet there are endless variations in the way we do it. What part does culture play in the process? How much do politics and economics have to do with it? As the nation has matured, have the ways people grow up changed too? This book traces the many paths to adulthood that Americans have pursued over time. Spanning more than two centuries of intense transformation in the lives of individuals and the life of a nation, Conflicting Paths is an innovative history of growing up in America. Harvey J. Graff, a distinguished social historian, mines more than five hundred personal narratives for what they can tell us about the passage from childhood to maturity. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and letters, he builds a penetrating, complex, firsthand account of how childhood, adolescence, and youth have been experienced and understood--as functions of familial and social relations, as products of biology and physiology, and as cultural and political constructs. These first-person testimonies cross the lines of time and space, gender and class, ethnicity, age, and race. In these individual stories and the larger story they constitute, Graff exposes the way social change--including institutional developments and shifting attitudes, expectations, and policy--and personal experience intertwine in the process of growing up. Together, these narratives form a challenging, subtle guide to historical experiences and to the epochal remaking of growing up. The most socially inclusive and historically extensive of any such research, Graff's work constitutes an important chapter in the story of the family, the formation of modern society, and the complex interweaving of young people, tradition, and change.
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The Future of Childhood

However, their lives also teach us that, in struggling to understand childhood, we need to keep the question of what ... The disappearance of childhood The same conclusion can also be drawn from a third instance of childhood's crisis of ...

Author: Alan Prout

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781134518678

Category: Education

Page: 184

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Alan Prout discusses the place of children and childhood in the late modernity. He argues that there appears to be a greater cultural confusion about the form that childhood should take.
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Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education

Disappearing Childhood ' , Childhood Education , 58 , 2 , pp.66-8 , 1981 . * The Day Our Children Disappear : Predictions of a Media Ecologist ' , Phi Delta Kappan , 62 , 5 , pp.382-6 , 1981 . " Childhood's End , American Educator : The ...

Author: Joy Palmer

Publisher: Psychology Press

ISBN: 0415224098

Category: Education

Page: 290

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Looks at fifty of the twentieth century's most significant contributors to the debate on education. Each essay gives key biographical information, an outline of the individual's principal achievements and activities, an assessment of his or her impact and influence and a list of their major writings and suggested further reading.
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Navigating Through the Storm

SUMMARY In this chapter I have identified the “disappearance of childhood” as a crucial component of the overall postmodern disappearance of modern definitions of basic social roles and the distinctions derived from them: “men” vs.

Author: Aharon Aviram

Publisher: BRILL

ISBN: 9789087909796

Category: Education

Page:

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This book aims to systematically tackle the most severe crisis to ever beset Western education systems, which stems from the growing clash between the Platonic-modern civilization—still very much at the core of prevailing education systems—and the postmodern civilization which has become dominant in Western societies in the last generations.
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