ExchangeEveryDay Past Issues

Alison Gopnik is correct. It is important to insist that child care for all is quality for the children. It seems in order to receive funding or support nationally or statewide there has to be a monetary return that effects adults in a quantifiable manner or avoidance of child abuse, criminal behavior or more productive adults. Quality for all children, in all economic and all cultural groups is enough to expect quality well educated staff and quality regulations and quality facilities.

I totally agree with Alison Gopnik. Someone much wiser than me (Lord Nuffield) said, "the best preparation for adulthood is a happy and fulfilling childhood". We have to focus on what children need to have fulfilling, happy childhoods; not on preparing them to be adults. Childhood should be viewed as important in and of itself. Period.

This weekend while going through an old steamer trunk owed by my Victorian grandfather I found a copy of Jack London's People of the Abyss that was published in 1903. As I scanned the pages I realized this was Mr. London's treatise on the state of affaires in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Mr. London spent a year on the East side of London talking to people and hanging out in the slums. He described the children hungry in the streets and their parents working long hours in deplorable conditions for very little pay. Just like you, he bewailed the injustice of it all and spoke eloquently about the ability of the new farming industry to serve far more people and produce more food. Surely the issues of hunger and poverty will go away now that we can produce more food and feed more people for much lower costs. One hundred and eleven years later the slums still exist and children are still going hungry, despite FDR's "chicken in every pot" and LBJ's "War on Poverty".

Today we know what it takes to raise healthy and happy children. We know how the brain develops and why children in poverty have more learning problems and fall behind their peers early in their education. But we still have not cracked the code that feeds greed so the hearts of the "Job Creators" can be soften and all can benefit from the abundance of the earth .

"But surely there is something a little crazy about thinking that children should be healthy so that adults will be more productive, or that children should be happy so that adults will be less violent. You would think that if there is anything in the world that we can all agree on is an unequivocal good, a moral absolute, an end in itself, it is the happiness and health of children. "

I love what Alison Gopnik does--her work and the ways in which she communicates and supports her research. I think if I had a magic wand, I would become Alison Gopnik.

The passage I've quoted, above, perplexes me. Dr. Gopnik points out that we seem to have culturally isolated childhood from humanhood. (I would say we also isolate elderhood from humanhood.) How have we come to view "adultness" as more valuable than other times in life? If we reach our adulthood without understanding--having experienced--goodness, morality, happiness and health, how can we know these let alone have the ability to agree upon these?