If Dogs Run Free, Why Not We…

If I had to tell what I’m writing, I couldn’t do it because I’m sick in bed with one of those awful sore throats (think 1000s of little razor blades, a million paper cuts, that sort of thing) which crops up as a symptom in some kinds of viral or bacterial illnesses. For those around me it manifests as a funny case of laryngitis, too, which leads them to make all sorts of jokes about how nice it is that I can’t talk…

So, before I go completely ’round the bend and make time stop its flow by enacting a hissy fit worthy of my inner child (ahem) — something along the lines of (whispered!) ranting about “why me? why me?” — just a couple of pointers. Joel has another installment of The Friday Corral wherein he “corrals” links to some of the interesting stuff he has come across this week. I was amazed by the first couple of Corrals, and this one is no exception: I’m impressed that Joel reads so many blogs, and that he honours this deluge of words to make the lists and categories and links and annotations that fill the Corral, remembering to include this or that, and pulling it all together weekly. Jeee-suss, it makes me feel real slow. There’s really good stuff there, check it out .

Second, Dave Pollard pointed to my piece about access to public parkland in Victoria vs Greater Boston with an entry entitled We Share This Land, and I commented there — possibly as a way of avoiding dealing with my own blog. I guess the not-so-secret corollary to my amazement at Joel’s corralling prowess is Guilty Conscience on my part over sporadic blogging here and even more sporadic responses to the conversations that do at times ensue, as well as sporadic reading of other blogs. To those of you who comment here, I do eventually try to respond, and I always appreciate it when anyone takes the time to comment.

Dave is extending the public access conversation in a thoughtful way, and he’s asking you to tell about your experiences in your community. As I wrote my comment on his blog, I was reminded of kids I knew of or had met in Beverly who didn’t know where Lynch Park was. They did, however, know where to find the Burger King and the Dairy Queen, the Malls on Rt. 128, their school, and the tvs in their homes. But they didn’t know the location of the public library or the public park, both within walking distance of their neighbourhood. Remembering this little tidbit made me speculate that we’re failing kids who know where the palaces of consumption and the palaces of indoctrination are, but the free spaces — the library or the park (and I don’t mean the park with its official “recreation program,” another group indoctrination activity, but simply the park as free thinking space) — those free spaces are increasingly elusive and unknown. That failure happens at both ends of the social spectrum: the overscheduled child, with no time for ruminating randomly in a library or enjoying unstructured time in a park, and the underprivileged child (I’m thinking specifically about the kids I knew of in Beverly) whose parents are functionally illiterate and who have never had bedtime stories read to them, who haven’t a stick of decent furniture in their homes, but who own tvs, and whose lives oscillate between the two prison palaces of regimented consumption and regimented learning. Yes, I knew of kids in Beverly whose parents couldn’t read (not immigrants, but American-born parents) and who therefore didn’t know what bedtime reading was. Just think about that for a second, you Readers: how reading, beginning with others who could read to you, has shaped your life, and imagine that factor wasn’t there.

Ok, now I’m off on a potentially dangerous tangent. You might now wonder why I’m dissing “palaces of indoctrination” where you might at least learn to read. Shouldn’t I champion schools? I won’t, not least because I think that we’re asking schools to do way too much. We keep demanding that they fix things they didn’t break, and when they fail, we demand more of the same. Schools have a key role in society (for too many parents under economic pressures, they unfortunately have too much of a custodial function), but they aren’t a panacea, nor are they completely free of culpability. They didn’t single-handedly tear certain social fabrics, schools didn’t create parental illiteracy, schools don’t bear lone responsibility for the peer-to-peer culture that convinces girls as young as twelve to service older boys sexually, if only to earn “respect” within their own girl-peer group (i.e., it’s not about imagination or pleasure, it’s about work and earning in the relentless capitalist mode). They’re not responsible (entirely) for turning some public parks and streetscapes into peer-structured institutional replicas. But then we think schools should be able to fix everything, and we get mad at teachers or administrators who aren’t miracle workers. When they fail, we demand longer school hours, standardised testing, and more and more homework, until the kids have no free unscheduled time left whatsoever. How about we get mad much earlier, at parents who plunk their young children in front of a tv early in the morning and use the tv as a babysitter throughout the day? Or parents whose lives are so thoroughly mediated and consumption-driven that they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they and their kids found themselves in a public park or in a forest — without a radio, without a tv, with nothing except everything that nature and your mind provides? Would that help? Probably not.

Should we expect schools to be able to fix the Death of Imagination? Why should any child get excited about learning to learn if he or she can’t exercise his imagination freely? Free imagination isn’t “earned” and broken imaginations can’t be fixed institutionally. Perhaps the parks and beaches and nature itself, not the institutions, need to become more proactive: Ents, ent away, kill your tv….

Ok, I really amn’t feeling too well and I need to stop right now, I’m ranting again. I guess Children’s Liberation is my not-so-secret revolutionary subtext, it pushes all my buttons. Kill your tv, go find the park instead. Find the streets, the cafes. Amble, and figure out if your flanerie has any imaginative revolutionary potential left. Meander, avoid the straight roads leading to the Palace.

PS: And yes, the irony of lying in bed with a sore throat and linking to those lurid examples of peer pressure didn’t escape me. See, I gots imagination!
PPS: Of the parents I heard about who couldn’t read, and therefore couldn’t read to their children, I heard that they also didn’t tell their children stories. That is, it’s not the case that they had an oral repertoire to replace the missing book-based one. So, perhaps one of the ways the Death of Imagination takes hold is when people in intimate relation to you don’t make stories a part of the relationship?