Peter Levine really misses the mark with his entry on the Moral World of Children. Basically he believes children don’t have morals, and will recreate the Lord of the Flies if they aren’t under constant surveillance by adults who surely know better. I’m gonna call bullshit.

This passage makes the point I’m about to make:

Nevertheless, I think Larkin had a point in the passage quoted above–not about all kids, but about children who are raised the way his generation was in middle-class, provincial England ca. 1930. If you leave children alone to create their own social world and to interact freely with one another, they can indeed be selfish and cruel. In the society of Larkin’s youth, discipline was strict (sometimes even brutal), but adults didn’t interfere much in children’s social world. They punished kids for playing dangerously or for annoying or inconveniencing grown-ups, not for being mean to one another. In fact, adults’ strictness tended to drive children into a separate world in which the stronger kids dominated. Left completely to their own devices, children will make Lord of the Flies.

So the adults were really strict and brutal and the kids who suffered that brutality ended up being brutal to each other. Certainly the cause of that was a lack of adult involvement in their lives. Surely if those adults had just been a bit stricter or a bit more invasive then those kids would have behaved perfectly. Give me a break.

And while this point seems to be lost on a good number of people, Lord of the Flies was about human nature in general, not about the nature of youth. However most people, Levine included I guess, can’t really see past their own ageist biases.

But since I’m ready for sleep I’m not going to repeat myself on this topic since it has been covered before over on the NYRA blog. Read it: Bullying Another Perspective.

I will take one more shot however. He mentions how things should be handled:

But of course you can interfere to make children kind and fair to one another. Or you can integrate kids into families and adult communities so that they don’t have a fully autonomous social world. There is a lot of variation in the degree to which children and adolescents are allowed to form autonomous youth cultures. I think less autonomy is generally better.

How do you make children kind and fair to one another? No doubt by punishing them if they behave otherwise. So if someone does something mean, you teach them to do something nice by being mean to them. Fairness is no doubt learned through your brilliant example of hypocrisy justified by the fact that you, as the adult, are allowed to be mean because you are bigger. Important life lessons to be learned by such a plan to be sure.

I do agree with integrating youth in with the adult community though. That’s one of the many positive benefits that youth rights holds for the world. But “making them be kind” is just a dumb concept.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 2:02 am and is filed under Youth Rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.