From Womb to Tomb, a Society Hellbent on Keeping Busy

“This world is too much with us; late and soon,” Wordsworth lamented of his day. How much more so would he say of our day?

I contemplated this after listening to my father share his angst over my little brother’s latest second-grade classroom project. (Yes, I have a 7-year-old brother--what can I say? I’m from a ‘90s family.)

Apparently my brother’s teacher had assigned each of her students a multimedia presentation on a famous person. My brother had chosen John F. Kennedy.

His presentation consisted of full-color photocopies depicting America of the 1960s, maps and charts illustrating the world’s “hot spots” during Kennedy’s presidency and quotations from Kennedy’s most noted speeches. For the most part, this report was put together by my father and his wife within their harried schedules, split between full-time careers and family life. Yet nothing less would do for this Central Valley public magnet school.

The day before the presentation, my father had frantically hunted the Internet to supplement the material my brother had already gathered with his mother at the library over the weekend. Dressed in his double-breasted suit with his portfolio of presentation aides under his arm, my brother made his way to his second-grade class fully prepared for “his talk on JFK”--including the Cuban missile crisis, civil rights issues and the assassination. The only thing about my brother’s report that smacked of true 7-year-old interest was his desire to dress up like the late president. Apparently, he had chosen JFK because “I think I kinda look like him and it would be fun to pretend I was the president.”

That flex of the imagination is about the only redeeming quality I see in this incredibly overblown assignment.

“Geez,” my father had sighed during our recent phone conversation, “I don’t remember going through all of this when you were in school.”

“That’s because, Daddy, when I was in the second grade, we were reading ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ and wondering if we would have lied to our fathers had we chopped down the cherry tree.”

Although I grew up with nightly footage depicting Vietnam War horrors, civil rights injustices and reports of the Zodiac killer, school was still a place of relative innocence.

Unlike the students of today, we weren’t expected to carry the burden and guilt of our parents. We were allowed to be children.

As an educator and a parent of my own 7-year-old, I’m both amazed and dismayed at the amount and level of work our elementary school children are asked to accomplish. Rather than simply focus on basic skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic, our primary grade students are being asked to demonstrate “integrated skills acquisition” and “interdisciplinary cognition.”

This means it is not enough to simply read a story to learn new vocabulary, grammar and syntactical structure, but that those skills must be integrated with the learning of science concepts, numerical word problems comprehension, historical and cultural awareness and computer literacy.

In short, the prevailing philosophy behind much of primary education today--causing no small amount of anxiety among parents as well as our children--is known as “metacognition” or “higher learning.”

The logic goes, “Why just teach basic concepts when you can introduce, if not teach, the whole enchilada?” Questions remain, however, as to just how much of a given concept a child can absorb at a given time. Most of us learn step by step, concept by concept. Yet, we as a society seem almost neurotic in our fervor to cram knowledge into our kids.

When I was pregnant with my daughter seven years ago, I remember a well-meaning relative giving me “uterine educational tapes” I could play for my developing fetus. After I gave birth, I received flier after flier about programs designed to give my child the “developmental” edge. Working and nonworking parents alike are encouraged, if not pressured, into engaging their preschool and primary-age schoolchildren in workshops and programs whose sheer number and diversity rival activities developed for senior citizens (that other group of people we don’t know what else to do with). From the womb until the tomb, we seem a society hellbent on keeping everybody busy.

I wonder, between time spent in the classroom and time spent in after-school day-care programs, coupled with Parks and Recreation weekend activities, where does a child get the time to be a kid?

How many of our kids are organizing their own game of tag with kids down the street?

How many are making their own “science projects” in the form of magic potions concocted from everyday kitchen sundries?

How many kids, after an educator-guided tour of the beach, still believe that those sea-smoothed pieces of colored glass are actually baubles from a sunken pirate ship, or simply must they take with them the lesson that man is an “Eco-beast” who litters Mother Earth not with treasures but with wanton waste?

I will never forget the reaction of my high school students to a segment of an old black-and-white movie that depicted an African safari in which animals were shot and killed. My students were horrified by the death of a water buffalo--yet in the same breath they requested that I bring in a really good movie, like “Pulp Fiction.” When I asked them if they would be disturbed by all the violence and carnage in that movie, more than a few replied, “That’s nothing; they’re just killing people and we’re overpopulated anyway.”

I thought of youthful Miranda in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” who joyfully exclaimed upon the discovery of other humans there within the shelter of her paradise island, “O brave new world that has such people in’t!”

How many of our elementary school-age children would say the same? How many of our children who are expected to understand the concepts of sociopolitical awareness as opposed to dress up, ecological devastation as opposed to mud puddles, science as opposed to magic, and organized sports as opposed to backyard fun, will as adults echo the words of Shakespeare’s wise old Prospero, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”

The world is too much with our children, I fear.

Why not endeavor to keep them playing upon this isle of innocence for just a few more years?