Mostly better
House on Red Corner · 2008-02-29
After most of a week of suffering, both EJ and I are feeling much better. We both still have some coughing, sniffling and nose blowing on our collective todo list. The relieving thing is that we are no longer quarantined to the apartment, so yesterday we went to the local library for some out and about time.
The local area has groups of kids who are ushered into the library at somewhat regularly for storytime. One of the librarians is a passable story teller and the kids seems to enjoy, or at least they act interested. They all sit on the floor and quietly face the front. When they are leaving and arriving they all have a buddy to hold hands with and they quietly stand in line and wait to shuffle along to where ever it is that they being taken to. The Bubster does not play along with any of this behavior. She grows bored of the story the librarian is reading, she gets up finds her own book and starts reading it. Then she sits at the little table and colors a picture, and when she wants to, she wanders through the aisles of bookcases.
I n one of my sociology classes, I learned that the behavior of the group of kids above, can be called “institutionalization.” I am certain that at this point in their life it is really not a huge factor, but somewhere along the way of standing in lines, holding hands and sticking together with the group, following the agenda of social norms, these kids will have some of their nature creativity taken away from them and their natural curiousity will be subverted into following group think. It may not be surprising to those who know me, that I’d really wish to avoid that sort of thing with my own child, so we are going to continue to encouraging her to explore things naturally, like a child.
Tags: childlike, learning, philosophy, sociology