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talkpoliticsThe European parliamentary elections are over, and though as an Icelandic expatriate living in South Africa I am neither eligible for voting there nor am I supposed to be particularly directly affected by the event, I could not help but make a few general observations. And no, I am not going to delve into the intricate labyrinth of European politics, and jump on the analytical bandwagon that has spilled a lot of ink for the last few weeks over the topic of the emerging wave of Eurosceptic fringe nationalist parties across the Old World. I would rather speak from a much more simplistic, or grassroots/human perspective if you like.
Picture the following scene. Half an hour before midnight, you go along the street and you bump into crowds of people all the way. True, it is Saturday night, but the picture is basically the same at weekday nights as well. The town, the size of Albany is somewhere in the Western Cape. I wouldn't say it is particularly exceptional in any way, except maybe for the colony of seals using the nearby rocky beach as their usual habitat.
A few more minutes and midnight will arrive, but the streets are still flocking with children; boys and girls running around in groups, teenagers smiling and laughing and playing football, jumping the rope, talking loudly and having fun in general. I have lived in parts of Europe before (UK, more precisely), and I have been to the US a couple of times for a while, and I think I am not mistaken when I say that such a picture is more like a rarity in such places. All that laughter that cannot be heard on the streets in the UK, the US, Germany or most of Europe for that matter; long forgotten smiles, and loud noise coming from all corners. Kids run past you doing cartwheels, speaking in a palette of languages, kicking a foot-ball made of rags and arguing about the upcoming World Cup. A mother or two peek from behind the nearby cafe, just to check if everything is all right, then resumes her chat with her pals.
For most modern Europeans or Americans, this might sound a bit incredible. An hour or more after midnight, I go back to the hotel next to the beach, and I see a flock of 7-8 year old kids dashing around the alleys in the garden, shaking with laughter. The boys pull the girls' pigtails, and the girls giggle and run away. Not long after that, they will all be sleeping in their beds, exhausted, tired of all the play in the street, never ever caring one bit about videogames, Facebook updates and Tweets.
I never saw a single kid ask the receptionist what the password for the hotel wi-fi was, or where they could charge their iPad, or where the closest gadget store was, or which the most popular Apple or Google app currently was.
But don't get me wrong. These kids still live in 2014, they do wear their neat school uniforms, they do possess smartphones of their own, they know the difference between Snapchat and Viber... but frankly, they do not give too much of a damn about any of that stuff. And that is the difference from what I have seen up there across the Equator. These kids communicate between themselves in the way communication is supposed to be happening, and that helps them go to bed with a smile - exhausted, but smiling... and then wake up again in the morning, asking where their threadbare sneakers and their shorties are, and run on the street, a slice of bread with butter and cheese in hand, looking for their pals.
Initially I decide to follow the example and not ask for the wi-fi password that evening. But on the next morning I cannot resist and I take it from the receptionist anyway. I realise that I have logged on to Facebook and Livejournal nearly a week ago. I log on for a while, just to write a post like this, and to realise that nothing is really happening in Facebook and Livejournal at all. While I am back outdoors, two blocks away from the hotel, all the cafes begin bursting at the seams. People are reading the morning newspapers, speaking loudly, kids are sporting the t-shirts of their fave teams that they will be rooting for at the World Cup...
I open my tablet and check the online news about the recent elections. Even without reading past the first deadlines I am sure that none of all those candidates had ever mentioned (read: lied) that it would be their priority to bring the kids back to the street. I stop browsing through the news after a minute.
Instead, I start looking for more in-depth treatises on children's play and its role for society (poor nerdy me!) Indeed, I did recently find one such research, authored by one David Whitebread of the Cambridge University. He writes that children's play is one of humankind's most important features. Some would contest that by saying work is humankind's greatest invention, but Whitebread is adamant, claiming that his long-time research suggests otherwise. He places children's play next to language and culture as the highest form of human development. "Without games", he writes, "not one of all those human achievements would have been possible". After real children's play follows good emotional health, professional achievements and self-realisation. But only after the games.
Other friends who have seen both worlds (i.e. the ultra-modern world of mass communications and omnipresent Internet technologies, and the world of kids doing cartwheels on the pavement and moms peeking over their shoulder from the cafe while chatting with pals), have confirmed this striking impression. One told me of their experience from visiting this country (she is British; OK, Welsh, more specifically). Some time ago, a few British families spent about two weeks over here, and they found out that their kids were behaving very differently from the local ones. They did spend time together all right, but they were at a loss as to how they should be using such enormous amounts of spare time in an interesting way that would keep them entertained and occupied. Needless to say, it didn't work well without all those hi-tech gadgets. No Playstation and no iPads, and limited or no internet access. There were no pre-programmed games (like on the iPad), so they had to somehow make-do. Their elder siblings and their parents who had grown up in another epoch, the "street epoch" as I call it, were bewildered at the total lack of street-play culture of their younger ones. The kids just did not know how to play and that's it! But give them an iPad each, and they would all sit in a room, together in their solitary self-isolation, and there would be peace and silence. But now without iPads, they even started displaying symptoms of frustration. So it was a tense couple of weeks for everybody rather than laid-back, and things only started to slightly improve towards the end of their stay, when the kids did somehow manage to overcome their "digital abstinence".
Today we substitute children's play with other things, probably deluding ourselves with the excuse that the most recent scientific research seems to suggest how important it is for kids to constantly have modern stuff funneled into their heads from the earliest age. Indeed, I suspect kids are born with innate abilities in handling modern digital technology we of the older generations could have only dreamed about. It is true that in many places around the world, kids start to go to school earlier than ever (like the UK), and visit other forms of education where the curriculum is designed in a way that would stimulate them to learn fast while simultaneously having fun - including the organised forms of sport that Whitebread is talking about. But in the process of all this, we may be forgetting that the most important component of a child's good health, both physical, emotional and intellectual, is the ordinary, simple street game with friends. Not just face-to-face contact, but natural, spontaneous, non-codified, and definitely non-vicarious personal contact. Donning the t-shirt with your fave football team and going out to run, jump, shout and laugh, kick a foot-ball around, and do cartwheels, and pick up bruises, and pull pigtails or have your pigtails pulled and run away giggling.
Having experienced a major professional shift recently, now working in elementary education, I eventually surrendered to my curiosity and came back to that town on the first weekday possible (yesterday), and visited the local school in that small town by the rocky seashore in the Western Cape. Just to feel the atmosphere. And I wasn't disappointed! A most incredible, and yet so ordinary thing was happening there in the morning: parents were driving their kids to school, others were arriving by foot or bike... but I did not see the pretentious kisses that I used to witness while living back in the mega-capital city of a major country from the civilised developed West, or the lame and subtle harassment by school bullies, or the fake showing-off of the parents with the shiny cars and gold watches. There were no luxurious limos or spoiled brats... it was as if I was on another planet, in a parallel reality, in a different epoch. Kids were laughing, and the parents too. Yes, there were traffic jams, even in a small town like that, and people were hurrying for work, but this hurry wasn't quite like *that* hurry, if you see what I mean.
Later that evening the games would start again. Those would be all sorts of games (as per Dr Whitebread's sophisticated classification): physical, object-based, symbolical, socio-dramatic, games with rules... your turn, Dr Whitebread, do finish the list. I got maniacal enough to go check how many children's playgrounds were around town (a town the size of Albany). I soon quit counting. Locals do love their playgrounds, obviously.
But let me disperse the impression that I had somehow found myself in a town from another epoch, deliberately separated from the modern world, like that famous Amish-style Afrikaner settlement that is Orania. No, this town was not in the middle of nowhere, just on the contrary. It was a few minutes away from the suburbs of the big city where I live. There sure is wi-fi internet there, and internet cafes, and big malls, and hi-tech companies, and a university of technologies nearby. There are promising chemists, and classical craftspeople, and all sorts of other folks really. But there is also something more elusive, which in the dull UN, EU and UNESCO documents on children's rights may sound beautiful on paper, but for most places in the presumably developed world means little to nothing: "States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts". The thick books often speak of humankind's striving for a "...world, where children can freely and safely live, play, learn, and develop their full potential, taking full benefit of the available opportunities".
How good, indeed, that I was able to see a place, even in 2014, where all of that is not just some words on paper resting on some dusty bookshelf somewhere in the UN headquarters, but is happening in reality. Perhaps politicians should be visiting such places more often, and see if they know what they are talking about.
I never heard any candidate on these EU elections (or any other elections to that matter) even remotely touch on this subject. None of them ever gave even the vaguest of promises (read: lies) that they would strive to bring the kids back to the street. So they are not getting my vote, even if I had the chance to cast it.
Picture the following scene. Half an hour before midnight, you go along the street and you bump into crowds of people all the way. True, it is Saturday night, but the picture is basically the same at weekday nights as well. The town, the size of Albany is somewhere in the Western Cape. I wouldn't say it is particularly exceptional in any way, except maybe for the colony of seals using the nearby rocky beach as their usual habitat.
A few more minutes and midnight will arrive, but the streets are still flocking with children; boys and girls running around in groups, teenagers smiling and laughing and playing football, jumping the rope, talking loudly and having fun in general. I have lived in parts of Europe before (UK, more precisely), and I have been to the US a couple of times for a while, and I think I am not mistaken when I say that such a picture is more like a rarity in such places. All that laughter that cannot be heard on the streets in the UK, the US, Germany or most of Europe for that matter; long forgotten smiles, and loud noise coming from all corners. Kids run past you doing cartwheels, speaking in a palette of languages, kicking a foot-ball made of rags and arguing about the upcoming World Cup. A mother or two peek from behind the nearby cafe, just to check if everything is all right, then resumes her chat with her pals.
For most modern Europeans or Americans, this might sound a bit incredible. An hour or more after midnight, I go back to the hotel next to the beach, and I see a flock of 7-8 year old kids dashing around the alleys in the garden, shaking with laughter. The boys pull the girls' pigtails, and the girls giggle and run away. Not long after that, they will all be sleeping in their beds, exhausted, tired of all the play in the street, never ever caring one bit about videogames, Facebook updates and Tweets.
I never saw a single kid ask the receptionist what the password for the hotel wi-fi was, or where they could charge their iPad, or where the closest gadget store was, or which the most popular Apple or Google app currently was.
But don't get me wrong. These kids still live in 2014, they do wear their neat school uniforms, they do possess smartphones of their own, they know the difference between Snapchat and Viber... but frankly, they do not give too much of a damn about any of that stuff. And that is the difference from what I have seen up there across the Equator. These kids communicate between themselves in the way communication is supposed to be happening, and that helps them go to bed with a smile - exhausted, but smiling... and then wake up again in the morning, asking where their threadbare sneakers and their shorties are, and run on the street, a slice of bread with butter and cheese in hand, looking for their pals.
Initially I decide to follow the example and not ask for the wi-fi password that evening. But on the next morning I cannot resist and I take it from the receptionist anyway. I realise that I have logged on to Facebook and Livejournal nearly a week ago. I log on for a while, just to write a post like this, and to realise that nothing is really happening in Facebook and Livejournal at all. While I am back outdoors, two blocks away from the hotel, all the cafes begin bursting at the seams. People are reading the morning newspapers, speaking loudly, kids are sporting the t-shirts of their fave teams that they will be rooting for at the World Cup...
I open my tablet and check the online news about the recent elections. Even without reading past the first deadlines I am sure that none of all those candidates had ever mentioned (read: lied) that it would be their priority to bring the kids back to the street. I stop browsing through the news after a minute.
Instead, I start looking for more in-depth treatises on children's play and its role for society (poor nerdy me!) Indeed, I did recently find one such research, authored by one David Whitebread of the Cambridge University. He writes that children's play is one of humankind's most important features. Some would contest that by saying work is humankind's greatest invention, but Whitebread is adamant, claiming that his long-time research suggests otherwise. He places children's play next to language and culture as the highest form of human development. "Without games", he writes, "not one of all those human achievements would have been possible". After real children's play follows good emotional health, professional achievements and self-realisation. But only after the games.
Other friends who have seen both worlds (i.e. the ultra-modern world of mass communications and omnipresent Internet technologies, and the world of kids doing cartwheels on the pavement and moms peeking over their shoulder from the cafe while chatting with pals), have confirmed this striking impression. One told me of their experience from visiting this country (she is British; OK, Welsh, more specifically). Some time ago, a few British families spent about two weeks over here, and they found out that their kids were behaving very differently from the local ones. They did spend time together all right, but they were at a loss as to how they should be using such enormous amounts of spare time in an interesting way that would keep them entertained and occupied. Needless to say, it didn't work well without all those hi-tech gadgets. No Playstation and no iPads, and limited or no internet access. There were no pre-programmed games (like on the iPad), so they had to somehow make-do. Their elder siblings and their parents who had grown up in another epoch, the "street epoch" as I call it, were bewildered at the total lack of street-play culture of their younger ones. The kids just did not know how to play and that's it! But give them an iPad each, and they would all sit in a room, together in their solitary self-isolation, and there would be peace and silence. But now without iPads, they even started displaying symptoms of frustration. So it was a tense couple of weeks for everybody rather than laid-back, and things only started to slightly improve towards the end of their stay, when the kids did somehow manage to overcome their "digital abstinence".
Today we substitute children's play with other things, probably deluding ourselves with the excuse that the most recent scientific research seems to suggest how important it is for kids to constantly have modern stuff funneled into their heads from the earliest age. Indeed, I suspect kids are born with innate abilities in handling modern digital technology we of the older generations could have only dreamed about. It is true that in many places around the world, kids start to go to school earlier than ever (like the UK), and visit other forms of education where the curriculum is designed in a way that would stimulate them to learn fast while simultaneously having fun - including the organised forms of sport that Whitebread is talking about. But in the process of all this, we may be forgetting that the most important component of a child's good health, both physical, emotional and intellectual, is the ordinary, simple street game with friends. Not just face-to-face contact, but natural, spontaneous, non-codified, and definitely non-vicarious personal contact. Donning the t-shirt with your fave football team and going out to run, jump, shout and laugh, kick a foot-ball around, and do cartwheels, and pick up bruises, and pull pigtails or have your pigtails pulled and run away giggling.
Having experienced a major professional shift recently, now working in elementary education, I eventually surrendered to my curiosity and came back to that town on the first weekday possible (yesterday), and visited the local school in that small town by the rocky seashore in the Western Cape. Just to feel the atmosphere. And I wasn't disappointed! A most incredible, and yet so ordinary thing was happening there in the morning: parents were driving their kids to school, others were arriving by foot or bike... but I did not see the pretentious kisses that I used to witness while living back in the mega-capital city of a major country from the civilised developed West, or the lame and subtle harassment by school bullies, or the fake showing-off of the parents with the shiny cars and gold watches. There were no luxurious limos or spoiled brats... it was as if I was on another planet, in a parallel reality, in a different epoch. Kids were laughing, and the parents too. Yes, there were traffic jams, even in a small town like that, and people were hurrying for work, but this hurry wasn't quite like *that* hurry, if you see what I mean.
Later that evening the games would start again. Those would be all sorts of games (as per Dr Whitebread's sophisticated classification): physical, object-based, symbolical, socio-dramatic, games with rules... your turn, Dr Whitebread, do finish the list. I got maniacal enough to go check how many children's playgrounds were around town (a town the size of Albany). I soon quit counting. Locals do love their playgrounds, obviously.
But let me disperse the impression that I had somehow found myself in a town from another epoch, deliberately separated from the modern world, like that famous Amish-style Afrikaner settlement that is Orania. No, this town was not in the middle of nowhere, just on the contrary. It was a few minutes away from the suburbs of the big city where I live. There sure is wi-fi internet there, and internet cafes, and big malls, and hi-tech companies, and a university of technologies nearby. There are promising chemists, and classical craftspeople, and all sorts of other folks really. But there is also something more elusive, which in the dull UN, EU and UNESCO documents on children's rights may sound beautiful on paper, but for most places in the presumably developed world means little to nothing: "States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts". The thick books often speak of humankind's striving for a "...world, where children can freely and safely live, play, learn, and develop their full potential, taking full benefit of the available opportunities".
How good, indeed, that I was able to see a place, even in 2014, where all of that is not just some words on paper resting on some dusty bookshelf somewhere in the UN headquarters, but is happening in reality. Perhaps politicians should be visiting such places more often, and see if they know what they are talking about.
I never heard any candidate on these EU elections (or any other elections to that matter) even remotely touch on this subject. None of them ever gave even the vaguest of promises (read: lies) that they would strive to bring the kids back to the street. So they are not getting my vote, even if I had the chance to cast it.
(no subject)
Date: 3/6/14 18:16 (UTC)...But then I had second thoughts. When I look around, I realize that no, we aren't that different.
Ohmigosh! We've become Westerners in every respect, good and bad! But mostly bad! Because we've got much to learn yet in terms of the good stuff! :-S
(no subject)
Date: 3/6/14 19:24 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 3/6/14 21:16 (UTC)This is sad. True and sad. In today's modern world, people end up treading among crowds of strangers while remaining alone, and many of them don't even personally know the majority of their most immediate neighbors, have never exchanged more than a nod with them on their busy mornings, have never looked them in the eye and don't know their names. Cities crowded with lonesome people who are engulfed in their own little worlds, consuming carefully pre-packaged media products, being spoon-fed whatever talking points are passing for politics these days, believing they're better off than most others out there in the broad scary world that's so full of misery and pain... and with dust-covered, barefoot kids doing cartwheels on the pavement.
Alas, that is the modern world.
And then, here's the Third World, basking in its presumed backwardness.
Gorgeous heartfelt post all throughout.
(no subject)
Date: 5/6/14 17:04 (UTC)That may be easier said than done though - my brother is like-minded and actually has kids, so I thought it was a little weird to learn he took them trick-or-treating up at a local gym, with booths set up inside that they walk up to and ask for candy the same way we did to houses in days of yore. He explained that was the only option now, that the neighborhood shut down and everyone went up to the gym - so staying behind and knocking on doors wouldn't do much good.
I figured I'd be double my current age before I'd be shaking my head at how things are compared to how they used to be...but I see the appeal of absolute safety, I assume that's the goal...I hope it's worth it...
On the upside, I probably see someone run into a wall/door/display/shopping cart while texting at least once a month now, and it's hilarious. Every time.
(no subject)
Date: 6/6/14 06:26 (UTC)Or to ride a horse on a TV screen...
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