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Free
the Children
There’s a small playground in Albany bedecked with some of
the funniest spelling-challenged graffiti I’ve seen in a long
time. Just about every piece of play equipment reads somewhere
“Worriers.”
Chris Mercogliano, recently retired director of the Albany
Free School and author of the new book In Defense of Childhood:
Protecting Kids’ Inner Wildness, would probably find this
to be not only a sign of some youthful warriors’ need for
a dictionary, but also an apt description of most of society
when it comes to playgrounds, children’s play in general,
and really all of childhood. Witness the article in my CDPHP
Focus on Health newsletter that arrived as I was finishing
up Mercogliano’s book, which intones, “Most playground injuries
occur because of lack of supervision. Kids who are bored with
using the equipment the right way can find other and more
dangerous ways to use it.” What they don’t explain is how
constant supervision would keep kids from getting bored.
It won’t, says Mercogliano. But it might make them depressed.
Mercogliano’s fourth book is of a more ambitious scope than
his previous three, which tended to rely quite heavily on
specific stories from the Free School (although Teaching
the Restless had a good bit of background research in
it too). His thesis is roughly this: that a combination of
forces—schedules packed full of adult-supervised activities;
huge amounts of schooling that resembles testing boot-camp;
lack of time outside, in nature, or alone; the disappearance
of any real paid work kids can do; and the dominance of electronic
media—is “domesticating” childhood. The result? Kids’ self-determination
and autonomy is essentially being crippled. When they get
to their 20s and are faced with some life challenge they’re
expected to figure out on their own, they just don’t know
how.
Mercogliano prescribes contact with nature, solitude, a chance
to learn to work stuff on their own, and not insulating kids
from every single little risk. It’s a tough message in a world
that believes there’s a violent pedophile behind every bush
and wants babies’ lullabies to do double duty as IQ-enhancers.
Mercogliano knows he’s got a tough sell. About to begin a
national book tour—which he booked primarily on his own—Mercogliano
recounts how the associate director of one very chichi private
school in Marin County, Calif., was excited to have him come
speak but had to check with the director, who was on vacation.
A few weeks later he got a curt e-mail message from the director
saying, “You don’t fit into our parent education plans for
the year.” He chuckled. “I think she must have read the book.”
He’s not surprised, but seems a little wistful for what the
conversations might have been like with a demographic that’s
the epicenter of overmanagement.
He’s also hopeful that his timing is right, as people are
starting, separately, to talk about most of the different
trends that he links together as one whole. “People are starting
to notice,” he says. “We have issues like childhood obesity
facilitating the growing awareness. That’s one so clear—over
20 percent of American children are dangerously fat. Fat enough
to get type 2 diabetes. Children never used to get that. Why
are they getting fat? A culture of childhood where they no
longer go outside, just sit in front of screens.”
“We
have to become more aware of the price involved,” he continues.
“It’s paradoxical. How can there be a price to safety, to
keeping your kids safe? It’s not easy because it’s so counterintuitive.
Still, there is a price. Some of us have to do the work of
pointing that out to people.”
Mercogliano will be gone for two months, talking at colleges,
small alternative schools, and on local radio stations. It’ll
go the way non-celebrity book tours go these days: self-promoting,
staying with acquaintances. And in this case, fueling up the
car, which runs on grease, at various restaurants along the
way. (He had to call ahead to find some, since apparently
out West biodiesel and animal feed companies are starting
to buy up waste oil.) With the help of Beacon Press’s publicist
Mercogliano has gotten his foot in the door at a couple of
choice places, including Washington, D.C.’s Politics and Prose
bookstore, where he is, by his own account, the only unknown
author on their daily roster for months.
At his local book party at Troy’s Market Block Book’s last
Friday (Sept. 14), Mercogliano sat calmly inscribing lengthy
(for a book signing at least) messages into copies of In
Defense of Childhood for parents of children in utero
through their teens as kids nursed, toddled up and down the
store’s internal ramp, never quite got the tablecloth off
the refreshments table, and begged for books on motorcycles.
“It’s the Italian in me,” he explained. “You get a chance
to give a blessing. . . .”
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
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