At 12:57 PM -0700 7/19/96, Mike Duvos wrote:
David Sternlight <david@sternlight.com> writes:
This is simply incorrect. It is a supportable advocacy for most adults, but children's minds tend to be like sponges--everything they take in (up until a certain age) is thought to be true, interesting, worth experimenting with, based on authority, etc. Read Piaget.
Piaget was very good at "proving" how fundamentally different the minds of children were from those of adults, and at constructing elaborate webs of complex terminology and doctrine to support his notions.
There are many others who have come to similar conclusions about the formation of independent judgement in children, and lots of non-Piaget experiments. Your comments are diversionary and in fact by the end of your post you come to agree with my basic point.
Again, we are applying a standard to the Net which has never been applied to libraries. Any orthodox Jewish child can read all he or she wants in a library about the wonders of pig-eating, without any possibility of parental supervision or disclosure of their un-Jewish interests.
That is also false in its implications. Librarians are in loco parentis, and most libraries are VERY careful about what materials young children are exposed to and what is more, are responsive to community pressure in the matter since most libraries are community-based. Again you have seized on the details of an example to act as if it were the argument itself, and nit-picked. My core point remains unrefuted.
Generally, very young children do not have the neural wiring in place to suspend emotional reactions to imagery based on intellectual considerations. Seeing an picture of someone being hurt in a movie causes them the same emotional pain as seeing someone hurt in real life, even though they may know perfectly well that the former image is fictional in nature.
Almost all children develop this important critical faculty by the age of 12, by which point, they manage to only be sickened by the evening news, and not by the latest "Nightmare on Elm Street" sequel.
So after trying to refute my point, you come to agree with it and want to shift the issue to the question of at what age.... I'm not competent to assess that nor, I assert, are you; I suggest it varies with the child and it's up to the individual parent to make those subtle distinctions, issue by issue, child by child.
While limiting the "horizons" of persons in their middle to late teens is often justified by arguments about developmental stages, the truth is that it is simply an attempt by their keepers to control how they think and to what views, mostly political and social in nature, they are exposed to.
Now you've really got me on the ropes to understand you. As I parse the above sentence it says limiting is often justified but it might not be. What kind of definitive conclusion is that? I suggest none, and your bottom line is that it's case by case. If so, it's up to the parents to figure out where THEIR kid is on the scale--nobody else has as much time, motivation, or opportunity to observe. David.