That’ll Learn ‘em

Reproduced under a Creative Commons License - Courtesy of DrinksMachine on Flickr

I’m tired. So there’ll be a lack of coherency, but that’s fine, I don’t think anybody has any expectations round here.

It’s not often that I have thoughts at nine in the morning. Let alone coherent ones that stay in my head long enough to be interesting.

This, coupled with the fact that aforementioned thought occurred whilst I was making tea and watching ‘Roary: the Racing Car‘ on Channel Five (bastion of trash), leads me to doubt the validity of everything I am about to say. But a week later it is still stuck in my craw/brain.

It’s been a while since I watched a kids tv program, and I forgot just how moralistic they are. Every tale must end with a lesson to share and be nice to people, and be accepting of those that are different and all that jazz.

Now, I have nothing against that particular jazz, in fact, I don’t think a moral sentiment expressed in kids tv isn’t correct, in the most simplest sense. We should be nice, we should share and we should be tolerant. These shows don’t seem to wage into difficult territory, for obvious reasons (now I think about that, Flying Rowan told me a while ago about a show that had sex advice for children, that was remarkably honest about talking about real sex and sexuality in a straight forward way, I’d like to see that, but that’s probably for another post).

Anyway.

There’s nothing wrong with moral lessons, except perhaps that they might just teach children that the tv is where they should go for their moral lessons.

You spend the first (and supposedly most important) five years of a kids life dumping them in front of Thomas, Roary and Bob, being told constantly by the tv to be nice and kind and lovely. You may even then go on to reinforce these messages by referring back to these people/programmes when the issue comes back. I don’t know how parenting works these days, but I’m sure that it must happen sometimes, and I don’t even think it’s necessarily bad for kids to watch telly, as long as they are still being talked to and communicated with and treated as the little humans they are.

Anyway, back to the point.

You teach them to get moral guidance from the weird plastic people on the telly.

Then they grow up a little, and you let them watch Hollyoaks.

Do you see what I’m getting at?

I’m not one to start lambasting television or videogames or whatever new fangled ideas those boffins in the red bricks come up with next. I really do think that there’s little problem with a good healthy dose of fucked up media content. Let’s face it, the kids, much like all of us, are going to be bombarded with this sort of nonsense all their lives no matter what they do.

But do we really want to teach them to learn unquestioningly from it?

The answer is no. The one thing we want to teach them is to be critical of what they see, to look for the machinations and thought processes behind it. Kids today are, according to lots of research I can’t be bothered to find, and plenty of anecdotal evidence from young people I work with, increasingly ‘media-literate’. They are savvy to the ways of the ad exec. They are more aware than you’d expect about the way the world works, and are often wiser than we give them credit for.

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t susceptible to accepting hegenomic norms.

I guess I’m technically asking for less moral programming for kids. Or perhaps just less moralising full stop. Let’s teach our kids to question what happens in front of them, not just listen to the plastic race cars that don’t just tell them what is right, but ask you to buy them in the ad break.

Ooh, I didn’t even think of that. What a lovely way to teach kids to treat other people as commodities. Anthropmorphise everything, and then sell it to them in betwen the shows.

Maybe this is the sign that I’m genuinely becoming and old stick in the mud.

But won’t somebody think of the children?