Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/institutionalized-childhoods-reconsidering-our-part-in-the-lives-of-children/5010063/
Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder: as if creating rose and bathed in light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when we have gotten used to existence, one has become an adult.- Eugene Ionesco
The noticeable thing in New Zealand society is the body of people with their inner resources atrophied. Seldom have they had to reach inward to grasp the thing that they wanted. Everything, from material requirements to ideas, is available ready-made. . . . They can buy life itself from the film and radio-canned life. . . . They dried up. From babyhood they had shiny toys put in their hands, and in the kindergarten and infant rooms bright pictures and gay materials. Why conceive of anything of their own? They have not the need. The vast expanses of mind that could have been alive with creative activity are now no more than empty vaults that must for comfort's sake be filled with non-stop radio, and their conversation consists of a list of platitudes and clich‚s. ...