What do you think of when you are presented with the word “childhood?” Does it involve being cared for, innocence, playing, happiness, and education? Around the world there are so many children for which this is not the reality. Many children live in poverty and hunger; others are forced to live with the effects of war or disease. Many children have to work to survive and often education is not even an option.
I have to caution, this is a depressing topic. When I watched the videos I saw the immense differences in the experience of childhood based on the conditions in which the children found themselves. Some children do not have clean water to drink while we have clean water for drinking, washing, swimming, and even to water the grass. Some children do not have enough to eat while we are struggling with unnecessary obesity, overconsumption, and food wastage. Many children have to work hard just to survive while we associate holding a job with adulthood and a pay check. Many live in poverty and fear for their lives while we enjoy the comforts of our homes and the relative safety of our communities. Many children have never gone to school while we see post secondary education as common. The list goes on but the main point is there is a huge discrepancy between childhood around the world. Indeed, the very meaning of the term is socially constructed.
If you would like to watch these videos, you can use the links below. But, before you do, ask yourself what do you associate with the term “childhood” and what has influenced this association?
- Social construction of childhood
- If the world were a village of 100
- If the world were a village
- Poverty education, amazing statistics
- Images of child poverty around the world
How does this affect us as teachers going into the classrooms in a developed country? How can we make a difference? What about poverty in our own community? Is knowledge really power or is something more than just knowledge needed to affect change? How can education on this topic lead to change? The questions are endless.
I think it is important that we stop and reflect on how lucky we are to be able to think of childhood with a smile on our faces. Do we take this for granted?
2 comments:
Yes child poverty is a depressing topic and kudos for taking it on.
When I think of childhood, I think of times spent playing on the beach, walking to school, sometimes being late because there was an interesting puddle, and always knowing that I had parents and family to take care of me.
Excellent that you do argue, quite effectively, that the concept of childhood is a cultural construct.
And I am not naive to the prevalence of child poverty.
I just have two issues to address with your post.
First: you only briefly mention poverty "in our own community." Poverty in Canada is an issue. The following is taken from a Statics Canada article:
About 760,000 children under 18 years of age, or 11.3%, lived in low income families in 2006, also unchanged [in 2008]. About 307,000, or 40%, of these children lived in a lone-parent family headed by a woman. In fact, about one in three children living with a single mother were in low income.
So there is a chance that you will have to address child poverty in your own classroom.
Second: I think a great class project would be to either have the class develop a website on child poverty and/or sponsor a child and/or organise a used clothing drive and/or help out a homeless shelter. I believe that educating students on child poverty alone will not be enough. It would be more effective to involve them in becoming part of the solution.
As we're piling the gifts for the kids under our tree yesterday, I turned to my wife and said, "This is making me feel kind of guilty -- there are like a billion people in the world that don't have clean water, and our kids have all this" I'm a long-time supporter of the Unitarian Service committee (56 sparks street, Ottawa) and we're taking five boxes down to the foodbank in January, but really, that's not even scratching the surface of the problem. Why do we even have foodbanks? They started as an emergency temporary measure, and yet here they are decades later, a structural feature of the system -- whatever happened to taxes and social welfare.... All that talk about ending child poverty by 2010. Good luck with that.... its frustrating and depressing. But I am encouraged to see student teachers tackling the issue within the context of their own classrooms....
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