Is Modern Culture Ruining Childhood?

955 Words2 Pages

Is Modern Culture Ruining Childhood?
Modernity is one of the most important periods in the human intellectual history. Philosophers and historians claim that it has started somewhere in the middle of the 19th century. Modernity is based on the project of “modernization” (rationalization and scientification of the world in order to make it a better place to live). This project was born in the middle of the Western civilization and it was considered that it is heading the only direction - towards the progress. That is why Europeans and Americans thought that the entire world should align them. A lot of children in different countries got access to the basic education and started spending a lot of their time in schools or other educational institutions. It is inevitable to not to consider and to analyze how the modern models of education and culture (including popular culture) influence childhood. This theme is quite a discussion nowadays, however, one things do change.
First of all in order to understand what happened with the childhood nowadays, I’d like to view some historical examples. In the 1920th a new type of state was created. That was the USSR, founded on the ground of the former Russian Empire. It was the first “communist” state that defined itself as a brand new historical type of the society and a brand new type of human (Mickenberg, p.104). The soviet ideology was based on the idea that the behavior is mostly formed under the influence of the environment. That’s why in the USSR, government created a powerful propaganda in the different spheres, especially schooling. Schools were treated as a storehouse, used to put the necessary information in the children's' heads. In the USSR, people were strongly controlled by state...

... middle of paper ...

...o centuries. Thanks to the development of health care and education, lots of people had a chance to have a normal childhood without suffering from illness, poorness and bad social environment. But it wasn’t as easy as it look from the first view. The traditional family has changed, leaving place for such an institutions, as kindergarten and school. On the one hand, for children this wasn’t so bad. Professional teachers gave much better education than anybody could receive at home. But on the other hand, children were deprived of the part of communication with their parents, especially on the emotional level. Besides that, the other problem is a commercialization of the youth in the adverts and entertainment market. Of course, this process has, both positive and negative sides, but mostly they cause the disappearance of the childhood as an important life stage.

Open Document