Word: adatto
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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From Kiku Adatto, director of children's studies at Harvard, we heard that children ought to be viewed as independent, adventurous and playful. She argued that we should recover the 19th century stories of resourceful youths like Huckleberry Finn...
...Adatto worried that children these days are perceived as objects to be manipulated, an attitude which could lead to pornography and abuse. To clarify her point, Adatto screened a series of current art and advertising photographs of children. In one image, the head of a girl is cropped from the photo; in another, a child is posed like a model, torso thrust at the camera...
Unfortunately, Adatto's presentation was a little far-fetched. I was not convinced that art photography was representative of general views of childhood. Indeed, art often views itself as questioning the status quo. Moreover, Adatto's constructive argument that children should be viewed as active agents is obviously only half of the story. We all know that children can at times be fiercely independent, but we all also know that children are almost by definition attention-needy dependents...
Turning from our perceptions of children to the children themselves, Adatto argued that what we need is "a school curriculum to make us critical and reflective readers of the media." This is a very strange goal. Does Adatto expect us to raise a country full of kids capable of sneering, "Reporter X wrote that, well, you can't take it too seriously then. You know, he voted for Perot"? Even if it were possible to transform children into media wonks at the age of eight, why would we want...
Professing his agreement with Adatto, Poussaint discussed the increasing objectification of children in the media as a symbol of changes elsewhere in society...