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There is a world of difference
between the modern home environment of integrated electric information
and, the classroom. Today's television child
is attuned to up-to-the-minute "adult" news--inflation,
rioting, war, taxes, crime, bathing beauties--and is bewildered when he
enters the nineteenth-century environment that still characterizes the
educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured
by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules. It is naturally
an environment much like any factory set-up with its inventories and assembly
lines.
The "child" was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense. Today's child is growing up absurd,
because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow
up. Growing up that is our new work, and it is total. Mere
instruction will not suffice.
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