Education

The budget is giving me tired-head and creeping doom feeling, plus I completely agree with Jon. The American people have been conditioned to believe they should pay no taxes and get whatever the hell they want from the government.

How have they been so conditioned? By the organ of the state which is the public education system. I'm not one for vast any-wing conspiracies, but I do believe that explains the blatant tone of outrage in this article: State of Play

This is KidZania, a multinational chain of family entertainment centers, where kids try out professions that have been downsized, simplified, and made fun. At these soccer field-size franchises in malls from Tokyo to Lisbon, children play at being adults.

Children can play surgeon, detective, journalist, courier, radio host, and dozens more jobs. They can buy and sell goods at the KidZania supermarket, take KidZania currency that they earn to an operational bank staffed with adult tellers, and be security guards escorting KidZania currency around the park. They can assemble burgers and pizzas, which they can then eat, or give makeovers to other paying children. At the planned KidZania Santiago, Chile, minors will be able to play at being miners. One-size-fits-all costumes supersize the cute factor. The result of all this is mass-produced adorability.

Now to me this sounds like the sort of thing I would have enjoyed as a kid. Come on, who doesn't love to play on giant models? I'd be the kid play-acting bank runs, crane fatalities and mining disasters, but that's what underpaid teenagers are supposed to supervise for.

The outrage in the article comes not from the fact that you can't simulate capitalism's real-world hiccups, but that the education in trades comes with a logo:

But when the children are learning factory work, it’s in a job bottling Coca-Cola, and when they’re working at a restaurant, that “restaurant” has golden arches. The dentist office is sponsored by Crest. The plane fuselage visible from the airport-style departure gate through which you access each KidZania franchise is branded, too. Corporate sponsorship is crucial to the KidZania concept. Companies can sponsor generic job activities, and other jobs are specifically built around the participating brands. Some sponsors fit awkwardly in the park: Selling Chevrolet to children is tough. The answer in these situations is often to put up a few computers in a booth where children can interact with the brand—in the Chevrolet case, by designing a customized Camaro.

How horrifying. But consider: I have a five-year-old son. When I ask him what he learned in kindergarten on any given day he shrugs, but he can recite jingles for Verizon Wireless. And we don't let him watch much TV, and much of that is DVRed, which means he is picking such things up almost instantly. Perhaps the real resentment here is not that corporations are teaching our kids, which was going to happen anyway, but that they're really, really good at it.

Childhood is plenty commercialized before we do anything to help train a new generation of consumers to be as greedy, materialistic, and self-centered as we adults are. Instead of supporting free play in the fresh air, or role-play that comes anywhere near teaching empathy or compassion, KidZania teaches children the importance of the next paycheck. It’s incredible that they can get it all so wrong. After all, it’s child’s play.

This of course reminds me of Toffler's complaint about what public education is for:

Let's look back at the history of public education in the United States. You have to go back a little over a century. For many years, there was a debate about whether we should even have public education. Some parents wanted kids to go to school and get an education; others said, "We can't afford that. We need them to work. They have to work in the field, because otherwise we starve." There was a big debate.

Late in the 1800s, during the Industrial Revolution, business leaders began complaining about all these rural kids who were pouring into the cities and going to work in our factories. Business leaders said that these kids were no good, and that what they needed was an educational system that would produce "industrial discipline."

Which is what they got. If your child is being programmed to operate a crane, you might as well have it done as educationally and entertainingly as possible. I'm sure the author of the KidZania piece would be horrified by the idea of ditching public education, but the purpose is exactly the same as KidZania's.

Somehow, somewhere between adult-guided crane operating classes and the Tiger Mother technique of browbeating the kids until they play the violin perfectly, America still manages to produce small numbers of people who can think. I'm amazed that that's the case. I don't know if places like KidZania could help, but they could hardly hurt.