One could argue that the root problem is a rotten culture of guys. I do argue that. But in addition to reforming the education and morals of boys, it seems only sensible to me to help keep girls out of some of the obvious snares and pitfalls. This is one of them. There’s no compensatory good to offset the trouble that prematurely sexualized appearance brings.

Do children learn anything about sex from dressing in clothes that would be sexy on an adult, or is it just part of the general case of “children look cute when dressed as miniature grown-ups”? That, I think, is where people who let their kids dress as their favorite Spice Girl(*) differ from people who don’t.

(*) Or whoever. I’m not up on the latest young people’s popular beat combos.

Harry (#51)

If I read you right, you think I must be a troll, a moral imbecile, or a pervert. I don’t think I’m any of those things, but perhaps I’m not capable of being sufficiently objective.

What I was trying to be, in a half-arsed sort of way, was Socratic. The real problem with that letter is that (charitably) all its facts are given on authority and its arguments are entirely implied. I wanted to see if some kind of argument about actual consequences could be teased out of what look to me like the weakest points.

The latter is particularly bad for girls because it encourages them to associate sexualization with fun social interactions. Dressing up is fun. Playing around with images is fun. Getting others’ friendly or admiring attention is fun. These are things that it’s right and proper for kids to do. But when more and more of it is sexualized, girls get less and less practice separating sexual interactions from others, which at least won’t help them and may well hurt when it’s time to fend off men who want sex in situations where the girl’s or woman’s own choice would be to not have it.

In addition, it certainly doesn’t do anything to discourage those men who think of women as basically ambulatory nookie dispensers. A positive emphasis on non-sexual interactions wouldn’t necessarily do the jerks any good, but it would help set the general context against them.

I’m very much in favor of healthy sex as part of a well-balanced life. I’ve long noticed, though, that among the women I know who’ve been abused or assaulted, one of the most common bits of reflective analysis is along the lines of “I was taught that sex was the price of something else that I actually wanted.” None of us guys should be thinking of our wanting to get laid as justifying that kind of price. And the too-early sexualization of appearance and manner for girls feeds into it.

(The comparison points for formal schoolwork I was thinking of weren’t other countries, but other periods of time. I know next to nothing about the formality of early schooling over time, but I’m wondering if the early years weren’t quite formal in, say, the 1940’s, became less formal in the 70’s and are becoming more formal again now?)

One of the difficulties with any accountability regime is this: you are trying to get a sense of what is going on in the school so you can hold the school accountable. But in order to do that the tests need to be reaosnably high stakes for the kids, because you are testing their achievement, so you need to get them to take them seriously. Accountability regimes in the US haven’t dealt with this well; but the culture around testing in the UK means that kids feel a good deal of pressure, and teachers feel pressure to teach the stuff that will be tested (which is only a fraction, if an important fraction, of a rounded primary experience).

“Early formal schoolwork” means early by just about any standards—certainly kids are doing formal schoolwork in reception class, when the kids are one year younger than they would be in Kindergarten in the US, and two years younger (or more, perhaps) than when they would start school in Germany. My sense is that the French start early too, but its unusual. There’s also no reason to believe it is especially effective in triggering early learning—play, and relaxing interaction with caring adults are mostly important for their own sake and for the emotional wellbeing of the kid, but they are also pretty effective for academic learning (we’re talking about young 5 yr olds and 4 yr olds here).

The letter writers aren’t for dumbing down the curriculum or anything like that either—some of them I know are enthusiastic about the national literacy and numeracy strategies (which seem to have been pretty effective at improving literacy and numeracy, though the studies showing that are not methodologically perfect).

The second bit is interesting. My vague across-the-water understanding is that the increase in tests is down to the government’s wanting to standardise education as much as possible, making sure that all kids learn the same thing to the same level at the same time – but the same government is handing over control of some schools to private businesses and encouraging the creation of faith schools, both of which have licence to teach substantially different curricula.

I think this is an interesting point – there certainly seems to be some degree of “well I don’t like seeing children dressed that way” going on in this thread, which is hardly solid justification for claiming that it harms them. Which isn’t to say, of course, that it doesn’t harm them in any way, just that it’d be nice to know what the harm actually is.

“How can complex, nonlinear, and open-ended games like SimCity, Civilization, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion not be cognitively healthy?”

With complete ignorance of the debate on these issues, I spent a great deal of my childhood playing relatively thoughful games (Sim City, Civilisation, Monkey Island), and I’d be intrigued if anyone objected to these sorts of games, which in hindsight I think I probably learnt stuff from.

Don’t tell Velleman…