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Our Cultural Diet is Changing, for Better or Worse When we hit the word “barium,” I knew I was reading a children’s book from a different era. Curious George had swallowed a puzzle piece which precipitated a trip to the hospital. To prepare George for the x-ray, the nurse not only gave him barium to drink, but explained to him, and therefore to my son and any other child reader, how drinking metal aids diagnosis. When George’s famous friend, the man with the yellow hat, leaves him for the evening, George cries the whole night before the operation. There is a picture of Curious George with actual monkey tears streaming down his cheeks. In the morning, Nurse Carol gives George a shot. The nurse warns, “It’s going to hurt, George, but only for a moment.” When George wakes up from the operation, he feels “sick and dizzy. His throat was hurting too. He was not even curious about the new book.” Curious George is not curious? Crying at night? Getting popped with needles? Swallowing puzzle pieces? Drinking barium? I thought to myself, what kind of children’s book is this? Then I looked at the copyright. Margaret and H.A. Rey’s “Curious George Goes to the Hospital” was published in 1966 in collaboration with the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston. Our US librarian, Sue Smith, confirmed that “Curious George Goes to the Hospital” is still used to orient children to hospitals because of its realism. 1966 was not so long ago, but the book was clearly written during an era when the sharp edges of reality were not necessarily smoothed away for children. The earliest iteration of the Grimm’s fairy tale “Cinderella” is full of sharp edges – literally. At the end of the story, the two evil stepsisters, for their wickedness towards Cinderella, are treated with pigeons pecking out their eyeballs from their sockets. Also, both sisters, at the behest of their own mother, cut off a part of a foot – one the toe and the other the heel – to ensure their feet fit into the slipper to pass the prince’s test. It is blood on the slipper that tips off the prince to the evil sisters’ imposter status. We didn’t see this in the Disney movie. John Silber, president emeritus at Boston University, in his book “Straight
Shooting,” quotes aphorisms from the “New England Primer,” an early educational book used to teach the letters of the alphabet to children. For Q, the aphorism reads “Queens and Kings must lie in the dust.” For T, “Time cuts down all, the great and small.” For X, “Xerxes the Great shared the common fate.” Silber points out that children, even before they learned to read, were acquainted with death, the “common fate” of everyone regardless of circumstance.1 Trying to wean my son from Curious George, we veered into Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes, and I encountered this nice little ditty: Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he ’live, or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread. I am not suggesting that we have to present children with the rough edges of reality too early. In earlier generations, when young children assumed responsibility for the family much earlier and life expectancies were much shorter, acquainting children with reality was a point of survival. Not so today. We have the luxury of nurturing infancy until the age of 35. Adults may still be searching for their true path in life at 50. We live in the Age of Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” We still have some challenges that define our generation of parenting though. We have almost no hesitation about exposing our children to provocative or violent media and we pile on responsibilities of another sort, whether they are homework or piano lessons or saving small villages in Nicaragua. We may laugh a little scornfully at the politically incorrect nursery rhymes and aphorisms of yesteryear, but how will history view the cultural diet we feed our young today? The good news is that no generation gets it perfectly right and each can learn from the past.
1 Silber, John, Straight Shooting, Harper Collins, 1990.
Fourth Research Symposium Shows Off New Home and Impressive Work The Nichols Hall atrium was the setting for a confluence of art and science at Harker’s fourth annual science research symposium, New Frontiers, in mid-March. Over 300 attendees enjoyed breakfast, The Science of Art display in the upstairs gallery and music by the Harker String Quartet while viewing student presentations on site and streamed via the Internet.
answered questions from both guests and each other. Vikram Sundar, Gr. 7, sought out faculty mentor Rajasree Swaminathan, MS science teacher, and the Science Research Club to support his look at the use of capacitors to provide a steady current to charge solar lithium-ion batteries. “Research is a lot of fun,” Sundar said. “You can make it your own.”
All told, there were 37 MS and US presentations, 22 student papers, two alumni presenters from the class of 2004 and two keynote speakers.
“Kids argue logic and reasoning with one another, and challenge each other to do better and better,” said Huali G. Chai, mother of Siemens semifinalist Andrew Stanek, Gr. 12.
With enthusiasm and confidence, students presented their work and
Harker News — May 09
Papers were given on topics
ranging from a survey of insect pollinator biodiversity on plants in Costa Rica to the activation of two proteins by airborne particulates relative to lung damage. Emily Carr, Gr. 12, credited her faculty mentor, biology teacher Kate Schafer, with inspiring her to take Harker’s research class and develop her work on the effect of estrogens on sea urchins. “The class was terrific and Harker was very supportive,” Carr said. Intel finalist Denzil Sikka, Gr. 12, credited Harker’s research class with the opportunity and support to develop a new algorithm for aligning large data sets. “Harker
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