Children, it would seem, not only know there is value in being
different from adluts, but care that a distinction be made; they
know, perhaps better than adults, that something terribly
important is lost if that distinction is blurred.
ix
American culture is hostile to the idea of childhood.
ix
Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.
xi
I had not imagined how pleasant it can be to acknowledge that
one's imaginative reach for solutions goes no farther than one's
grasp of the problem.
xii
Even the idea of a children's game seems to be slipping from our
grasp. A children's game, as we used to think of it, requires no
instructors or umpires or spectators; it uses whatever space and
equipment are at hand; it is played for no other reason than
pleasure. But Little League baseball and Pee Wee football, for
example, not only are supervised by adults but are modeled in
every possible way on big league sports. [...] Children's games,
in a phrase, are an endangered species.
4
In a literate world, to be an adult implies having access to
cultural secrets codified in unnatural symbols. But in a
nonliterate world, there is no need to distinguish sharply
between the child and the adult, for there are few secrets [...]
14
[...] one finds that in the Middle Ages childhood ended at age
seven. Why seven? Because that is te age at which children have
command over speech. They can say and understand what adults can
say and understand. [...] this helps us to explain why the
Catholic Church designated age seven as the age at which one was
assumed to know the difference between right and wrong, the age
of reason.
14
