Smart Kids Play With Stupid Toys

So, there are only two days standing between me and a diploma from Rochester Institute of Technology.  I will graduate with a Bachelor's of Science degree in Biomedical Photographic Communication.  Sounds sophisticated, I know... Of course it does, Refined is my middle name (*ahem* sarcasm).

Anyway, all of this pressure about growing up has got me thinking about when I was a young, little thing.  I've realized how much has changed since then in terms of technology.  My upbringing was pretty old school.  We began learning cursive in first grade, and were subsequently required to perfect the skill until about eight grade.  By that time the graphite and ink had seeped via passive diffusion into our adolescent veins.

In high school, the skill was irrelevant.  I should mention that I went to a public high school (they had these machines called computers), and the cursive dictators only reigned supreme at the private school I had attended previously.  Handwriting transitioned from a skill to an art, one that I am grateful to have now that I can appreciate artistic things, but as far as functionality was concerned handwriting didn't make the cut.

I had to learn to type.  I taught myself... Kinda.  My keyboarding skills are still well below the average "words per minute" of my peers.  Interestingly enough, I recently learned from a co-worker that her daughter's public school began teaching typing in kindergarten.  She and her husband had to teach their daughter how to write her name in cursive so that she could make a signature later in life.

What effects do these shifts in technology have on children growing up in the "modern" world?  Well, let me tell you a story from when I was about 7 years old:



My bestest friends in the whole wide world when I was 7 were my stuffed aminals (I am aware of the spelling, be creative people).  I loved my stuffed aminals more than any other toy that was given to me.  I would cut the tags off as close as possible to the stitches because that would allow the stuffed aminals to become real.  Real aminals didn't have tags, so why would my aminals want them?  That was how I brought them to life.

At night my stuffed buddies would gather around the outer edges of my bed.  They would guard my bed from any bad things that tried to get me while I slept.  Spiders, ghosties, vampires, and the boogie man had no chance.

During the day, we would have tea party picnics.  My friends would sit on my favorite blanky, and mommy would pour us little cups of tea (which was really just water with far too much sugar in it).  We would tell each other stories, and read each other books (back then all books were printed on paper, and I taught my aminals to turn these things called pages).  The best of the aminals would get to go outside with me.  We would walk to the park, or explore the woods behind my house.  Sometimes mommy would even bring us to the beach!

One day, I had a human friend over to play.  I loved my human friends too.  We ran around outside for a while.  We blew bubbles in the back yard, and chalked the sidewalk with bright colors.  After a while, we went inside to play.

I brought out my stuffed aminals, thinking it would be very nice of me to share, and handed one of them to my human friend.  It was a life-sized cat with orange fur and tiger stripes (one of my favorites).  She looked at me, confused, and said, "What does it do?"

I replied, "What do you mean?"

"Well, does it make cat sounds, or talk, or something?"

"No..."  I was completely bewildered.

"Why do you have it if it doesn't do anything?"

"What do you mean 'if it doesn't do anything,'" I asked.

"I meaaannnnn... If it doesn't meow, or purr, or do cat things when you squeeze it then it's stupid!  It's stupid to play with toys that don't do anything."

"He isn't stupid," I yelled, "He's my cat and I love him!"

Let's just say that the rest of that play date didn't go too well.  I ran crying to mommy pretty quickly, and don't remember her saying much (although I did catch the word "crazy" being mumbled under her breath).  I just didn't understand why other kids couldn't see that my stuffed aminals were alive.



The moral of the story is that technology makes kids stupid.  Well, that's more or less what I'm trying to say, but maybe I should re-phrase it.  Children develop more imagination when more is left to the imagination.  If an audio-recorded cat sound is implanted into a stuffed cat, then "meow" is all that the cat will ever say.  The sound is given to the child, and therefor it is not created by them.  My cats, dogs, and teddy bears all had in depth conversations with me because I created those conversations.  I was not given a "purrrr", and expected to be content with that.  I was able to create.

Toys these days are like smartphones compared to what I used to play with.  They beep, and talk, and dance and are all pre-programmed to keep your child entertained with the same five phrases for hours and hours and hours.  Parents, don't expect your kids to learn much more than those five phrases.  Smart kids play with stupid toys.

This reflection on childhood actually applies in my life today.  Thank God I learned how to write because when I experience serious writers block an LED computer screen just won't snap me out of it.  I have to pick up a pen.  I have to connect, physically, with my words.

I think this is essential in so many creative processes.  There is something to be said for digital photography (I should know; I just spent four years of my life studying it), but there is nothing like walking into a darkroom and developing your own film.  This is something that many of the new photography students never get to experience, and what a horrible absence it creates.  For an artist to be tangibly connected to a process allows for a tangible connection to the product, a pride in one's work.

I pray that there will never be a day when we rely 100% on technology, on what is already given, or on things that so easily fail.