Childism and Grimms Tales

Childism and the Grimms' Fairy Tales or How We Have Happily Rationalized Child Abuse through Storytelling A week ago I participated in a Huffington Post Internet panel discussion about fairy tales with three people, who began waxing poetic about the wonders of the fairy tale and how it benefited children à la Bettelheim. I, too, was a little guilty of this, not of waxing poetic about Bettelheim, but about the utopian qualities of the fairy tale. And then, at one point, I blurted out something like: "We've been talking too much about the virtues of fairy tales, while they're really terrible! They're sexist and racist! They stem from patriarchal societies, and depict white men as saviors and women as comatose and barbie-doll princesses." Everyone laughed, and then we became serious shifting the topic to discuss some of the negative qualities of fairy tales, but we did not go far enough in our ideological critique. We did not discuss the childist aspects of fairy tales and how the tales reveal prejudices against children and young people, and how they might partially socialize children to accept the abuse they suffer, even today, without realizing it. So now I want to make up for a lapse in the Huffington discussion, and I want to focus first on the subtle and not so subtle childist aspect of the Grimms' fairy tales and then relate the abuses that they reflect to Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's significant work, Childism, which is one of the most important studies of child abuse that has appeared in recent years and has not received the public attention that it serves. Of course, the Grimms' tales have never had to worry about neglect of attention. It is almost as if they are embedded within us despite their so-called Germanic origins.Yet, there are childist aspects of the tales that we have ignored, and I would like to begin by exploring how numerous tales in their famous collection are geared to rationalize the manner in which adults use and exploit children and encourage children to devote themselves to parents and sovereigns without questioning how they are treated. There are links between authors, authority, and authoritarianism. Let me begin with two tales that may lay the groundwork of our analysis of the childist aspects of the Grimms' tales. The Stubborn Child (1812) Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him and let him become sick. No doctor could cure him, and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. After he was lowered into his grave and was covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the ground with fresh earth, but that didn't help. The little arm kept popping out. So the child's mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth. The Stubborn Child (2008) Anna Maria Shua In the section of their work dedicated to children's legends, the Brothers Grimm refer to a popular German story that in its time was considered an appropriate cautionary tale for children. A stubborn boy was punished by God with illness and death, but after all that, he still didn't mend his ways. His pale little arm, with its hand like an open flower, would poke out of the grave time and time again. Only when his mother gave him a good swat with a hazelnut stick, did his little arm slip below the earth again, proof that the child had found peace. Those of us who have passed by that cemetery know, however, that it still creeps out whenever he thinks no one's looking. Now it's the strong and hairy arm of an adult man, with fingers cracked and nails encrusted with dirt from struggling to force its way up and down. Sometimes the hand makes obscene gestures, surprisingly modern ones, which philologists assume are meant for the Brothers Grimm. Ana María Shua, Quick Fix: Sudden Fiction, trans. Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, illustr. Luci Mistratov (Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2008): 164. Shua is a contemporary Argentinean writer, who brilliantly exposes the childist and sexist features of the Grimms' tales, and I might add, she also speaks to the resilience of the young still within the hearts of older people as we seek to defy the cultural system that has whipped us into characters with habituses that can be manipulated in arbitrary ways. Indeed, a critique of this tale requires us to question the arbitrary power of a make-believe god who actively strikes down an independent child and uses the child's mother to carry out his dirty work. And it is dirty work that the mother performs in the name of a fictitious god. But in reality she must clean up and cover up the crimes adults commit against children. Most people have never read "The Stubborn Child" or are aware that it is a Grimms' tale, and this is because we do not want to read tales, especially a Grimm's tale, which exposes the brutality of adults so openly. We prefer to sugar-coat our selection of the Grimms' tales and seek out those that end with happy endings. Yet, even those tales are fundamentally childist, that is, they tend to undermine the autonomy of children and young people, and overlook their maltreatment because the young always triumph in the end or find some kind of happiness and are in harmony with the world. But happiness is also related to succumbing to the approval of adult standards of success. Therefore, it is important that we revisit the tales with a focus on the initial abuse and remember how this abuse will be played down and forgotten by the happy ends of the tales. Let me give you some examples and also remind you that well over 30% of the 210 Grimms' tales involve some kind of child abuse and/or abandonment. 1) In "A Tale about the Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was" a younger son is called a dumbell and humiliated and then given to a sexton who intends to smooth over his rough edges. The boy goes off to learn about the creeps. 2) In "Brother and Sister" two children are beaten every day and get nothing but leftovers for food. They go off into the wide world. Eventually they find some sort of happiness. 3) In "Rapunzel" parents give their twelve-year old to a sorceress, who incarcerates the girl. After the sorceress discovers that Rapunzel has made love to a man, she banishes the girl to a desolate place where she is later re-united with her blinded lover. 4) In "Cinderella" a young girl is treated like a slave by her stepmother and stepsisters. She gets a prince, and her stepsisters get their eyes pecked out. 5) In "Mother Holle" a stepmother treats her beautiful good stepdaughter cruelly. However, because she works like a slave for Mother Holle and is industrious, she is rewarded by the strange mother goddess, while the ugly bad daughter is later punished by Mother Holle because she is lazy. 6) In "Little Red Cap" a young girl is eaten by a wolf because she does not listen to her mother 7) In "Mother Trudy" a girl who is stubborn, curious, and disobedient goes to visit the mysterious Mother Trudy who changes her into a block of wood and throws her into a fire. 8) In "The Juniper Tree" a young boy is killed by his stepmother, who then chops up his body and serves the boy in a stew to his father. He later returns as a bird to seek revenge on the stepmother. 9) In "Snow White" a stepmother, originally a biological mother, attempts to have her seven-year-old step-daughter murdered because the queen is jealous of her beauty. The girl flees to live with seven dwarfs and becomes their housewife and later the castle wife of a prince. 10) In "Sweetheart Roland" a stepmother, who is really a witch, tries to chop off the head of her stepdaughter. Instead she mistakenly chops off her own daughter's head, while her stepdaughter flees with her sweetheart Roland. 11) In "All Fur" a king seeks to marry his own daughter after his wife dies and to commit the sin of incest. The Princess flees disguised in a coat all made of fur. She basically forgives her father. 12) In "The Water Nixie" a nixie forces two children who fall down a well to work for her. Eventually, they flee. 13) In "The Raven" there is a queen who has a daughter, and because this child was naughty and wouldn't keep quiet, the mother wishes her daughter would become a raven and fly away so that she could have her peace and quiet. Indeed, the daughter is transformed into a raven and flies into a forest and eventually marries a prince. 14) In "Iron Hans" a king wants to execute his son because he has disobeyed his orders. So, the son runs away with Iron Hans and later is reconciled with his father. 15) In "The Ungrateful Son," a son is punished for not sharing a meal with his father. A toad leaps on his face, sticks to it forever, and the son must wander the world feeding the toad. 16) In "The Old beggar Woman," a young rascal invites an old beggar woman into his house to warm herself, but he doesn't do anything to help her when her rags catch fire and she burns to death. 17) In "The Stolen Pennies," a child keeps returning to a room as a ghost because he had stolen two pennies that he was to give a poor man, and after the boy's early death, he is not able to rest because of the theft he committed. 18) In "Eve's Unequal Children" Eve sanctions God's unequal treatment of her ugly and misshapen children who are assigned to lower-class roles. 19) In "The Poor Boy in the Grave" a poor shepherd boy who becomes an orphan is placed in the house of a rich man who beats him mercilessly and drives the boy to suicide. 20) In "The Maiden without Hands" a miller cuts off the hands of his daughter to save himself from the devil, and she flees her home after this mutilation. But she does wed a prince in the end. Despite happy endings -- and not all of these tales end happily -- and moral injunctions in the tales, none of them question the right of adults to discipline children severely according to principles that justify their arbitrary power over the young. Often parents and adults act in the name of a Christian god to justify their actions. Often the children pray to god for help. Perhaps the two most insidious tales that rationalize child abuse and abandonment are "Hansel and Gretel" and "Faithful Johannes," and I say insidious because they appear to be celebrating such values as faithfulness, true devotion, and generosity, while perpetuating the sacrifice of children to a patriarchal system of arbitrary beliefs and values. "Hansel and Gretel," the more popular of the two, assumes a sexist perspective by emphasizing that it is the mother/stepmother, who wants to abandon the children in the forest, not the father; that it is a witch who wants to devour them, and that the children should return to their father with a treasure and not question or reject him when he has played a negative role in their lives by abandoning them. In "Faithful Johannes" the plot of the story and situation of the helpless children is somewhat different and more like the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, which is also in the Koran. The question raised by these stories is: Should we kill our children to demonstrate our devotion to a god? And the answer in the Bible, the Koran, and stories like "Faithful Johannes" is quite simply, yes., and Alice Miller, the perspicacious psychiatrist and defender of children, explains why in her book, The Body Never Lies: The tradition of sacrificing children is deeply oriented in most cultures and religions. For this reason it is also tolerated, and indeed commended, in our western civilization. Naturally, we no longer sacrifice our sons and daughters on the altar of God, as in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. But at birth and throughout their later upbringing, we instill in them the necessity to love, honor, and respect us, to do their best for us, to satisfy our ambitions – in short to give us everything our parents denied us. We call this decency and morality. Children rarely have any choice in the matter. All their lives, they will force themselves to offer parents something that they neither possess nor have any knowledge of, quite simply because they have never been given it: genuine, unconditional love that does not merely serve to gratify the needs of the recipient. Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting, Trans. Andrew Jenkins (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. ******************************** It is now time to turn to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and the theses in her book, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). Every single thinking person in the United States, and not only in the United States, must take it upon herself/himself to read Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's recent book, Childism. It is especially a must for those of us who work with and live with children. Young-Bruehl's major thesis is clear and simple: "People as individuals and in societies mistreat children in order to fulfill certain needs through them, to project internal conflicts and self-hatreds outward, or to assert themselves when they feel their authority has been questioned. But regardless of their individual motivations, they all rely upon a societal prejudice against children to justify themselves and legitimate their behavior." (1) Given this widespread prejudice almost every adult in America tends to act against children while thinking that he or she is actually doing what may be best for the child. In other words, we all live in a contradictory relationship with children. We dictate what they should learn and how they behave without listening to their needs and wants and without paying attention to their developmental capacities. We are all to a greater or lesser degree guilty of childism, and Young-Bruehl argues for the necessity of using terms such as childism and childist so that we can more consciously overcome our common prejudice. Some people might ask skeptically whether we need another ism. After all we have racism, sexism, ageism, Anti-Semitism not to mention all sorts of other isms such as communism, socialism, fascism, and so on. Can't we just continue fighting for children's rights and legislation to protect them without fostering another ism. But Young-Bruehl argues that to confront a prejudice that has been repressed or not fully articulated, we must name it, identify the motivations and causes, and articulate ways to overcome the prejudice. As she says, " The word childism could. . . guide us to an understanding of various behaviors and acts against children and childhood. . . .Childism could help identify as related issues child imprisonment, child exploitation and abuse, substandard schooling, high infant mortality rates, fetal alcohol syndrome, the reckless prescription of antipsychotic drugs to children, child pornography, and all other behaviors or policies that are not in the best interests of children. The behavior of adults who are childist -- most of whom are parents -- harms directly or indirectly the huge human population under the age of eighteen, which is now close to a third of the population worldwide, and in some places more than half." (7) Understanding how we are all complicit in childism is crucial for us to adjust our behavior and to contend with a prejudice that we all have and that we don't fully recognize. It is to Young-Bruehl's credit that she opens up a discussion of a prejudice that we do not acknowledge enough. But before I continue to discuss some of Young-Bruehl's notions of childism, her historical and critical analysis of adult motivation and rationalization, and her proposals for confronting the prejudice against children, I want first to present some statistics and facts about childism that are illuminating or need more illumination: 1) America incarcerates more of its children than any country in the world. Half a million American children are currently in juvenile detention centers where many of them are victims of abuse and neglect. 2) The United States was the country that pioneered strategies to prevent child abuse and now spends more money fighting it than do all other industrialized countries and has the highest rate of child abuse in the world. More children are reported for child abuse and neglect in the United States than in all the other industrialized countries combined. 3) America lags behind the rest of the international community in its care for children. U.S. Laws do not meet children's developmental needs or defend their rights, and the United States has yet to support the 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child or ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. 4) The number of children and families experiencing homelessness in the United States is alarming.  The Urban Institute estimates that 1.35 million children will experience homelessness over the course of a year (Urban Institute, 2000); and the number of children and youth in homeless situations (PreK-12) identified by State Departments of Education increased from approximately 841,700 in 1997 to 930,200 in 2000 (U.S. Department of Education, 2000). According to the Wilder Research Foundation, in 2009, the study counted 9,654 homeless adults, youth, and children and estimates the overall number of homeless people in Minnesota to be at least 13,100 on any given night. the number of homeless children with their parents, now about one-third of the homeless population, increased from 2,726 to 3,251 since the last study. Nearly half (47%) are age 5 and under, the average age is 6 and one-half. 5) The Child Defense Fund's new report The State of America's Children 2011 finds children have fallen further behind in many of the leading indicators over the past year as the country slowly climbs out of the recession. This is a comprehensive compilation and analysis of the most recent and reliable national and state-by-state data on population, poverty, family structure, family income, health, nutrition, early childhood development, education, child welfare, juvenile justice, and gun violence. The report provides key child data showing alarming numbers of children at risk: children are the poorest age group with 15.5 million children—one in every five children in America—living in poverty, and more than 60 percent of fourth, eighth and 12th grade public school students are reading or doing math below grade level. I am mentioning these sad statistics and facts to set Young-Bruehl's book and my remarks in a socio-cultural context of an insidious civilizing process in America. I use the word insidious because, despite the fruits of this civilizing process for privileged groups in America, it is seductive and harmful at the same time. In fact, though appealing, it is like a viral disease that works its way into our habitus, into our customs and behavior that become second-nature to us, so that we act against the very little and defenseless people whom we love most. Childism, in this regard, is more than just a prejudice but also a disease, and I believe that Young-Bruehl's book is a diagnosis of the disease and a proposal for a cure. Let me briefly summarize the contents of her book before I suggest ways in which we might incorporate her ideas into our own daily praxis of mediating tales with children, especially the Grimms tales, that is, telling the tales and fostering interest in the tales in a socially responsible manner. Let me also briefly mention some facts about Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, who unfortunately died in December of 2011. She had studied at the New School with the great German-Jewish philosopher Hanna Arendt, and after her graduation, while teaching philosophy at Wesleyan College, she wrote a biography of Arendt as well as one of Anna Freud. During the 1980s she enrolled at the New Haven Child Study Center and eventually became a psychotherapist receiving a degree in psychotherapy from the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis in 1999 and starting a practice as a psychotherapist in Philadelphia and later New York. Her major book during her work on psychotherapy was The Anatomy of Prejudices (1996). She was also the author of books and essays on feminism and psychotherapy. In 2007 she moved to Toronto, where she continued her work as a psychotherapist and was engaged in the struggle for children's rights until her death in 2011. Young-Bruehl's book is divided into seven chapters: 1) Anatomy of a Prejudice; 2) Three forms of Childism: Anna's Story; 3) Child Abuse and Neglect: A Study in Confusion; 4) The Politicization of child Abuse; 5) Mass Hysteria and Child Sexual Abuse; 6) Forms of Childism in Families; 7) Education and the End of Childism. What is new and original in her study is her approach: she combines a psychoanalytical perspective with a socio-political and historical analysis of our present insidious "civilizing" of children. I shall not review all the chapters, only those that are applicable to storytelling and to the Grimms' tales and to the social-cultural-political context in which we use tales for children, including the cinema, television, and internet. In chapter one she argues that children are a target group of prejudice and that in order to understand how the prejudice works, we must explore the various motivations of the victimizers, something that is rarely done. The foundation for prejudice against children can be traced back to Greek civilization that laid the basis for the prejudice in the Judeo-Christian tradition. To quote Young-Bruehl: "Aristotle's assumptions about children -- that they are possessions and lack reasoning ability -- are childist. Nonetheless, they fit well with the common assumptions of the Greeks, and they were easily built into the European tradition after Aristotle, where they continued to intertwine with sexism and justifications of slavery (which eventually became racist). The idea that children are by nature meant to be owned by their male parent and that they lack reason has justified treating them like slaves and like immature, unformed persons without the active qualities, the developmental thrust, the proto reasoning and choosing, and the individuality that contemporary developmentalists now recognize in them." (25-26). Prejudice in general is a belief system, not a knowledge system about a particular group, and as a belief system, stereotypes of the targeted groups are formed based on some obvious distinguishing appearances, but more on activities and functions attributed to the group by way of fantasies. Young-Bruehl maintains that there are three elementary forms of fantasy, related to sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism, and childism can involve all three forms of fantasy, belief, and action, and they are: 1) fantasies about being able to self-reproduce and to own the self-reproduced offspring; 2) fantasies about being able to have slaves -- usually sex slaves -- who are not incest objects, and 3) fantasies about being able to eliminate something felt to be invidiously or secretly depleting one from within. (35). "At the more fundamental motivational or fantasy level," Young-Bruehl argues, "childism can be defined as a belief system that constructs its target group, "the child," as an immature being produced and owned by adults who use it to serve their own needs and fantasies. It is a belief system that reverses the biological and psychological order of nature, in which adults are responsible for meeting the irreducible needs of children (until the adults grow old and, naturally, reciprocally need support from children). Adults have needs of various kinds -- and fantasies about those needs -- that childist adults imagine children could and, further, should serve. The belief that children as children could serve adults needs is a denial that children develop; the belief that children should serve adult needs is a denial of children's developmental needs and rights." (36). Young-Bruehl maintains: "Our characters are the sum of our inherited or inborn characteristics interwoven with psychic habit we develop from childhood on into adulthood. Our habits include habits of working over in ourselves traumas we have undergone, habits of assimilating to what we have been taught, and habits of projecting. Our characters encompass both our biological nature (sometimes called temperament) and our 'second nature,' acquired in and from our familial, social, and political culture." These comments should be related to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the habitus. Using Freud's classification of character types -- the hysterical, the obsessional, and the narcissistic -- Young-Bruehl maintains that we all have the tendencies of these character types that we endeavor to balance as we engage and interact with the world. Since it is impossible to retain peace and harmony, we are constantly seeking to balance certain urges and fantasies as we mature and form our characters. At times, there are breakdowns and we cannot contain a particular tendency or any tendency and we become neurotic. Young Bruehl writes: "a neurosis could be described as a breakdown or a running off the road (to a greater or lesser degree) during a characterological journey toward maturity. Characteristic distortions result, and I would add that characteristic prejudices result, as a person struggles to regain harmony. A prejudice is a neurosis or developmental problem played out projectively in the world, among people. . . . One of the key ways people have of keeping themselves on an even keel is projecting their conflicts onto others; they throw their baggage overboard in a storm. The result is a prejudice rather than a neurosis." (48-49) Young-Bruehl moves from a discussion of individual character types to discuss how entire families and societies are affected by people with these characteristics. As she remarks (53): "there are families and societies where hysterica , obsessional, and narcissistic people predominate or control the main social, economic, and political institutions, organizing and operating the institutions according to their characterological needs and prejudices. So there are, then, societies organized around hysterical dramas, scenes full of conflict, and moral panics or mass hysterias; societies organized around obsessional rituals, control mechanisms, and paranoid ideas; and societies organized around grandiosity, identity-assertion propaganda, and efforts to dictate the future. Sometimes societal character is lasting, staying relatively constant over generations, but sometimes -- particularly under contemporary conditions in which the media have such influence - societal characters shift and change in less than a generation." For instance she cites that what is known as a generation gap is a time of rapid social character shift, often spurred by a group revolt of the young against the prevailing characterological constraints of their elders." Chapter Four, "The Politicization of Child Abuse," begins this way: "By the end of the 1970s , with the defeat of the progressive Comprehensive Child Development Act and the field of Child Abuse and Neglect in disarray, the damage being done to the nation's children was becoming evident to many Americans. Money to fund Child Protective Services was minimal. The child poverty rate was rising year by year, and the nation was declining on international measures of child well-being in almost every area. Daycare was scarce and often of poor quality -- unless you could afford a nanny or send your child to a private program. The nation's divorce rate was rising, too, but there was no help for the children of these divorces, no resources outside their immediate or extended families. As the number of broken families was rising, Ronald Reagan capitalized on the widespread anxiety in his presidential campaign of 1979 with a platform that called for reaffirming 'family values' and reinforcing parents' rights over children's. Conflict of generations during the latter part of the 20th century emerged and is still ongoing. On p. 165 Young-Bruehl writers: "Child sexual abuse has become a site of contestation between children and adults; a political and legal battlefield, it stands at the crossroads of generational conflict and transmission of trauma. Understanding adult motivations and their legitimating belief systems (childism) is of great importance in helping children who are reported as physically abused or neglected, but it is critical to helping children reported as sexually abused because those children will be caught up not only in the drama of having their families investigated and probably prosecuted but in a vast social-political drama of adult-child relationships. How to deal with a family in which sexual abuse has taken place becomes a key social and political question. (165-66) This situation has to be seen against the background of a general rule about childism: sexual abuse serves the childisms of hysterical role manipulation and narcissistic identity erasure, but it seldom serves the childism of obsessional elimination, while acts of physical and emotional neglect often do. Sexual victims are kept in the house, not eliminated; their service is required, their availability is bound up with their abuser's desire and fantasies. Sexual abusers manipulate sexual roles and confuse the child victims, making them doubt their own identity, and this is part of the abuser's purpose, a source of their pleasure and their satisfaction. Sexual abusers may also erase the child's self, including his or her capacity to tell the truth of the experience, so that they can control the story. This last point is extremely important, and Young-Bruehl goes on to support the notion that it is crucial to believe what children say about what they have experienced. Children do not fabricate stories of detailed sexual activities unless they have witnessed them, and they have, indeed, been witnesses to their abuse. Toward the end of this chapter Young-Bruehl discusses the conservative and narcissistic turn of Baby Boomers, "Child sexual abuse represented a direct challenge to the fortress of the family and to the 'family values' ideologists, but it also constantly challenged claims to 'the truth' that came from all political directions including that of theorists who were primarily focused on sexism and its harms, which were thought to fall similarly on women and children. A narcissistic culture is one in which claims to possession or ownership of 'the truth' go along with claims to ownership of children and ownership of the future that children represent. And a narcissistic culture is one in which denial and lying become so accepted that all statements -- including children's descriptions of their abuse -- are said to be lies. Like the adults around them, children can learn in such a culture to say as a matter of self-protection -- protection of their identities -- what they think others want them to hear." (186-87) Young Bruehl concludes this chapter by stating: on p. 194: "Sexual abuse is the type of abuse that depends most for its discovery on the verbal testimony of the victim, and the victim alone, so it is not surprising that in this area of study questions about the reliability of children's testimony have been more important than motivational questions or definitional questions about what acts constitute abuse and what penalties should be legislated. One of the crucial questions Young Bruehl asks throughout her book is: What makes parents turn against their children? What are the motivations? She argues on 226: "A person who believes that children are owned by their parents and that their identities can be shaped and molded at parental will can use any type of act to bring this about. The acts are weapons in a war between the generations. And it is impossible to understand the war through inventories of the weapons or by counting the number of children who have themselves become weapons. Nor is it possible to work for peace and the prevention of further wars. She concludes her book by discussing the necessity for better education to end childism. She argues that "child advocates of all sorts must address not only the conditions of the specific abuse but the conscious and unconscious justifications for it: the childism of the abusers and the childism within American society. They need to legislate and enforce a national comprehensive child development program, drawing on the best Child Development science, that articulates a minimum standard of attention to each child's needs. And they must articulate a platform of children's rights like the U. N. Declaration and Convention on the Rights of the Child, and find ways to monitor and enforce them. . . crucial to achieving these political aims is the education of both adults and children about prejudice against children and how it is manifested within individuals within families, and within American culture. Seven irreducible needs: 1) Loving, attentive interaction between the child and its caretakers. 2) Physical protection, safety, and regulation. 3) Avoidance of standardized or over-ritualized childrearing or education. For instance testing is about failing and being tracked according to failure. Children are shamed and humiliated by such an approach. 4) Each child should be provided with an emotional and intellectual environment appropriate to the child's developmental stage. 5) No physical discipline or corporal punishment by limiting setting, structure, and expectations. 6) Stable communities and cultural continuity. Greater parental participation of parents in school and community. 7) Protecting the future -- adults must keep in mind not just their own children, or their community's children, or American children, but all children. Finally, Young-Bruehl discusses the history of American schooling and its transformation in the late 20th century. p. 289 -- Historians critical of American schools and schooling have described how the nineteenth-century common schools -- which began as one-room schools without any age differentiation, much less tracking of abilities -- turned into huge factory like institutions that directed students toward their future occupations on the basis of their class, sex, and race. Progressive educators reacted against the privatizing vision from the start, emphasizing its authoritarian and utilitarian purposes: the majority of children were being schooled to fulfill adult needs and to fulfill particular low-level positions in adult enterprises, not to develop their potentialities and their characters. The teaching methods were producing generations of role-reversed children, eliminated from opportunities, manipulated into preset roles in workforces, and deprived of encouragement to independent thought. The schools practiced all kinds of childism at once -- eliminative, manipulative, and erasing -- under the rubric of 'tracking." Because they were well financed, American post World War II public schools were, despite their basically childist organization, consistently ranked higher than schools elsewhere in the developed world. That ranking lasted until the late 1970s, when a decline began that has not been remedied. Without corporate funding, the inherent inequality of the tracked schools grew worse, at the same time that inequalities within American society were growing. When parents and legislators woke up to the crisis in the school system, they once again turned to standardized testing and teaching as the solution -- though this time students were tracked into different types of schools at both the elementary and high school levels. The U.S. educational system now consists of public schools, some well-endowed and some with almost no funding, private schools, and recently the hybrid charter schools, which are corporately owned but funded with a mix of public and private money. At the bottom of all the agendas at these schools is the childist notion that children are to be trained and educated to fulfill the needs of adults not according to their developmental needs. Comments on using storytelling to counter childism As Young-Bruehl points out, children who are abused physically and psychologically have difficulty telling their own stories because they are afraid to tell the truth, do not know how to articulate their feelings that are often confused, are prompted to tell adults what the adults want to hear, and know that they will not be heard or that there will be no adequate response to their stories. Yet, they need to and are eager to confide their stories in some one. Their best hope is an understanding therapist or some one outside the family such as a social worker. But sometimes therapists and social workers are not responsive. Therefore, knowing how to tell a story with confidence and integrity may enable a child to confront his or her difficulties. Knowing how to use stories to navigate oneself through life is crucial for any child. Our contribution to the development of children with whom we work is to assist them in developing their capacity to tell their own tales to help them learn the art of storytelling. I began this talk by discussing how "terrible" the Grimms' tales are. I should have probably used the adjectives "terrifying," "dangerous," or "loaded." But I didn't mean to or don't mean to dismiss these tales or argue that they are inappropriate for children. In fact, the Grimms' so-called fairy tales and all the folk tales gathered in the nineteenth century as well as in the twentieth and twenty-first are vital for our understanding of childism, and we should continue to study them, use them, and create new stories based on what they communicate about child abuse and abandonment. The Grimms' tales are also reminders that childism is world-wide, not only part of American culture, and one of the reasons we continue to tell the Grimms' tales and other folk and fairy tales is that they remind us what we have done to our children and to ourselves in the course of our civilizing processes. To keep telling the the Grimms' tales -- and other canonical and traditional tales -- as they are without questioning and changing them and encouraging children to appropriate them according to their needs, howeveer, will only further childism. The answer to childism demands critical soul-searching and a radical grasp of the nature of authoritarianism and narcissism. In raising and teaching children we must educate ourselves and change our pedagogical practices. On a cultural level in the realm of storytelling, we must exploit the deficit of traditional tales such as the Grimms' tales for the benefit of children, their creativity, and their critical skills. In my own work with teaching artists at the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis I have made the following suggestions as guidelines for our collaboration with teachers and children in the classes in which we tell the Grimms' tales and other stories: 1) We must try to understand how we are complicit in childism and acknowledge that we are living and working in a society that does not cater to the developmental needs of children. This does not mean that we must confess mea culpa and atone for sins. It simply means that we must be attentive to the children and their stories as best we can and try to understand their individual needs as best we can. It also means that we must be conscious of how we at times may be imposing our will on the children. 2) We must find diverse ways to let the children's stories breathe. 3) We must help children hone their art not just because we want them to become artists and to create beautiful stories, but also because we want them to be effective with their art. All art is political, whether we are conscious of this or not. To tell a story is always a political act, a socially symbolic act, no matter what the speaker is conveying. A story is an intervention into ongoing conflicts and struggles. It offers a narrative perspective. It intervenes in traditional dialogues and challenges belief systems. And of course, little stories are always challenging master narratives. Little stories have just as much right to be heard as master narratives. 4) By respecting the stories that children create and encouraging them to learn about different perspectives, we help them sharpen their critical and creative skills. 5) We must recognize that we do not have to address their abuse directly. They know it. They feel it. Their artful stories can be an effective way to confront their problems. Their discussions, for instance, of "Hansel and Gretel" can help them learn about the motivations of adults and child abandonment. Their discussions about the arbitrary power of gods can enable them to understand authoritarianism and to understand how belief systems are foisted on them. 6) We can never be neutral and should not be neutral when topics such as abuse, abandonment, and social justice arise in the course of a teaching situation or session. This does not mean that we are to impose our ideas on children, but we must somehow, through our own stories, communicate to children that there is no such thing as neutrality and that safeguarding the rights of children is one of the highest priorities any society should have and maintain. Social justice can only be reached by speaking out civilly in public places and guaranteeing that all voices are heard. 7) Finally, we should all try to recall the enlightening tales of the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen that give us courage to dispel the magic spells of our present religious, educational, and political organizations. We must be able to listen to and to speak with children then they say kings are not wearing any clothes.   Endnotes PAGE 23