Age of Ecology Part Eight
Being Born
"How is the little creature (kryatura) in the belly of its mother? Let your mind imagine that the kryatura, being inside the belly of its mother, can be likened to a twig doubled in half. And some say like a walnut which lies inside a watery skin, with its two hands resting on its breasts, the elbows of its arms lying on its two knees, its two heels drawn up under its backside, its head also on its knees, the mouth closed, the umbilical cord open, since through this it eats what its mother eats and drinks what its mother drinks. And there is no discharge from its body, for otherwise it would kill its mother. And when it is born, what was closed is opened, and what was opened is closed, for if it were not thus it could not remain living for even one hour. And it has a burning candle near its head, and it sees from one corner of the world to the other, all the while being in the belly of its mother. And in all the life of that person it never enjoys better days than those."
(from ME'AM LO'EZ, a Sephardic Jewish commentary on Genesis, published in Istanbul in 1730 and reprinted as an epigraph to Barbara Duden's Disembodying Women, Harvard, 1993)
Sometime in early 1983 I learned that Tom Verny, a Toronto psychiatrist, was organizing the grandly named First International Congress on Pre and Peri-Natal Pyschology. Verny was the author of a book called The Secret Life of the Unborn Child published in 1981. It gained considerable attention and signaled the coming of age of a previously fairly marginal branch of psychology. The Congress was intended to consolidate this success by bringing together many of the scholars who had studied birth and prenatal existence as formative experiences. It was held at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and attended by midwives, obstetricians, childbirth educators, psychologists and psychoanalysts, as well as interested members of the public. Their perspectives were diverse, but they shared a conviction that how we are born matters. Many argued that the the upheaval of birth creates the very template within which consciousness and imagination form.
The last of my four children had been born at home earlier that year - a birth attended by midwives who were still practicing illegally in Ontario - and I was keenly interested in both the politics and the psychology of childbirth. Tom Verny liked the idea of having me report on the Congress for Ideas, so I set up a temporary studio in an office adjacent to the scene of most of the action and, in three manic days, managed to get almost all the Congress's main speakers on tape. The series was broadcast later that year. Times have changed a little - midwifery is no longer illegal in Ontario - but I think most of what is said here pertains to things that don't change...
Being Born Part Two
Being Born Part Three
The World of the Child
Between 1978 and 1983, three of my four children were born, and, along with changing diapers, tripping over strollers in the front hall, and reading stories, my wife Jutta and I found ourselves in the middle of all the issues that preoccupied parents of that time. We were, broadly speaking, hippies. Two of our three children were born at home, and none of them attended primary school. (One went to university without prior schooling; the other two decided, on their own initiative, to begin their formal education with high school.) Our preferences leaned towards re-establishing the neighborly, home-made and de-professionalized form of life that our teacher and later friend Ivan Illich called the vernacular. This had arguably been the dominant tendency in the social movements that came out of the 1960's, but, at the beginning of the 1980's, times were beginning to change again. Feminism, for example, faced a crucial question. Was it arguing only for the inclusion of women on equal terms in the existing economy, with the requirement that children be institutionalized from infancy onwards in order to keep their mothers "at work"? Or would the women's movement undermine and upset the very categories of modern economic society and begin a move towards a world less focused on jobs, production, and budgeted time and, therefore, more hospitable to children? Early daycare was a big issue, because it epitomized a larger conflict: the contradiction between the nature of children and the character of the society in which they were trying to grow up.
In her book The Self-Respecting Child, British writer Alison Stallibrass speaks of the developing child as having an elusive "growing tip." Where it is, at a given moment, can be detected but not predicted. Child development, in other words, occurs at its own eccentric and individual pace. It has its own cadence, and this cadence is often out of sync with the fixed routines, prescribed schedules, and programmed learning goals which must inevitably characterize most institutional care for children.
This series was an attempt to vindicate this view. It drew on many of the writers that had inspired Jutta and me, including notably, and pretty extensively, John Holt, whose reader-written journal Growing Without Schooling was one of our mainstays. Parts of it were controversial. The second programme, on early daycare, was one of the few shows I ever made that provoked serious and sustained criticism from listeners. After a talk I gave to the Women's University Club of Toronto around the same time, I was accused by one of my auditors of living in Little House on the Prairie, and that pretty well sums up the tenor of the critical letters I got in response to Part Two of The World of the Child. Like-minded listeners were more enthusiastic, and cassettes of the programmes circulated widely for many years.
It has been thirty-three years since these shows were broadcast, but a lot of the questions they address remain current. There are also some fascinating people to be met with here, a number of them no longer alive. These participants were as follows:
Part One: Neil Postman, Neil Sutherland, David Elkind, John Lee, Jerome Kagan, Lloyd de Mause, and John Holt
Part Two: Elliot Barker, PenelopeLeach, Jerome Kagan, Burton While, Otto Weininger, Louise Kaplan, and Marion Thompson
Part Three: Seymour Papert, William Condon, John Holt, Eleanor Duckworth, Jerome Kagan, Richard Katz, Otto Weininger, Stanley Greenspan, and Burton White
Part Four: John Holt, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Valery Suransky, Seymour Papert, Alan Mirabelli, and Bob Glossop
The World of the Child, Part Two
The World of the Child, Part Three
The World of the Child, Part Four
The Rebellions of 1837
The media love anniversaries. A historical subject of no current interest becomes instantly pertinent when its age is a multiple of fifty. This worked in my favour in 1987, when the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Rebellions of 1837 in Upper and Lower Canada came around, and the stories of these forgotten wars were suddenly topical. I was delighted. In a series I had done a couple of years before called "Richard Cartwright and the Roots of Canadian Conservatism," I had seized on a distant ancestor of mine to explore the ways in which the Tory tradition had shaped Canadian political culture. Now here was my chance to explore the radical traditions that led to armed revolt in the Canadas in 1837. Once again, I was lucky to have the musical assistance of Anne Lederman and Ian Bell, who then performed together as Muddy York and who were both scholars of early Canadian music as well as skillful musicians. An ample cast of talented actors allowed me to portray a variety of the historical characters. They were: Chris Wiggins, Sandy Webster, David Fox, John Jarvis, Lynne Deragon, Albert Millaire, François Klanfer, and Richard Partington. And, finally I had the assistance of a number of excellent historians, some of whom were by now becoming friends, as I undertook my third excursion into early Canadian history. They were: in Part One - William Kilbourn and Robert Fraser; in Part Two - Sydney Wise and William Kilbourn; in Part Three - Stanley Ryerson, Murray Greenwood, Jean-Pierre Wallot, Philip Buckner, Fernand Ouellet, and Alan Greer; and in Part Four - Alan Greer and Murray Greenwood. The series was first broadcast in December of 1837...