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emotional and intellectual supports that help them balance the interac-
tion between their visceral energy and their newfound insights. Just as
traditional forms of teaching and childhood curricular arrangements are
passé given the "new times," forms of discipline and control strategies
are obsolete. Can kids who hold Kevin's knowledge of the world in gen-
eral and the anxieties and tribulations of adulthood in particular be do-
mesticated and controlled (not to mention the question of should they)
in the same ways as children of a different era of childhood were? Custo-
dial schooling is no longer adequate for children of the 1990s--indeed, it
was never adequate for children no matter what the era.Education for domestication assumes that the information a child en-
counters can be regulated and sequentially ordered ( Polakow, 1992;
Gaines, 1990). Much schooling and child rearing is still based on such an
archaic assumption, resulting in strategies that negate children's explo-
ration, invention, and play. Indeed, the purpose of many of these strate-
gies is to prevent the integration of acquired information from a variety
of sources into the cognitive and emotional structures of an evolving
personhood, that is, growth itself. Thus, child rearing insufficiently pre-
pares children for adulthood or even postmodern childhood, as it ig-
nores the world that surrounds children and shapes their lives. The
lessons to be excavated from this quick analysis of the Home Alone
movies are sobering in their urgency. The state of the family at the end of
the twentieth century and the inability of the public conversation about
it to transcend the most trivial forms of platitudes to the value of family
in our "national character" is distressing. An effort to examine the nature
of kinderculture and the forces that shape it simply does not exist in the
surreal, image-based politics of the present era. The ambivalent adult
relationship with children is a suppressed feature of the cultural land-
scape, rarely if ever addressed in even the professional schooling of
child-welfare professionals, child psychologists, or elementary educa-
tors. These silences must end.
References
Aronowitz S., and Giroux H. ( 1991). Post-modern education: Politics, culture,
and social criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Best S., and Kellner D. ( 1991). Postmodern theory. Critical interrogations. New
York: Guilford Press.
Coontz S. ( 1992). The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia
trap. NewYork: Basic Books.
Ferguson S. ( 1994). The comfort of being sad. Utne Reader 64 (July/August):
60-61.

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Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood. Contributors: Shirley R. Steinberg - editor, Joe L. Kincheloe - editor. Publisher: Westview Press. Place of Publication: Boulder, CO. Publication Year: 1997. Page Number: 51.
    
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