Childhood’s End---Protect our Dreams, by Donald F. Morgenso

(Source: Vital Speeches of the Day)Dr. Morgenson discussed what it really mean to be children and children’s distinct perception of the world, how we should protect our “dreamer”, the children.  As he pointed out, adults had a hard time to remember their childhood as it really was; as year gone by, most of us forget how we saw the world when we were children: later knowledge and the process of intellectualization often distorted the real picture.  Once we entered the “‘sophisticated’ world of adults”, we lost the precious quality of spontaneity and amazement. (Page 595) Children possess many qualities that adult can’t even perceive: in their world, there is infinite possibility; they are interested in almost everything except the ones that adults expect them to be interested in. Children are so different from the grownups that some might see them as creatures from another world: they talk, think and move in their unique ways that adults don’t usually know how to deal with them. Children appear to have a psychological need for irreverence. (Page 596) They love jokes, puns, and witty word games and never hesitate from applying these tricks to mock the most-respected ideas or images of the adult world.

On the latter part of the article, Dr. Morgenson mentioned how we push children into an isolated world. In history, children were not provided with special environments to build up their little world secluded form the adults. However, since 1800, the growth of technology prolong the education period, children’s world got farther and farther away from the adults’. The heaven for children, which seems weird to adults, is often a wasteland, instead of the playground carefully planned by the adults. The advance of technology deprived people’s fantasy of magic and wonder, which often intrigue a feeling of nostalgia in adults; we see this too in premature children, they are hard, shielded from emotion, over-intellectualize everything in life. Dr. Morgenson suggested that we should resist “childhood’s end”, protect human being’s ability to dream and to live truthfully by protecting our children, our natural dreamers.