The sheer number of organizations actively working to get their messaging into kids’ eyes and ears is impossible to list. With the aim of reaching children before the “wrong” perceptions form, much of the messaging these organizations manufacture seeks to install particular “schemas” before children develop the cognitive capacity to evaluate them.
Yes, children lack the ability to evaluate the messages that are presented to them. This is a developmental fact that once was common knowledge. And, since kids lack the cognitive capacity to evaluate the messages they see and hear, their perceptions and beliefs are easily influenced. Myriad agenda-driven agencies — some you’ve heard of, many you haven’t— exploit this developmental vulnerability every way they can.
Organizations which target children know that kids cannot distinguish between information and instruction — between a story, video, or lesson that reflects the world and a story, video, or lesson that shapes how kids will see the world.
Often, reading materials, digital programming, and classroom curriculum marketed as “educational” are in fact NOT educational in any meaningful developmental sense. Rather than learning, what much of the messaging children absorb achieves is schema formation by prior occupation of the developmental space.
For more on that, see Sandra Bem’s work on gender schema theory.
Child development theorist, Jean Piaget, established that children under seven are in the preoperational stage, capable of absorbing narrative and social information, but not yet able to subject that information to logical evaluation or understand its implications at any level of abstraction.
Everyone should read more Piaget.
Piaget is explicit that premature exposure to concepts beyond a child’s developmental capacity to adequately evaluate them leads to distorted assimilation. Distorted assimilation is not good. It means children accept the message presented to them without true comprehension, causing confusion or rote acceptance of authority rather than genuine understanding.
Schema formation by prior occupation of the developmental space is achieved when an activist teacher or organization succeeds in getting their idea/message/belief into children’s eyes and ears before the children have developed the capacity to evaluate it and decide whether they will believe it, wait to seek more information about it, or reject it. The kids just absorb the idea as fact. The schema is formed.
Child development theory describes how children actually develop. Derived from more than half a century of cross-cultural empirical research by theorists from incompatible traditions, this literature establishes, with considerable consistency, that children are not miniature adults. No, they are beings with their own developmental logic, their own cognitive and emotional stage requirements, and their own vulnerabilities.
An understanding of children’s developmental vulnerabilities is required in order for any organization, institution or agency that purports to serve kids to truly benefit children. Organizations, institutions or agencies that exploit kids’ underdeveloped cognitive capacities and strategically bypass genuine learning cede the privilege of having access to children in any capacity.
Kids first. Not agendas.
Make schools learning-only places. Get the messaging OUT of our schools.
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