<–part 1

Yet, consumerism is imposed on children as early as birth, and even prior to it. First, possible future parents strive to “liberate” themselves financially and so they “liberate” themselves from the child – contraceptives is one tactic that is extremely profitable for the medical industry, sterilisation is another, which annihilates the idea of conception and creation itself and brings us back to consumerism as being the vehicle for impotence and sterility.

But when the possible finally become actual parents and get a child, they immediately set off to “liberate” themselves from the child again – this time with baby-sitters, nursery, day-care, school, tutors, extensions, etc. so as to be able to consecrate their time yet again to the “more important”: earning money and serving the “public” good (which public and what good is another question raised by the statistics on poverty and jail above) by earning money and serving the offspring by earning money and spending it on strangers – the “professionals” – thinking that they thus provide care, health, safety, and curriculum. The more they earn, the more they claim to love, to be good parents and good members of society, and the more things they acquire.

But things do not appease the child’s not yet stifled craving for love in the other, the non-material sense. The child screams and demands something which often neither she nor the adults know how to articulate, or perhaps even are not fully aware of – possibly a primeval instinct of being cuddled, snuggled, nursed, looked at, sniffed, pampered, protected, respected, and other such animal stuff. Instead, the civilised Homo Sapiens fights these instincts and imposes “independence” that amounts to: “my child is independent when s/he does not intrude into my space but has her own space which touches mine occasionally, between the baby-sitters, daycare, school, and work and without disrupting me”.

Since money and objects have come to symbolise, and have even replaced, love, the child demands more and more and does not understand why all this love in the form of things does not appease the other, the primordial, the unspoken of and the repressed urge; that is until it mutes. Since how much a child is “loved” is also an indication of the child’s place in society, then by the same logic, the more the child has the better s/he is expected to feel among people. Envy, competition, rivalry are bred by consumerism; and the fetishism of contemporary world demands ever more sacrifices and things.

At this point, a mini synthesis will help connect the above observations to the next part of the essay. Love, as a social construct, has undergone many operations. In a consumerist age, its meaning has become that of provision of things and the accumulation of capital to the point of loss of contact between people. Because things and capital derive their existence in a context of pain, exploitation and lies, any replacement of a living being with things replaces love with pain, exploitation and lies.

Apart from unhappiness, this breeds pathological mistrust between people on many levels: adults distrust each other; they distrust their own children and children grow up to distrust everyone else, including, or perhaps in the first place, their own parents (and seen the wider picture, of course rightly so). Love as the energy of creation, of transmission of a part of oneself to another, whether as personal creativity or cultural or biological reproduction, has been consistently fading away. It is therefore not surprising that consumerist art such as Andy Warhol’s would be chosen to represent contemporary experience: flat, compulsive and sterile.

on Love: the question of Sex

Western doctors, the overseers of social “health”, urge parents to think about sexual relationships and career before pregnancy, during pregnancy and postpartum.

The highly complex phenomenon of sexual energy – the yearning for fulfillment and creative togetherness is thus reduced to sexual intercourse for the sake of pleasure tantamount to the consumption of sterile, genetically modified food. Sterile sexuality is empty pleasure that has no possibility, not even a chance of creativity. This is not to say that sexual intercourse necessarily has to take place with the intention to reproduce. But when the idea of creation – any kind (artistic or biological) – at any point of a union between two people has been a priori eliminated, the physiological act itself breathes emptiness, death.

At the same time, the need to connect with someone for the expression of such creativity, the pleasure of creation sought in a union, can be misinterpreted as a sexual need, because in its basic sense, the act of creation gives the pleasure of satisfaction. The “market” can cash well on this urge particularly when it is not satisfied but almost. Hence, the capitalist “curriculum” promotes sterile sexuality and the medical capitalist plays an important role in this.

In Montreal, I have spoken to 7 doctors, of whom 3 were male and 4 female and 7 nurses (all female). Most of them were from the CLSC, the centralised governmental health association that establishes clinics in every neighbourhood of the province of Quebec. All were shocked to hear that I nursed my child for about 4 years. I pointed out that even UNICEF stipulates nursing for NOT less than a year, preferably two, with no supplements during the first 6 months, while anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler, editor of Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives, offers a wider span for nursing human babies ranging from a minimum of 2 ½ years to a maximum of 7.

According to her research, societies, in which children are allowed to nurse as long as they want to, children usually self-wean with no arguments or emotional trauma, between three and four years of age (which was exactly what my daughter did). “Another important consideration for the older child is that they are able to maintain their emotional attachment to a person rather than being forced to switch to an inanimate object such as a teddy bear or blanket. I think this sets the stage for a life of people-orientation, rather than materialism, and I think that is a good thing,” says Dettwyler.

To return to my physicians, doctor Janice’s words express perfectly the opinions of the rest of my respondents. “Yes, the UN recommends that [minimum one year]. So, one year is enough. You should wean after that. Such abnormal nursing is bad for the family. The child will grow dependent, and nursing lowers the mother’s sexual drive, which can cause problems in the family later on and will harm the baby”.

Apart from the minimum standard being “good enough” for the child, this attitude touches on several other issues. First, it raises the question of child dependency versus independence discussed above and where cruelty and abandonment are presented as the meaning of love. Second, it expects the child and the mother to adapt their nature to the male sexual standards, rather than vice versa (democracy, i.e. the totalitarianism of numbers, does not apply in this case). Third, this makes sense politically and economically, for, socialised sexuality consumes sexy attire, make-up, specialised foods, diets, food & drink industry in general, contraceptives, cars, furniture, entertainment, ad infinitum.

But is all this really inevitable?

on Making Things: questions of Respect

This is an excerpt from my journal marked ‘autumn, 2002’.

Having been inspired among others by Korchack and Nikitins, Sasha and I interpreted “love” in the non-commercial sense and chose, first of all, to be “there” for our daughter Liouba, which meant being less “out there” in the social world. This meant less material means, living space, time and energy.

The decision forced us to rely on meagre supplies and sharpened the imagination and artisan skills not only of the parents, but also Liouba’s. One such example is Liouba’s “town-house”. The second floor whose original construction, in a previous existence, used to be a TV box. Liouba hid inside it when she was 1 year and 10 months old and said, “ku-ku”, shutting and opening the lid. I cut out windows, she decided where she wanted to have the door; we dug out colourful old rags and together patched a joyful mosaic on the outside. She painted the inside with pencils and crayons. The ground floor came later. Liouba and her dad made it from the remains of the wood with which dad made our bed and wardrobe. She decorated it in bright acrylics and I “filled in the gaps”.

The house has a meaning and a purpose. First, it served as an outlet for spontaneous creativity, which we took playfully yet seriously. Second, it is a sign of independence and potency: one can create something almost from nothing, and that makes it different from the children’s houses purchased in stores, because contrary to commercial toys that snatch everything from the lives of the underpaid workers who make them and from the working parents who purchase them, this house saved matter that would have gone to waste and brought us together. Creativity can be simultaneously aesthetic and practical.

The house has become Liuoba’s hiding place, her possibility for seclusion. While she uses the whole apartment as hers, she also knows that she shares it with others. In fact, she relies on the knowledge that she can always find someone somewhere, be it in the kitchen, the living room, the office, or the bathroom; even her room – someone might always knock or she, herself, may call one of us in. However, her little, dancing with sunny colours house is outside our reach. She trusts our respect for her privacy. At the basis of this respect live our love and our trust – mutual and her decision for independence.

on Using Things: questions of Trust and Respect

Apart from the example of the house, we decided to also give Liouba the trust and an opportunity to decide in other spheres of her experience, such as to train herself to be wise, confident, strong and independent, sometimes testing our own principles. The Skripalev sports-complex that we installed in her room illustrates this relationship.

Pictures 2 and 3 portray the sports-complex we brought with us from Russia. It has rings, a rope ladder, a wooden ladder, a fixed ladder, a swinging ladder, a rope, an elastic liana, a swinging gymnast’s bar, a fixed bar and the slide which leads to her bunk bed. Liouba had this sports complex since she was 4 months old, and the only rule regarding its use has been the same that the Nikitins used in their home: namely, that no adult interferes with suggestions or help to reach something that she can not do by herself. This way she can only do what she is ready to do. By the age of three, she could climb anywhere and could reach any spot in the room without touching the floor. When Liuoba’s friends come, we do not allow the parents to come in and “help” their children. Even though many children are weak and unable to support their own body weight with their arms and swing, they learn quickly how and where to climb and when it is time to leave, most parents have difficulty retrieving them from under the ceiling.

This example points to the relationship between parents and child. It is not the sports complex by itself that “evolves” Liouba into a more mature and confident child. The complex is only an artificial substitute for the massive possibilities offered by forests, riverbank slopes, climbing country-house roofs, and so forth of which we are denied in city existence, particularly in Western setting, where the underdeveloped public transportation infrastructure^v, hefty fees, private property laws, the destruction of natural resources, etc. render space and nature inaccessible. However, our approach to the object, to the meanings attached to our approach of this object and to the limitations or the liberties that we ascribe to our child point to who we are.

Our trust does not end here, however. We took Nikitins’ advice and extended it to Liouba’s decision making with regard to other aspects of her life, such as toilet training (at 4 months of age), nursing (till 3 ½ years with a break and finally till 4 years and 2 months), and her decision to take off to Russia without her mom.

On Things: Questions of Mistrust

Since the 1950s of Soviet Russia, Lena Alexeevna Nikitina and Boris Pavlovich Nikitin, have been sounding alarm that children’s most vicious enemy is, in fact, adults’ mistrust that begins with holding the child when she walks, helping her up when she falls, forbidding her to climb “dangerous” stairs even on the primitive children’s playgrounds marked “for use between 0-3 years old”, picking up the child and sticking her on the slide, constantly telling her what to do or not, what to wear, eat, feel, know, think, and so on, in other words, exercising total control. Mistrust is also manifested in speaking for the child, putting words in her mouth, branding, evaluating, “helping” and “teaching”. Finally, it takes the form of siding with the institution in the adult endeavor to reconstruct the child from a curious individual to an obedient consumer of things and of instruction^vi.

Protective behaviour on the part of adults may, at first glance, seem harmless, even benign. In the long run, it affects the physical, emotional, and mental development, where the child forfeits her right to learn to trust her own abilities and limitations. The absence of those inner mechanisms of self-regulation creates outright danger and is at the basis of much stress and “failure” of the future-adult. Moreover, mistrust sends children the following message: adults treat anyone smaller and weaker than themselves as frail, handicapped, even insipid (have you heard that baby-talk-intonation?). People call such behaviour “protective”, “caring”, “loving”. Since this is love, many children learn to suppress their frustration and to accept others’ control and their own failure. Later, they reproduce this love, care and protection with younger ones, but also with their own parents by then grown old, child-like and frail and thus continue the cycle.

The Nikitins call for trusting the child, providing her with an emotionally safe and enriching environment rather than limitations and control. Such attitude would raise the curiosity, creativity and confidence levels to the extent that parents would not need consumerism to replace family relations, because an independent child will know how to make toys, invent games or find answers to questions about the self and the world. There is an important distinction to make, though, between trust and neglect or between self-chosen independence or self-reliance and imposed neglect concealed by slaving parent substitutes, vocabulary, and things.

But how could meaning of a child’s freedom to investigate experience and choose her own categories appear in a capitalist setting? For example, Francoise Dolto advises parents to pay children for household chores in order to help them become financially autonomous and concomitantly conscientious workers. Or, at the Childhoods 2005 conference in Oslo, numerous presentations focused on the “positive” aspects of consumerism and called for the participation of children in this sphere – they equated participation in consumerism with “empowerment” and “independence”.

But the problem is that a child who receives a few dollars for washing dishes does not learn independence, rather the contrary: to succumb to the will of others, to do them services in return for a reward set by the more powerful. In this case, the child does not do the dishes because s/he uses them or to participate on an equal footing in family life. The child does them for a materialistic end in order to get something from materialistic parents. It goes without saying that having children do schoolwork for grades and for the promise of material bliss in the “future” is part of the same strategy that markets obedience, consumerism, misery and mistrust, a strategy that shuffles meanings, sells 500ml juice in 750ml bottles, substitutes bright packages of favourite monsters on TV with yogurt derived from miserable cows and chemical laboratories, and so on, ad infinitum. In all of this, parents, instead of siding with their children and protecting them, end up being the prime vehicles of capitalist meaning.

On Issues that objectify: Trust in Institution

The complexity of the notion of trust extends to everything that touches a person’s life. What, who, why, how, when can we trust concerns not only the quality of life that we expect but, on a primordial level, our survival. Trust/mistrust is part of a complex process of the way we react to strangers and others almost on the level of our basic instinct. But what is this instinct in today’s “civilised” context? Let us turn to a concrete example of how parents can “choose” whom to trust and whom to mistrust.

On a Tuesday in July 2004, Liouba (5) and I had an appointment with her friends at a playground at 4pm. To profit from a lovely day outdoors, we arrived an hour earlier. “Liouba, Liuoba,” we heard someone shout from the slides and saw her friend, Celine (5 years old) waving. Celine was out with her kindergarten group. Liouba joined them, but in 10 minutes the teachers rounded up the day-care kids and went back to school.

“Don’t worry, Liouba,” I comforted her. “In less than an hour you’ll see Celine”. We left the playground to wash our hands and eat our lunch returning at least 30 minutes after the kindergarten was gone. I took out my knitting while Liuoba went to play in the sand when suddenly a woman approaches us with a screaming boy.

“Whose child is this?”

His face was so distorted with distress that I failed to recognise him at first. Then I saw that it was Todd, Celine’s 3-year-old brother. “How did you end up here”, I asked. “Bwwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” was the heartbreaking reply. The woman who had found him said he was screaming for at least 20 minutes and she could not make sense of what he said. When Todd realised that Liouba and I were there, he cheered up and just as he began to play, a panic stricken day-care teacher appeared, looking for a forgotten child.

“Did he stay behind with you?” she asked me.

“No, we didn’t even know he was out with this group” I replied and was curious to hear the version that would be presented to Todd’s parents.

Soon after the incident, we see Karen, Arnold and the kids. “So, you kept Todd behind at the playground,” was their greeting. The kindergarten didn’t even bother to make up a story that would not contradict my testimony. I should, also, mention that this neighbourhood and the kindergarten were considered among the prestigious parts of Montreal and of day-care establishments.

I got the impression that the parents were annoyed that I witnessed a serious bluff by the prestigious institution to which they belonged. I explained to them that we didn’t even know that Todd was with the group, that we found him at least half an hour after the kindergarten was gone and that, in fact, he was found by a stranger. However, Karen interrupted me briskly pressing with the Kindergarten’s version.

It is interesting that Karen and Arnold made the decision in favour of the Institution. Not only that, they made it as if they were that Institution. As parents, they did not want to get in conflict with the kindergarten but as part of that institution, they wanted to convince me, a witness to the institution’s blunder, of its competence.

“Well, errors happen,” insisted Karen, “so they forgot him for a few minutes…”

“More than 30,” I interjected.

“No, it wasn’t 30 minutes, it was 2 minutes. I know. They told me they went back immediately when they realised they had left him with you,” persisted Karen.

“Actually, they didn’t know that we were here, so they didn’t leave him with us. Plus, how do you know at what point their realisation came? They could have realised this when they were getting the kids ready to be picked up by the parents. And, do you think that between me and them, I have more reasons to lie about what happened?”

“I don’t know why you insist on slandering them. All I know is that Laurel said that as soon as they had reached the kindergarten, she realised Todd was missing and ran back immediately and it couldn’t have been more than 5 or 10 minutes….”

Todd’s suffering (for whatever number of minutes) and the danger to which he had been exposed did not seem to shake his parents’ faith in their prestigious institution.

One of the difficulties in anthropology is also its strong asset, namely, the degree to which we can take a specific example, even if it may seem anomalous, and generalise it to the extent of claiming to understand society better. In the example above, we can say that, “well, statistically it is not frequent that kindergartens forget kids behind; this is an exception and hopefully it will teach Laurel and her colleagues to be more vigilant in the future”. What the above incident exposes, though, is the general aspect of human/institutional relations, which means that even when the abstract and the general become concrete and personal, the institution has been incorporated in the self to the point that an individual would think and live through it and on behalf of it at the expense of personal instincts. Even if personal reactions to the incident may vary: some people would scream at Laurel, others might sue or pull out their kids only to place them in the same institution elsewhere – the child is still surrendered.

The question of trust is multifaceted. Some of its aspects are revealed in situations of conflict between the child and educator, where parents mostly side with the Institution: they trust doctors, teachers, psychiatrists with questions ranging from toilet training to Prozac, rarely pausing to ask the child’s opinion or to listen to what the “medical” symptoms might be telling about the context of family relations. Instead of listening to the scream of despair, parents side with the “professional” – the Institution – and read the disorder symptoms as medical conditions to be remedied by “professionals” and according to “professional” norms and requirements that aim at manufacturing a docile child manageable for the troupe of overseers of social order and capitalist interests.

Karen and Arnold’s trust choice is stimulated economically: they want/need to earn money and do not want/need to keep their children at home like some home-schoolers do, who are either rich and can “afford it” or are really “poor” because of the sacrifices society imposes on those who choose to raise their own kids. Karen and Arnold also want to accrue the symbolic capital that comes along with a child’s being part of a prestigious institution.

However there is more to their story. Trust in authority comes, not only as a rational choice, but as an irrational reflex undermining the basic parental instinct that normally would push a parent to protect offspring – including from strangers, who the nursery and kindergarten employees really are. And here we touch on a general trend of contemporary “civilised” society, which, paradoxically, through individual greed dumbs down to totalitarian obedience.

Finally, when we give our trust to a children’s institution, we inevitably strip it away from the child, which points to an inherent dichotomy between the interests of a child and those of the Institution in charge of children.

Conclusion:

On the Study of Things: Phenomenology, et a

Consumerism and desires are excellent tools of control over some (many) people and of profit for others (fewer) people. In this way, everything – from the setting of a room to what we eat and do – is part of a person’s relationship with the world. Desire for objects exercises a power over the individual who has to conduct specific services and tasks in order to be able to obtain the money to buy the objects of desire (in this logic, people also acquire the status of objects). The invention of money made it possible for some people to control the lives, effort, work and desires of others and to dictate to them what to purchase and where and how to spend time. Hence, on the one hand, things – when used moderately and wisely – can be assets in enhancing independence and freeing time, yet at the same time, they can be a dangerous enemy to creativity and independence. Objects and habitat can thus be slippery “texts” – for, interpretation obeys the common and uncommon senses of the beholder.

It is like two neighbours with two identical Jeeps: Jill has the car in order to camp in what’s left of the forest, while Jack keeps it in order to improve his social status. He gives up many occasions for travel so as not to increase mileage and even sustains himself in order to service and maintain the vehicle. Both Jack and Jill may be seen every Sunday afternoon scrupulously washing and oiling their respective Jeeps in their respective backyards. Behind the exchanged greetings each might even harbour a warm feeling of sharing something together that others, who do not spend their Sunday afternoons in love and gratitude with their Jeeps, may not understand. However, are the relationships, rationale, methods, consequences, or feelings the same, in spite of their similar contribution to car industry and global capitalism? For, Jill beautifies her car after three days of adventure and life in the wilderness (regardless of its effects on the forests she tramps, on the labour markets of the “Developing” (slaving) World that makes the Jeep a possibility for her, or on the oil fields of the middle East), while Jack rubs his in order to keep out the rust, to touch and dust his beloved with tenderness, this Jeep that adorns his self and which by its mere existence provides his life with meaning? What is this meaning?

It is interesting to note that the phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches have taken root in Occidental thought at a time when industrialisation has made things overabundant and people over-dependent (on things as well, and as bad).

Phenomenology could thus be a tricky method unless the investigator uses it most cautiously in order to reveal the dislexic, schizophrenic^vii, contradictory and redundant nature, feelings and relationships between people, meaning and objects. An attempt to elucidate how and why would a person acquire or use a particular object can point to the semantics of living with objects, people and the environment all the while the mischievous objects themselves remain slyly deaf, dumb, and numb.

My concern is to take the study of objects beyond its current scope and the status quo of the illusory progress of humanity and of material evolution of things, in order to find other possible ways of living with people and things, possibly with less things and preferably with self-made; because, when we spend time and effort making our own, we make only what is necessary, mostly of recycled matter and do not need to exploit the natural and human resources of the planet in order to buy things we don’t need thus making some few people even wealthier and most others tragically devoid of any possibility for love in any sense. For, when one is constantly hungry and bugged for time, what love can such a person give?

Tragically, though, most social scientists, educators, media, politicians and others continue to use terms that foster negative impressions of people and societies where things are scarce. They call them “poor”, “primitive”, “developing”… and in naming them as such sustain the value and cultivate the desire for the possession of things. In addition to deprivation, poverty has been invented as the stress and pressure to possess. It is this stress and pressure that makes industrialism and capitalism flourish since once you rob people of their time and the possibility for independence, you get workers and consumers.

Therefore, an attempt to answer the question of what makes people want and acquire things inevitably leads to the question of self, relationships, and love; but all these in a different light from the simplistic formula: I want therefore I love or vice versa. The trade-off involved – in the bargain of wanting and ceding and in the schizophrenic use of terminology – reveals our reliance on linguistic and social structures that control us and prescribe particular actions and desires. In simple words, love, objects and objectifications point to fundamental ways of existence that are mouldable and reshapable.

Finale: on love, objects, and objections

No essay can avoid touching on politics, particularly one that discusses desires, objects and love. In a world where even the size of one’s foot becomes an economic, and therefore political, issue – the amount of foot paraphernalia that can be made, advertised and sold is astounding (Nike vs Adidas vs self-made boots) – love is the easiest merchandise and, concurrently, an excellent political and economic tool in a global hierarchy, a pyramid of those who sell, buy, and control with the millions at the bottom who carry the pyramid on their backs and who still buy and consume what the industrialist/capitalist provides, ironically with their own labour and sacrifices.

In this way, the setting of a room with all its objects is part of the relationship that a person forms with her world and the question of trust, respect and love veils the discrepancies in the meaning and application of these notions.

Even the so-called charity or aid programmes perpetuate dependence: in the summer of 2005 in Montreal, a charity organisation was raising money to serve better meals at schools in “disadvantaged neighbourhoods”. While of course “disadvantaged” children need more and better food, such endeavours not only refuse to question the idea of schooling and family separation or even alienation, they present it as positive, as kind, as charity. They also slam shut any possible window to question the fact that the “disadavantaged” (a passive term), both parents and their children, are denied the power to make their own choice as to what, when, and where to consume and to decide what is good for them.

Finally, of course it is never mentioned that instead of paying the salaries of the administrators of such projects or administrators in general, it would have been more sincere to value each person’s effort equally: a parent’s effort to be as valuable as a “professional teacher’s” or a garbage collector’s pay should be no less than a tax collector’s, actually the tax collector already receives his bonus in the fact that his garbage does not stink; or consider the question of why is the effort behind the pesos or the rouble less valuable than the one behind the dollar or the euro. If this is too utopic for some, another option could be to simply donate enough money to the poor so that they, themselves, could provide nourishment for their kids – emotional included. Instead, the system makes the poor, too, depend on consuming what it deems fit for them to consume managing them within the purposefully circumscribed space of tragedy and despair. Finally, the poor and the wealthy, together, abandon their children in the despotic wilderness of the Institution for some to become predators and others obedient prey.

In this light, Karen and Arnold’s reaction to Todd’s abandonment by the school does not come as a surprise. Long before the school abandoned Todd, they, themselves, had abandoned him in the race for material and symbolic wealth.

To return to the beginning, Korchak’s example shows a different approach to love than what is common in consumer society. He does not objectify the “object” of his love nor does he replace it with objects or contradictory meanings. The semantic meaning of his words remains consistent with his actions. He said that he would not abandon these children and he stayed with them even in vanishing – a presence in that which is no longer physically seen or known. He is actively present, even in death and thus fulfills his promise of love.

In this war, is death the only way to love? My next paper on Modernism and Education focuses on how death is the underlying force of children’s institutions. I am presently working on the final part of the trilogy where I examine options to rewrite the script with life.

Bibliography:

Bourdieu, Pierre; transl. Richard Nice; Distinction. Routledge, London 1996.

Dettwyler, Katherine and Patricia Stuart-Macadam editors. Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives; Aldine De Gruyter, New York, 1995.

Dolto, Francoise. La cause des enfants. Editions Robert Laffont; Paris: 1985.

Hansen, Gladys. Violence in the Sandbox: A guide to children, parents, pre-schools and teachers. Little Children Productions, P.O.Box 24531, Los Angeles, CA 90024; 1982.

Herrick, John Middlemist and Stuart, Paul H. Encyclopedia of Social Welfare History in North America. Sage Publications, Inc.; Thousand Oaks, CA: 2005.

Herzfeld, Michael. The Social Production of Indifference.

Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London 1992.

Korchak, Janush; transl. From Polish into Russian by K. E. Senkevich; How to Love a Child, Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoj Literatury, Moskva 1990.

Mitchell, C. and Reid-Walsh, J.; Researching children’s popular culture: The culture spaces of childhood. London: Routledge 2002.

Nikitina, Lena A. and Boris P. Nikitin; My, Nashy Deti, i Vnuki. Molodoja Gvardia, Moskva 1989.

Nikitina, Lena A.; Roditeljam XXI go Veka. Znanie, Moskva 1998.

iPelaez, Vicky. The prison industry in the United States: Big business or a new form of slavery. 13 October 2005.

http://www.doublestandards.org/pelaez1.html

iiIbid.

iiihttp://www.prisonjustice.ca/politics/facts_stats.html

ivhttp://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/89-577-XIE/children.htm

vFor example, the petit train du nord used to be a railway service that connected the northof Quebec with Montreal. Car industry destroyed the railway and installed TWO highways. The railway was recently turned into a paid bicycle path.

vi Interesting that in Latin languages the term ‘instruction’ has two components: education and directives.

vii The term “schizophrenia” comes from Greek meaning “split mind” referring to the condition when a person is “split from reality”.