Kids Need a Healthy Dose of Exploration

Big fan of the short film "Duel" that we saw today in class.  It was so well executed on a number of levels.  It pointed to the unfortunate reality of adults shoving information they deem necessary into kids' heads, giving them no breathing room to think for themselves.  As discussed before in class or the other blogs, kids are oftentimes smarter than we think.  They need to be able to explore.  They need to be able to figure out things for themselves.  Now, it is essential that they be grounded in certain truths, but at a certain point, they need to be "let go of" and just explore the world for themselves.  The film did an excellent job of showing how people can turn out to be boring, rule-following robots if they only carry the knowledge of others before them; if they only accept what everybody else deems to be appropriate, without ever analyzing it for themselves.  The kid in the film could see this coming, and he was able to take matters into his own hands to stop it from becoming his own future.  

My new favorite quote is from a recent reading by C. S. Lewis, which goes:
"To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.  And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms.  Young things ought to want to grow.  But to carry on into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development.  When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so.  Now that I am fifty I read them openly.  When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."  

This is basically what the kid in the film decided to pursue: the curiosity that comes with childhood, even though he was growing up.  

But all that was only the message of the film.  Instead of just preaching, like it could have done, there's also a story to this film.  It's actually pretty amusing -- I loved the variety of visuals used to illustrate its meaning, like the conveyer belt machine, the scissors, knives, and pliers, and most of all, the funnel.  The funnel was a hilarious way to represent stuffing useless material into kids' brains.  Lastly, and this isn't as important, but even the look of the film was quite pleasing.  The characters were hand-drawn, but there was some brilliant interaction with real-life objects, animated in stop-motion.  

Overall, I was blown away with this film: It speaks directly to the issue of kids not being exposed to proper realities of life, and how just letting them explore on their own will actually develop them to be wiser adults.  But it also does this in the form of a story, where the viewer actually cares about the characters in the film.  

   

(If you haven't guessed by now, this short film reminded me of The Lego Movie, which is about pursing creativity and going against the falsehoods that the rest of the world would have you believe.)