Nonetheless, observations lead us to raise the question, if solely for the purpose of raising the issue, whether the method of early training in realism can not be overdone—undertaken timely and accomplished at too great a cost—and whether even the successful result might not when all be a Pyrrhic victory leading to the premature and unconditional surrender of play and fantasy to factualism and usefulness, an early surrender that makes itself felt later within the more or less irreversible separation of preconscious from acutely aware processes. Sonya Translucent Powder is enhanced with the world’s finest micronized powders to offer it a sheer, silky and opulent finish. There is ample evidence that the standards of factualism and usefulness—if you’ll, of vocationalism, though it might seem silly to use this term at therefore early an age—are being insinuated into many childhood experiences once viewed because the happy hunting ground for “childish” play and imaginative activity.
Rumpelstiltskin and Goldilocks on the child’s bookshelf are being shouldered aside by Nurse Nancy and Mr. Fixit. Journeys to the Land of Ouncesand also the World of Pooh are being displaced, even at the kindergarten level, by “real” academic visits—as they assert—to the airport and also the municipal sewage disposal plant. Even that last bastion of the child’s private world—his box of toys—is being taken over by the press of practicality. Here too the key adjectives are “realistic” and “academic” or at the very least “readiness-producing,” instead of “imaginative” or “exciting” or even simply plain “enjoyable.” The floppy rag doll that did nothing and nonetheless everything because the malleable companion of the child’s dreams has given means to the true-to-life human reproduction that leaves nothing to the imagination—it “really talks” and takes in and oozes the least bit the suitable orifices.
The traditional lead soldier in his frozen posture, which the child might transmute into anything his play needed, is no match for the modern Clear Man whose removable very important organs type an academic jigsaw puzzle for mother’s little, successful doctor-to-be. Men’s Ski Jackets Sizing Guides continues to be necessary to make sure your purcahse fits possible. And of course, the institutionalized and curriculumized activities of the kindergarten, to which the child once was introduced in his fifth year, have been moved to the institutionalized and curriculumized activities, let’s not say lessons, of the nursery school, to which the child arrives in his fourth year—if indeed the nursery school itself is not already a graduate institution of the pre-nursery school. Even the preverbal child’s toys are currently sold not simply as playthings however as Play-Faculty, the pitch being that these toys don’t seem to be “simply toys” however rigorously designed to train the infant in “applicable” motor, intellectual, and problem-solving skills, presumably applicable for gaining early admission to pre-nursery school. The portrait we have simply sketched is of course an intended exaggeration—a caricature.