Reading Kids' Diaries

I think we should read kids' diaries. I'm also just a little bit pro-Bush's-spying-program, assuming he really is just scanning for terrorist plots and not preventing robberies or extra-marital affairs or meetings where people get together and burn Bush effigies or anything crazy like that. But that's not today's topic. I'm not talking about violating civil liberties for the sake of security here, I'm talking about violating civil liberties for ART.

If there is one consistent problem with all fiction (and even non-fiction) it is the unrelenting portrayal of children as adults perceive them, never the portrayal of children as they are. Now, I can't capture children as they really are—at age 22 I'm hardly in that position, and I never was able to keep a diary as a kid—but I do remember thinking, when I was a child, that every portrayal I saw was horribly charicatured and never represented the world I knew.

Exhibit A: Bullies. Stories about children are rife with bullies, children who live to make other children feel bad, and that's fine, because there are plenty of bullies in elementary school and middle school. They were, however, never of the Malfoy-Crabbe-Goyle variety. Never one obvious leader with cronies who had no other friends who would show up just to torture people. As I recall, it was the legitimately popular kids who were bullyish. The vast, vast majority of boys, especially around age 13, are obscenely insecure. It's not like college (or even high school), where the secure crowd rises to the top and wins everyone's love, and an insecure minority are stuck being assholes whom everyone kind of hates but may have some power due to sheer force. No no no. In middle school, the entire popular crowd is insecure and generally takes it out on anyone they can. And they're less explicit about their bullying. There's no obvious building themselves up...it's just about shooting the other person down. It's about exchanging looks with a group of five that say "Wow, this person just made a really bad choice. Why would anyone do THAT?" It's not about shoving people into lockers. It's about subtle mockery and exclusion. It probably wouldn't look that bad if an adult listened to the whole thing.

I'm a little too caught up in exhibit A to run through other exhibits, but they would partially concern the inner life of children. What do they think about? I famously thought about my kindergarten teachers molesting miniature versions of the von Trapp children. What do normal children think about? The exhibits would otherwise concern the interactions between children. What do they talk about? What kind of signals do they give? I have relatively little recollection. I don't think TV shows, books, plays and other art forms portray these accurately, even when they capture something fundamentally true about people. They fail to capture childhood as it is, not how we vaguely recall it to be or see it in other children. I only know because I was overwhelmingly frustrated as a child by the innacuracies. I just didn't do anything about it.

Which is where the civil liberties violation comes in. Isolate children from portrayals of themselves. Force them to keep diaries under the guise of secrecy. But then read the diaries. Read them all, and from them get an idea of the collective experience of individual children.

Of course this is impractical, but we should find some way of getting the information from them without letting them just confirm our suggestions, without them just spewing back the portrayals of them they've seen. Save art! Help human understanding! Exploit children!