08/01/2003 - 9:38 a.m.

But some day you will be old enough to read fairy tales again.

I regret getting out of bed this morning. Having been woken up by my mother turning on all the lights upstairs at seven thirty before rushing out of the house in a panic, I discovered I would not be able to return to sleep. Rather unlike the jack hammer sleeping soundly in the next room.

So, at eight o clock, an hour of the morning I have not woken up to for quite some time, I wandered downstairs and turned on the television. After the news, which was a repeat of last night's ten o clock news, only with different anchors, I started flipping channels. I watched a few seconds of some random morning show and an infomercial on vitamins before I arrived at Sesame Street. I was a regular viewer until the fifth grade, and this morning I felt nostolgic.

There is nothing to feel nostolgic about. It's painful. It's horrible. This is not an opinion seen through a bias, this is plain and simple fact. What used to be a funny kid's show that anybody could watch has turned childish and ugly in the meanest and crudest sense of the words. Oh Mr. Henson, if only you knew. It made me feel ill, to sit there and watch the Muppets I knew and loved become puppets. I watched half of it, and it's an hour long show, but showed no signs of improving in the second half. If they still end the programme with "Elmo's World", I saw all I needed to see.

Children are not stupid. It is as soon as they are treated as though they are stupid that they become so. I know kids, I know a lot of kids. All you have to do is treat them like a human and answer their questions truthfully. I hate people who lie to children, people who tell kids that everything's OK when it isn't, people who hide important things- death and illness- from kids because "they won't be able to handle it". Well, no, they won't, especially if they don't come across it again until they're my age.

With this in mind, why then do they need sugar coated television? I was very very young, but I still remember watching the Sesame Street episode when Mr. Hooper died. He didn't just disappear, he died, and they told everybody he died. They wouldn't do that today. For one thing, the show has gotten too big for you to be able to care about anyone- it's all full of nameless, faceless, characterless monsters, and the Muppets aren't much better. No wonder kids latch on to Elmo, he's the only one who ever tells you what his name is.

I could never be a teacher, in spite of everybody wanting me to, I couldn't do it. When I've taken those awful "career aptitude" tests, they always come out telling me to be a social worker, which I could never be either. But I would like to give some kids the chance to be treated like they have half a brain, and wherever the applications are for that job, give me one now.

Life is heuristic, things are laid across it, and you do with those things what you can. You learn by doing and trial and error, and you go with what works. If you find books, you read. If you find markers, you draw. If you find that you can't digest Oreos, you don't buy them. It's all the same thing. Someone has only to help lay the right things across the path, and who knows what could happen.

I don't see enough people doing things like that. I see classes of students doped up on Ritalin who know not to talk during their lunches and that they must stand in straight lines before the music classes begin. What do they teach them at these schools? Professor Kirke said that, and in a way he is right. It is always winter and never Christmas; Father Christmas is forgotten before he can give the High King Peter his sword.