When I re-read a beloved series of books from my childhood, I saw all too clearly how society limits kids’ creativity and originality.
Recently I came across my old copies of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, a series about magic cures for children’s foibles. When I read them to my own children, I was stunned to discover that these silly books are actually horror stories—
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle possesses a treasure chest of medicines to treat children’s bad habits—and unlike Ritalin, these cures involve bad trips.
When little Melody Foxglove’s mother complains that Melody cries too much, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle prescribes “Crybaby Tonic,” which makes Melody produce enough tears that she nearly drowns. Jody Jones, who skips school to build his tree house, is treated with “Ignorance Tonic,” which makes him forget how to count & read.
Today, our schools and systems are doing these things to children.
Read the rest of the story HERE: At www.theatlantic.com
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)