







































 

IN OUR OWN IMAGE: 
THE CHILD, CANADIAN CULTURE, 

AND OUR FUTURE 

CAROLE H. CARPENTER 

Foreword 

Originally published in 1996, the following text was presented as the ninth 
annual Robarts lecture when I was the John P. Robarts Professor of Canadian 
Studies at York University for the academic year 1994-95. It was well 
received and excited considerable commentary given that it was perceived as 
a radical gaze on contemporary childhood. Yet little came of it in terms of 
any concrete action; indeed, the position of children and their culture within 
Canadian culture has, if anything, worsened. More children are now living in 
poverty than in 1996; children are more controlled and manipulated than 
ever; they evidence increased passivity (through escalating youth obesity, for 
example); and anger dominates their environments as never before. Hence, 
the call for a new vision of child and childhood is all the more necessary 
today in order to offer them a chance at a future they own. 

A generation ago, the social historian Peter Laslett noted that: 

In the pre-industrial world there were children everywhere; playing in 
the village street and fields when they were very small, hanging round the 
farmyards and getting in the way, until they had grown enough to be given 
child-sized jobs to do; thronging the churches; for ever clinging to the skirts 
of women in the house and wherever they went and above all crowding 
round the cottage fires. 

Given such ubiquity of youth, it is not at all surprising that the 
"perpetual distraction of childish noise and talk must have affected everyone 
almost all the time." An estimated forty-five to fifty per cent of all people 
alive in Stuart England were children, according to Laslett's figures which, as 
he indicates, accord with circumstances in twentieth-century third world 
communities. It is, then, more than a little surprising that: 

These crowds and crowds of little children are strangely absent 
from the written record, even if they are conspicuous 



 IN OUR OWN IMAGE CARPENTER 

enough in the pictures painted at the time, particularly the outside 
scenes. There is something mysterious about the silence of all these 
multitudes of babes in arms, toddlers and adolescents in the 
statements men made at the time about their own experience. (104) 

Children per se are not really absent from the record; rather, real children 
are—their cultural existence is, in effect, a veritable silencing of the lambs. 
We know very little about what it was actually like to be a child anywhere in 
the world in times past, especially from the perspective of children 
themselves. 

This general suppression of children as a cultural presence persists today; 
a circumstance that is by no means unique to Canada, though it certainly is 
characteristic of this country. Despite a promising increase in scholarly 
interest recently, Canada definitely has not showcased childhood as an aspect 
of its culture as have some other countries of late: for instance, Australia, 
where an extended and expensive scholarly anthology on childhood sold out 
soon after publication1; or Britain, which, along with producing many other 
relevant publications, dominates the 1988 Collins anthology, Childhood ed-
ited by Penelope Hughes-Hallett, a work that contains not one Canadian item 
in its 450 pages despite broad coverage of time, space and cultural groups 
worldwide. 

Children do appear in a variety of "stories of childhood" in Canadian 
culture, that is, the range of discourses and gazes that deal with child and 
childhood, from anthropological considerations to literary and artistic 
representations. The anthropological sources are amazingly spare until 
relatively recently, especially given the vast accumulated data on Canada's 
First Nations, but then most of the early documenters were men and, often, 
priests; children were simply not within their purview, as the noted Huronia 
specialist Conrad Heidenreich observed (personal communication, Dec.1993). 
The absence of children from Franz Boas' monumental Northwest Coast work 
is even more telling given that he was one of the founders of the American 
Folklore Society which, at the time of its establishment in 1888, specifically 
identified children's traditions as one of its primary foci of interest. The 
Native People were already marginal; their children-far from marginal within 
indigenous societies-were largely ignored by outside scholars whose gaze 
tended to exclude them. At best, indigenous children were heard of, but 
certainly not from. 

The storying of childhood as the Native People actually experienced it 
has only emerged since the late 1960s as part of their cultural 

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reclamation. And then it has poured forth-suppressed voices release into a 
post-colonial discourse, seeking validation and respect. The result is many 
extraordinary oral life histories, memoirs and autobiographical novels (see, 
for example, the works of Blackman, Johnston and Campbell). Childhood is 
effectively a metonym for the overall oppression of the Native People, for it 
is as children that they have been most marginalized, silenced and robbed of 
their cultural selves by Canadian culture either through omission or relentless 
commission. Prevailing paternalist thought and policies essentially 
transformed all indigenous people into voiceless children and, by so doing, 
purposefully dismissed them. 

This is not to suggest that Canada's First Nations should be treated as 
children nor that children are actually to be equated with the indigenous 
people, but rather that Canadian society has treated them both comparably. 
Investigation of the positioning of such different groups at the margin 
illuminates some key concepts and orientations within our culture. It is also 
worth noting that since the late 1960s, the Native Peoples have often served 
as a bellwether of Canadian concerns; hence, their contemporary cultural 
circumstances may presage the future of our nation's youth. 

The denial of voice to children generally is simply part of the adult 
world's control over them. As Rex and Wendy Stainton Rogers note in their 
extended deconstruction of the knowledging of childhood, Stories  
of  Childhood: 

One voice has been largely missing. . . that of children themselves. 
This is not accidental; it very much reflects a general dismissing of 
such texts in our culture. (104) 

The Stainton Rogers' argument was not constructed using Canadian 
examples, though it easily might have been. Children have an historical 
cultural presence in Canada, but their cultural present has been largely 
ignored and they themselves have not typically been heard. Very little indeed 
has been made of their existence as cultural beings, of their real or imagined 
significance in cultural terms, or most particularly, of their own culture. 

Most discourses pertaining to Canadian children come from Education 
and the Social Sciences (particularly Sociology and Psychology), and 
consider them largely in the context of various institutions, social processes 
or roles. Some folklore studies assume a humanistic approach focussing on 
aesthetics and creativity; or child-centered cultural dynamics and meaning. 
Otherwise, virtually all analyses of 

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culture in relation to Canadian children deal primarily with its acquisition 
through socialization and its operation in families, schools, community 
organizations and the like. Even the finest works available on the history of 
Canadian childhood, such as Joy Parr's edited collection, Childhood and 
Family in Canadian History, tend to concentrate mainly on what comes 
passively to children from the adult world and their gradual adjustment to the 
established social orders in which they live. Seldom is consideration paid to 
children's active creation and manipulation of their environments through 
cultural means; their philosophical encounters with things, people and 
concepts; and the position of their own thoughts and traditions in their 
grappling with life. Noteworthy exceptions are Neil Sutherland's article, 
"'Everyone seemed happy in those days': the culture of childhood in 
Vancouver between the 1920's and the 1960's" and the study from which it 
emerged, the Canadian Childhood History Project conducted in the 
1980s at the University of British Columbia. 

The best-known works on Canadian children's traditions, such as Edith 
Fowke's handsome bestseller Sally Go Round the Sun (1969), tend far more 
to description than analysis so they have done little to counter popular 
opinion that such cultural artifacts are passing phenomena-charming, 
delightful and amusing, perhaps, but in the final analysis, not very significant. 
Fowke's book was selected 1970 Children's Book of the Year by the 
Canadian Library Association. This recognition, though arguably well-
deserved, has had somewhat detrimental results in terms of the appreciation 
of children's lore as legitimate culture, for the work enables and, through its 
popularity with teachers and librarians has promoted, an approach to 
children's traditions as adult-directed entertainment over their actual 
operation in child-focused situations. Dr. Fowke assuredly did not directly 
intend this outcome and ought not to be faulted for it, since she both recog-
nized the value and import of children's culture and was recognized for 
contributions to its appreciation.2 

* * * 

The traditional behaviors and the intangible and tangible artifacts of 
Canadian children continue to be viewed primarily as the embodiment of the 
timelessness and universality of childhood, which itself is conceived of as a 
state we must survive in order to emerge as people. Children in this country 
are, then, effectively perceived and hence treated as pre-cultural or proto-
cultural beings and, therefore, because culture is a defining characteristic of 
human beings, as not fully hu- 

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man. Canadians certainly are not alone in possessing or implementing such 
ideas, but the situation has particular relevance to us because of whom we 
think we are and should be. 

In many respects, children today can be seen to occupy a position in our 
culture not dissimilar to that which Native Peoples endured from Contact 
through into the second half of the 20th century. Children are a recurrent 
image, a central concern, even a national symbol, but they are not considered 
to be people like or, more to the point, quite equal to other people. Rather 
they are treated to a greater or lesser extent as objects—possessions or 
commodities to be manipulated at will. Presumably with the best intentions, 
adults treat them paternalistically, claiming that they act only for children's 
own good. But that good is determined by outsiders to the group and children 
rarely have any opportunity to express their own truth. 

The Canadian nation has come to recognize the folly of its historical 
treatment of the Native Peoples and the necessity to deal in contemporary, 
post-colonial times with a resultant complex tangle of human anguish and 
irreparable damage; just demands for reparations; cultural guilt; and a search 
for moral justice through self-determination. Yet, we have not mended our 
ways for, prevented by our laws and consciences from subjugating the "child-
like primitives" we once supposed the Native Peoples to be, we Canadians 
persist in enacting the same imperialist scenario with today's children. Let us 
explore the similarities. 

Strong societal images of the child and childhood are reflected in their 
many and varied representations throughout this country over time. These 
images are certainly not exclusive to Canadian, but then, exceptionally little 
of what characterizes us (or, for that matter, any other contemporary nation) 
is unique. We came by many of our images quite honestly through our 
heritage of western civilization and Christianity, namely: the Biblical child as 
innocent, pure and good; the Romantic child as visionary, closer to nature 
and hence to supreme understanding; John Locke's child as tabula rasa or 
blank slate; and the Calvinist child as evidence of original sin and so evil by 
nature, though sometimes salvageable through nurture. 

Some images we fashion into a distinctive, that is, truly Canadian 
mould, for the representations reflect as well as shape us. One such image is 
the child as worker or extra hands. For a period in the latter nineteenth and 
early twentieth century, a child (specifically a needy one in care) was thought 
to be a highly desirable immigrant-viewed as malleable, biddable, capable of 
much-needed labor and bound to be grateful for the rewards that would 
certainly come his or her way. As a 

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result of this image, nearly 89,000 children were brought to Canada from Dr. 
Thomas Barnardo's homes and similar institutions in Britain between 1865 
and 1925, many to be abused and made virtual slaves, treated worse than the 
farm animals they frequently tended. This disparity between the imaginary 
child as hands and the reality is vividly presented in a 1990 documentary, 
Welcome Home, which juxtaposes historical evidence, government 
propaganda and the commentary of one home child. The population of 
Canada now includes well over a million descendants of such children—an 
enormous debt to an image. 

The child of nature, as natural creature, which is another significant 
image, takes on special meaning in this country given the mythic connection 
with the land that underlies our identity, be it local, regional or national. The 
child of the Canadian imagination is not merely a part of nature, but is one 
with nature, assuming an almost Pan-like quality. Two excellent examples are 
the stop-frame, frozen children in Jean-Paul Lemieux's portraits of the Quebec 
landscape (often in winter) and the Young Ben, a real boy who embodies the 
spirit of the prairie in W. O. Mitchell's classic novel, Who Has Seen the Wind 
(1947). The image goes much further back, however, to Charles G.D. Roberts' 
1921 publication, Children of the Wild, and some of his other books, as well 
as to Ernest Thomas Seton's late 19th-century works of naturalist animal 
stories that established this distinctively Canadian contribution to 
international children's literature. The persistent image is one of a "sensuous 
little savage," as Wallace Stegner characterizes it in Wolf Willow (1962), his 
storying of the last plains frontier, the pre-World War I Saskatchewan milieu 
of his childhood. 

The profound impact of Calvinism on Canadian culture (Jansenism in 
French Canada) is evident in our distinct take on the child as, on the one 
hand, evil (at least potentially) and, on the other, supremely good. The single 
most famous folktale of Canadian origin that centers on a child is Rose 
Latulippe also know as The Devil at the Dance (Fowke, 1979: 83-87). In this 
story, a young girl disobeys her parents' and societal proscriptions and sneaks 
out (sometimes wearing a red cape, no less) to go dancing: a handsome, dark 
stranger appears at the dance and leads our Rose into a whirl of temptation, 
only to be recognized for the Evil One himself, sometimes by a babe in arms 
who cries out or by a passing priest who eventually exorcises him away. Rose 
is marked indelibly in this encounter: visibly as scars of the Devil's claws on 
her hands and spiritually as a necessity to dedicate her lift to the Church. A 
pointed message to all rebellious youth! 

Alex Colville, an internationally renowned Canadian artist, once 
asserted that he preferred to paint subjects that were "wholly good"; 

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consequently he turned his highly controlled magic realist vision to the task 
of portraying children and animals.4 Similarly, in creating the first of his 
many renderings of children's games on the Canadian prairies while 
hospitalized in England following a nervous breakdown, William Kurelek 
used childhood then as later to discover goodness and worth in himself and to 
proclaim a message of Christian virtue as the means of confronting the moral 
dilemmas of modern life. This image of the Canadian child is very 
widespread and popular, for Kurelek's illustrated book, Prairie Boy's Winter 
(1973) has won more awards than any other Canadian publication and, 
together with his other three works specifically for children (1974, 1975, 
1976), has sold in excess of half a million copies worldwide. 

Briefly, there are some other perhaps more immediate images: first, 
child as redeemer or savior is ever-present as third-generation figures in our 
immigrant literature—Noah in Mordecai Rich1er's Son of a Smaller Hero 
(1955) or young Moses in Adele Wiseman's The Sacrifice (1956)—let alone 
in the daily lives of countless thousands whose sacrifice of home and heritage 
their children carry as a sentence from which they redeem themselves and 
their families through success in this, the new land. Second, the child as 
helpless dependent is widely evident in advertising-what's riding on those 
Michelin tires, for instance, or appealing for moderation in drinking from 
posters in your local liquor store asking "Do you need a better reason?" And 
child as victim is a vivid image in such compelling modern works as The 
Boys of St. Vincent's (1992) back to perhaps the best-known visual image of 
child in Canada, Paul Peel's "The Tired Model" painted in 1889 and regularly 
on exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Working out of a Victorian 
sensibility which elevated the child's form to a consideration now deemed 
almost pathologically voyeuristic, Peel painted several youth nudes 
including" A Venetian Bather" (1889) about which the noted art historian 
Dennis Reid has said: 

It was probably the first nude to be publicly exhibited in Toronto. 
Viewers who normally would be outraged at the display of such 
seductive flesh were enabled by the innocence of the young subject 
in her exotic setting to luxuriate in the delicious curves and soft 
glow and to savor pleasure for its own sake. 

Such obvious exploitation of the young brings us to a singularly appropriate 
point to conclude this section on imaging children in Canada. In general, 
these representations demonstrate how we have fashioned 

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children in our own image, for our own purposes and how, in so doing, 
combined with the silence of the child's own voice, we have lost sight of the 
real living child. This cultural imaging and its relevance throughout our 
culture over time will receive the fuller discussion it merits in a book-length 
study-the direct result of my Robarts Chair research—on "Images of Child 
and Childhood in Canadian Culture." What is pertinent to this discussion is 
the impact of such imaging on the lives of contemporary children. 

* * * 

Fine studies by scholars such as Daniel Francis (1992), Terry Goldie (1989) 
and Leslie Monkman (1981) pertaining to images of Native People in Canada 
indicate the extent and impact of this storying of our aboriginal peoples, their 
stereotyping along the Pesky Redskin/Noble Savage dichotomy, and the 
consequent failure to represent their multifaceted real cultural and human 
nature. The resultant situation is one of subjugation, alienation and 
marginalization and sentimentalization, exploitation and fossilized 
preservation among the image-makers. Such is the case as well for Canada's 
children, who remain suppressed in spite of the postcolonial, feminist, 
multicultural, and human rights movements of today. They are a special kind 
of human being sentenced to a status as "a mixture of expensive nuisance, 
fragile treasure, slave and super-pet," in the words of the educator and 
commentator on childhood, John Holt (1975: 18). 

Just as the images of Native People, their way of life and their cultural 
artifacts have been drawn into service to represent Canada and Canadianness 
at home and abroad, so too have children and childhood been used, as is 
evident by a glance at the most famous Canadian child of all—Anne (with an 
"e") of Green Gables. In her particularly insightful book, Children’s 
Literature in Canada, Elizabeth Waterston describes Anne as operating in a 
distinctly Canadian way: 

the fictional Anne Shirley uses idealism, imagination, humor, and 
independent thought to tame society's emphasis on unremitting 
work, social propriety, and religious conformity. 

Waterston goes on to state that Emily Carr3 dealt with life in a similar 
manner, and to argue that: 

Characters [of contemporary children's literature] are armed with the same 
weapons as the fictional Anne Shirley and the real Emily Carr: 

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humor, intense feelings, the will to survive, honesty and essential kindness. 
Canadians believe these qualities represent national values.(4) 

Later in her work Waterston says: 

Canadian children's books fix an image of the country that will 
endure and that may well affect international relations in the future. 
The true image of Canada is a composite of savagery and sweetnes-
like literature, like childhood. (11) 

If any book has worked in this manner, it certainly is Lucy Maud 
Montgomery's classic, translated into dozens of languages and variously 
commodified overtime throughout the world (especially in Prince Edward 
Island where not a summer passes but that the play is staged for tourists who 
make pilgrimages to Anne's home, cradled on the waves of the Gulf of St. 
Lawrence). Anne encapsulates many of the key Canadian child images: she is 
an orphan, sought as extra hands (by mistake since they wanted a boy, about 
which much more deserves to be said); she is good (and does good, not least 
for Matthew and more especially Marilla Cuthbert, for whom she is a savor, 
brining nurturing love into an emotionally arid existence); she is unquestion-
ably sensuous and certainly wild or savage in the sense of being untamed, but 
far the better for that; and above all, she is not merely close to nature, she is 
the essence of that particular place. 

We Canadians frequently conceive of ourselves and present our essence 
as child-like, offering up our supposed youth as a nation as an excuse for our 
perceived or felt cultural immaturity. When our Prime Minister Sir Wilfred 
Laurier proclaimed late in the nineteenth century that "the twentieth century 
belongs to Canada," some Canadians seem to have believed that we would 
one day grow up, become a world power and have real guns rather than toy 
pistols (or the popular chicken cannon devised by the Royal Canadian Air 
Farce4). Some Canadians still harbor such beliefs despite the modern 
postnational condition. It is not merely by chance then, nor does it seem 
unfitting, that the 1984 Canadian volume in the A Day in the Life of [various 
countries] series carries a photograph of a young boy and girl as a symbolic 
representation of our nation comparable to the cowboy used on the American 
volume. As a people we seem to conceive of ourselves, of our essential 
being, in terms of the best that child represents—that sublime and natural 
goodness, simplicity and faith in people and life For example, the Ojibway 
artist Arthur Shilling wrote in 1986: 

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Children are my island, my innocence. 
They are the spirit of forgiveness. 
Children are the giving 
and forgiving 
part of God in me. (80) 

A central underlying Canadian conception of child, then, is as our conscience 
as a people, which made it quite natural for federal government under Brian 
Mulroney to chair the 1990 United Nations Summit on the Child. This 
national identification of ours with and through children renders all the more 
remarkable the fact that as a group, children are, without doubt, culturally the 
least advantaged—indeed, most oppressed5—people in Canada today for they 
do not even have recognition, let alone status, as a cultural group. 

At the same time, children are not merely important in our cultural 
expression as already discussed, but central to our contemporary daily 
existence and (not insignificantly) to our economic activity. Kids constitute a 
huge market (estimates predict that by 2011 there will be 3.5 million children 
and youth in Ontario alone). Kid-stuff involves large sums of money: toys 
alone were a $1.2 billion Canadian industry in 1990; revenue from children's 
camps across the nation in 1993 was almost $110 million; and primary and 
secondary education combined now gobbles up over $30 thousand million 
Canadian dollars annually. Childhood itself is a major commodity, to be 
preserved individually, in specially purchased Grandmothers' remembrance 
books for instance, or collectively in museums (akin to the famous Museum 
of Childhood in Edinburgh)6; to be nostalgically exhibited in our homes 
through those objects of great pride—our family photographs—or sold in art 
galleries.7 As well, childhood artifacts and expressions are regularly 
circulated internationally in campaigns aimed at tugging our heartstrings to 
loosen our purse strings in support of various causes. One particularly 
notable Canadian commodification of children's expression is Ben Wicks's 
1995 compilation of young people's letters and drawings, Dear Canada/Cher 
Canada: A Love Letter to My Country, which is unabashedly intended to 
enlist children's voices in promoting national unity.8 

Canadians have a particular angle on the commodification of childhood 
in that children's music is easily one of our most successful cultural exports. 
From over twenty years of performing, recording and publishing, Sharon, 
Lois and Bram as well as Raffi and Fred Penner have emerged as icons of 
childhood, in Canada and beyond our borders. They are all Canadians rooted 
in a long tradition of folk singing 

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for children fostered by the CBC around mid-century and Sir Ernest 
Macmillan's arrangements of traditional music for school children dating 
from the inter-war period (for extended discussion see Posen, 1993). It must 
be noted that this industry almost exclusively involves music produced for 
children by adults rather than the music children sing and pass on by 
themselves, that is, their own culture. 

* * * 

Children's culture itself conjures up images-of youngsters singing, 
skipping, clapping, playing and sharing together a rich lore passed down over 
the generations and occasionally recorded by dedicated collectors such as the 
American, William Wells Newell, in his late nineteenth-century study, Games 
and Songs of American Children and Britons, Iona and Peter Opie following 
World War II (see, for instance, their first major work, The Lore and 
Language of Schoolchildren. In part we story our childhood years through 
such imagery, recounting our past-times, our experiences on the streets and in 
the playgrounds of yesteryear, often in the process nostalgically lamenting 
their passage and the other concurrent transformations we perceive in society, 
the environment and everyday activities during the intervening years. 

But, today the streets are the preferred playgrounds for relatively few 
children; parks are frequently favored haunts of pushers and perverts; 
schoolyards are by intention orchestrated into adventure playgrounds and 
adult-supervised activities or patrolled by Peacemakers, adult-designated peer 
troubleshooters. Surface evidence might easily lead one to presume that the 
demise of children's lore has come, having been predicted virtually since the 
name in 1846 of the discipline of Folklore which studies such oral-based 
culture. One might claim, in keeping with Neil Postman's argument presented 
in The Disappearance of Childhood (1984), that much more than the lore, the 
very state of being a child has vanished, its passing hastened along as (in the 
manner outlined by David Elkind in The Hurried Child [1988]) we 
determinedly hurry our children through a brief, youthful apprenticeship for 
supposedly real life. Would we dare suggested that old age is comparably an 
apprenticeship for the next phase of the life cycle—death? In a certain 
spiritual sense the golden years may indeed serve such a preparatory function, 
but surely that would command greater not less respect for this period. The 
political correctness emergent from gerontology demands the social 
recognition and just treatment of our seniors as full human beings with all the 
attendant rights, feelings, interests and so on. Why not similar recognition and 
treatment 

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for those at the other end of the life cycle? After, as a childhood friend of 
mine wisely remarked many years ago, "Babies are wee people."9 

We in contemporary western society significantly orchestrate our 
children's existence. In good part our of fears for their physical safety and 
security now or in the future: 

we institutionalize them early—age three was recommended in the 
"For the Love of Learning," the report of a recent Ontario Royal 
Commission on Learning; we structure their free time into endless 
classes or organized activities, often of our choosing for their good, 
or for our good so we can fulfill the demands of our lives; we direct 
them towards success as we define it; we instruct them variously 
and continuously as we perceive they require; we manipulate their 
environments to reflect our ideas; we censor their cultural 
experiences and expressions according to our aesthetic sensibilities, 
and we generally seek to control and direct them so as to produce 
children as we think they ought to be, that is, in our own image. 

In assuming as our right this extension of ourselves onto and through our 
children, surely we ought to accept responsibility for the contingent messages 
we convey to the young. Yet, there is little to suggest that we give much more 
than passing thought to those messages or how they are received. Comparable 
were the messages we communicated explicitly or implicitly to our aboriginal 
peoples in the course of their colonization. Now, faced with the 
consequences, we recognize that the Native People generally felt belittled and 
demeaned; came to view themselves as being inferior and forced to undergo 
radical transformation in order to benefit from, let alone participate in, 
mainstream culture. Large numbers ended up believing that they had lost 
control of their existence and, far too often, that their lives were not worth 
living. 

Culture was both medium and message in this communication, which we 
now dub cultural genocide while engaging in a communal mea culpa. But 
does the guilt feel so good that we wish to repeat it? It would seem from our 
actions that singularly appropriate representations are to be found in the 
haunting portraits of the young amongst Edward S. Curtis's documentary 
photographs of "the vanishing race" included in his magnum opus, The North 
American Indian, published in the early 1900s. During their colonization, 
Native People were encouraged away from their cultural traditions, 
sometimes purposefully 

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impeded and/or prohibited from practicing and transmitting them by 
outsiders who did not really understand or appreciate the cultures. Are not 
the cultural circumstances of Canada's children similar? 

* * * 

As elsewhere in the world, the culture of childhood in Canada must be seen to 
comprise three different, though inter-related aspects. The first of these is the 
predominantly oral culture shared amongst children themselves, that is, their 
folklore-folklife, which includes material they appropriate from the world 
around and make their own; the second is all those cultural artifacts 
considered appropriate to children and/or to which they are intentionally 
exposed; and the third, the concept of child as storied and applied in the 
culture which necessarily both bounds and enables the existence of a culture 
of childhood. In this child-centered era, it is the latter two aspects that have 
mushroomed in presence so as to overshadow the child's present, which 
comprises his/her own take on the world, interpretation of circumstances, 
creative expression and the like embodied in children's own cultural artifacts 
not only preserved from the past but also shaped from and to contemporary 
life. 

In order to have such cultural artifacts of their own, children need time to 
be together, to explore the natural, social and personal worlds in which they 
exist, and to share their ideas and experiences. They need to encounter trials, 
be surprised, experiment, manipulate their surroundings, fail and master. In 
other words, they need to develop their cultural fitness through relevant 
exercise just as they should develop physical fitness by using appropriate 
muscles. The "cultural muscles' appropriate to children are rhymes, jokes, 
riddles, games, taunts, songs, parodies, gestures and much more that young 
people operate with and through amongst their peers, thereby manipulating, 
creating, negotiating, absorbing, reacting within a vital, interactive and, in a 
healthy way, subversive10 cultural matrix. It is such experiences that validate 
their existence as child, make worthy their very being (rather than their 
becoming), and underscore their joy in living. 

The dynamics of contemporary life are such that relatively few children 
are encouraged or enabled to spend extended periods in child-focussed, child-
directed environments engaged with children's own culture. Indeed, not a few 
responsible adults seem to view such circumstances with suspicion or 
derision. Rather than being respected as their right to privacy and freedom of 
expression, the secret world of children alone together is frequently equated 
with dark or sinister 

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behaviors, and as contributing to violence on the playgrounds, or to racial 
and gender stereotyping, or to "mischief" in its various aspects from sexual 
exploration to drug use. Either out of necessity or, in good Calvinist fashion, 
to ensure that their time is spend more wisely, the adult world increasingly 
restricts children's free time to be children. 

But children's lore is far from dead, as demonstrated by the ease with 
which Virginia Caputo collected some 300 songs in oral circulation among 
urban schoolchildren in just six one-hour sessions.11 A forum I organized for 
the 1994 American Folklore Society meeting on "Children's Folklore in the 
Media Age: Assessing the Field" concluded that the tradition, while 
transformed, notably persisted but also continued to display dynamic 
creativity. Very young children today may sing along with an animated 
purpose dinosaur they see on television but, as documented by panelist 
Elizabeth Tucker, they readily come to manipulate the Barney theme song in 
order to comment on the media or on human interrelationships, especial 
friendship and homosexuality.12 

When the adult world turns its gaze upon children's own culture, it is 
commonly with pragmatic intent. Specialists from many fields recognize the 
benefits to children of engaging with their own culture, including: 
developments in terms of motor control, physical fitness, linguistic acumen, 
social skills, cultural stances or orientations, and understanding of abstract 
concepts such as justice as well as basic life skills. Play is good for children, 
psychologists tell us; it enables the proper unfolding of individuality that 
permits people to control their own lives. Fair enough, but such ideas do 
place emphasis on the becoming rather than the being in terms of culture. 
Adults typically want to ensure that the unfolding is, indeed, proper, and 
hence tend to intervene. 

Let us consider an example: contemporary playground observations 
indicate that some children playa form of tag in which It has and can pass on 
HIV Upon learning of this game, many adults react in horror in one of two 
ways: either proclaiming (on the basis of their moral precepts or sentimental 
images) that youngsters should not play with AIDS, or demanding that 
children be taught the real facts of AIDS. The game should, then, be banned 
or attached through appropriate instruction. Few would let it be, allowing 
that the game is children's means of coping with the existence of this real-life 
terror through exerting control over it in the relatively sage microcosm of life 
that their culture, in effect, really is. During the Second World War, British 
children are reported to have played similarly with Hitler and Nazism (see 
Opie & Opie) in an effort to understand and to maintain the sense of 

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control over surroundings necessary to emotional well being. Also, one of the 
hypothetical origins for "Ring around the Rosie" suggests that this game, too, 
developed among youngsters in their efforts to assert control through play 
over another terror, the Black Death.13 

The world around seldom seems to view children as knowing, having, 
doing but rather as needing, lacking, emerging. Little if any intrinsic value 
appears to be placed on the state of being child. How to encourage self-worth, 
then? Much of children's own culture has been around a very long time: it 
should be obvious that it is of significance, that it works and has real meaning 
for children since it truly has been strong enough to be remembered by them. 
By what right then do we endeavor to change it? and with what effect? Take 
some modern (politically correct) rewritings of nursery rhymes, for instance: 
"Georgy Porgy, puddin' and pie, Kissed the girls and made them cry. . ." be-
comes "Georgy Porgy, what a shame, Kids call you such a silly name . . ."14 
Children who use the first rhyme know that Georgy did something he should 
not have done and made girls cry, so name-calling is Georgy's just desserts-
retributive justice, an idea generally favored by children; youngsters who hear 
the second verse recognize it for the over, preaching didacticism it is and will 
not embrace it in their tradition so the adult's intent is foiled. Which is really 
in the cultural best interests of the child? 

The liberties we take with children's culture demonstrate our un-
willingness to accept the young for who they are, to recognize their 
differences and to celebrate their distinctiveness. These familiar phrases are 
the demands of multiculturalism, enshrined in the laws of the land, expressive 
of the fundamental freedoms of all (presumably younger and older) 
Canadians as specified in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and at the heart 
of Canadianness. Cultural self-determination is the cry of our times, yet our 
children are less culturally empowered than any other distinctive minority. 
While children in care have the right to their religious freedom, the right to 
maintain their own culture and various other rights guaranteed under 
provincial legislation (for instance the Child and Family Services Act in 
Ontario), there is no similar statement of rights for a child not in care, who is, 
therefore, much at the mercy of his/her parents culturally. The phenomenal 
cultural reality experienced by many youngsters seriously infringes upon their 
rights, namely, to freedom of expression and freedom of thought, conscience 
and religion as specified in Articles 13 and 14 of the Hague Convention, the 
UNESCO Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted in 1989, of which 
Canada was a major supporter and signatory. 

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Children are such cultural pawns that it comes to some as a genuine 
revelation that their lives are actually their own. Jean Little, one of Canada's 
most famous authors for children, recounts her awakening at age nine 
following upon an aesthetic reaction to orange segments arranged as "a line 
of glowing orange boats": 

For the first time I saw my world and my life as something that 
belonged to me and began to put small scraps of time away in a 
place where I could take them out and look at them whenever I 
needed.(92-93) 

Ms. Little's marked success despite being legally blind is undoubtedly linked 
to this empowerment that refuses victimhood. Substantial numbers of 
Canada's children never are personally empowered culturally and assuredly 
suffer variously as a result, just as the Native People have. Many of the 
significant youth problems of today are notably similar to the a-social and 
anti-social behaviors exhibited by Native People that are commonly traced to 
colonization, for instance, low self-esteem, substance abuse, increased 
violence, inter-generation conflicts, rootlessness and lack of identity and, 
most alarming, a dramatic rise in the suicide rate. 

Some psychologists and youth psychiatrists offer perspectives from their 
disciplines that may be adapted to a cultural understanding of this situation. In 
particular, Alice Miller presents in he Drama of the Gifted Child and the 
Search for the True Self (l983) a concept of loss of authentic self during 
childhood which derives from the abandonment or repression of aspects of 
children's personality deemed unacceptable in an effort to seek approval from 
parents or society-at-large. The result if a false self that requires external 
validation: in effect, a young person who is highly vulnerable and without 
internal direction. It is evident that growing numbers of children are 
experiencing a similar loss of their true cultural selves to which they may 
respond in several ways. Some develop a false cultural being that meets with 
parental, peer group and/or societal approval but is seldom richly satisfying in 
terms of providing a firm sense of identity and ownership. Others may rebel 
culturally, seeking solace in the highly subversive youth pop culture, which 
can lead them away from the security of local identifications into the 
consumerism and anonymity of international media and often into self-
destructive or anti-social actions. Still others exist in a cultural void, estranged 
and without commitment or purpose. 

The notable rage evident among contemporary youth owes partly to the 
suppression of this authentic cultural self which an individual 

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normally would. come to realize by actively manipulating culture to include 
self in relation to various groups, their traditions and artifacts. What we have, 
then, is growing numbers of young people who are suffering because they do 
not know who they are or where they belong as a result of being unable to 
engage actively with culture—ANY culture, let alone our national culture 
which could be seen to need their involvement. 

There seems to be little joy in life for many of our youth, but why? An 
absence of fulfillment through joy, as opposed to amusement or thrills, can 
be directly linked to a stifling of the play-element in modern childhood. 
Today's children certainly play, but they generally do so under the scrutiny 
of adults as in daycare or during school recess, unless they are in the aerobics 
classes now being scheduled by some schools to utilize this time to 
(supposedly) greater effect in promoting fitness. Such efforts may foster 
physical, but not emotional fitness. Children need the freedom to develop 
emotional well-being, too, which is facilitated more through the 
interpersonal connectedness of their oral traditions and through observation 
and imitation amongst themselves than through intellectual activity or 
instruction under adult control.15 Adults authoritatively make certain that 
children are well controlled and supervised to ensure that their play is good 
for them, that no one gets hurt, that no one bullies or name-calls or teases or 
. . . copes in. manipulates and masters the natural and social world around or 
the emotional world within, 

So it is that our children are culturally deprived and become dis-
engaged. Marginalized and repressed while young, they do not personally 
appreciate culture as a concept, a process or a set of products. Hence they 
become prey to manipulation as passive recipients of, rather than creative 
participants in, the larger cultural matrix beyond their limited experience-a 
retrograde state for any nation, let alone for one so tentative about identity as 
our own. 

The recognition of the culture of childhood within Canadian culture 
today and in the future has implication for the overall cultural well being of 
our nation's citizens. Our own image for children may not be in their cultural 
best interests or in Canada's best interests culturally. It remains a challenge to 
determine and pursue these cultural best interests of the child (CBIOC), but 
doing so is imperative. Only by actually, rather than merely rhetorically, 
recognizing the full rights of children will Canadians act in accord with their 
cultural ideals and enable future generations to continue the pursuit of 
excellence in being human that rests at the core of Canadianness. To do so 
requires that the child's own voice not only be heard but also be taken on 
advisement. 

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For young people to come to possess Canadian culture, they must first 
manipulate and master culture as children. They must know that they 
themselves own culture and realize the self-validation and self-esteem 
attendant upon the acceptance of that culture as equal to all others recognized 
under multiculturalism. Paradoxically, while children's rights in some, 
especially legal, areas are being supported (see Wilson), the respect for 
children's way of being, and therefore their culture, is lessening. 

Key to promoting better child-adult interaction is the promotion of 
children's enablement rather than their containment, which first demands 
appreciation for the cross-cultural communication involved as a two-way 
process. Simply put, such a situation means that we adults have much to learn 
about children from children themselves. The knowledge children bring to 
any situation bears consideration, for no more than members of any other 
cultural group are children neutral receptacles disposed to received and be 
shaped entirely from outside. 

Heritage is naturally a prime concern relating to the CBIOC. It behooves 
us as responsible adults to consider whether we are doing children any favor 
by imposing our heritage baggage on them, especially given the emergence 
of mixed ethnicity as the defining characteristic of the largest single group of 
Canadians. Is it not right and in keeping with Canadian ideals that any child 
should have a say in heritage-related matters within the family just as that 
child would be heard in a custody dispute? According children such a voice 
(and hence increasing their control) would, however, necessitate major 
restructuring of engrained cultural concepts of child and childhood, parent, 
child rearing and more. But such a restructuring is needed to liberate 
Canada's children and to ensure their just treatment today as well as their 
ownership of their futures. 

In Surviving as Indians: the Challenge of Self-Government (1993), 
Menno Boldt poses five carefully argued imperatives to effect a just future 
for Indians in Canada (see p. x). Four of these are, with adaptation, applicable 
to a just future for children in Canada, as follows: 

l. moral justice for children; 
2.Canadian policies that treat children's rights, interests, as 

pirations and needs as equal to those of other distinctive cultural 
groups in Canada; 

3.Child-focussed leadership that is committed to eliminating the 
colonization of children and to empowering young people; and 

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4. The assurance of appropriate circumstances for children to 
maintain and pursue their cultural traditions with other children. 

Boldt's fifth imperative concerns economic self-determination which, in the 
case of children, should be replaced by the security of the necessities of life 
provided by the adult world. 

But how are we as a people to move toward this just future for children? 
First, adult Canadians must make evident a certain humility with respect to 
youngsters, what they know, what they have, what they want, what they can 
best teach themselves and so on. If manipulate we must, then let it be the 
environments not the children. In particular, we ought to consider carefully 
whether our agendas of child concern and the resultant environments we 
impose on children are really in their (and ultimately, then, the Canadian 
peoples') cultural best interests. 

Of the many questions this presentation raises, the most central concern 
is how to achieve the goals it establishes. As a single example we might 
consider the desirability of children having free time to play. If we in our 
communities made such playtime a priority, we could direct resources 
towards ensuring safety on playgrounds by employing students or seniors 
(armed with cell phones) as discreet supervisors, or to establishing block 
networks for after-school play in homes or yards, using the extant model of 
babysitting cooperatives. What is required is the communal will; appropriate 
methods will follow apace. 

Throughout Canada we must recognize that dealing with children is 
comparable to relating to members of any other cultural group. In the 
interests of developing better child-adult communication (and hence, mutual 
understanding), it is time, as Kathleen McDonnell argues, that "we called a 
truce in this thankless, no-win war with out kids"(18) and learn to do more 
than just censor and rage against their cultural preferences (20). Today's Kid 
Culture, as she terms children's own culture, contains a fair dose of material 
appropriated from or strongly influenced by popular culture. We clearly 
ought to recognize the legitimacy of children's chose cultural expressions—
we demand the same for other cultural groups. But, cultural tolerance 
seemingly extends much more easily to diverse traits of distinctive others 
than to the sometimes wild, anarchic behaviors, attitudes and artifacts of our 
own children which challenge and disturb the established order. They are 
subversive-no more, no less than children's own traditions have always been 
and rightly so. 

In Don't Tell the Grown-Ups (1990), Alison Lurie makes a powerful 
argument that: 

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IN OUR OWN IMAGE CARPENTER 

We should take children's literature seriously because it is sometimes 
subversive; because its values are not always those of the conventional 
adult world (xi) 

The argument applies equally to children's culture, for it is through the 
manipulation, rejection and re-creation of their cultural world that young 
people simultaneously search for and validate their voice and so situate 
themselves culturally. 

While deserving of recognition as a distinct cultural group, children are 
decidedly different from other such groups, since they do grow our of their 
child-focussed culture. Yet, that cultural world can be, after Tolkien's claims 
for the secondary world of Faerie, a key means of coming to terms with the 
larger reality while offering fantasy, recovery, escape and consolation in the 
same manner as fairy stories do. As children we can be closer than perhaps at 
any other time of our lives to our authentic selves in our personal cultural 
operations. The cultural of childhood remains with us in memory as adults, a 
secondary reality to be revisited as burden or release, depending on our em-
powerment through it. Such revisitation may illuminate the primary reality of 
our true (as opposed to ideal or actual) selves-a scenario played out 
effectively in such scenes from Canadian literature as that in Gabrielle Roy's 
novel, The Cashier, where the constrained and unfulfilled protagonist, 
Alexandre Chenervert, "sees" an image of himself as a playful child who 
looks upon the actual adult he is to become quizzically, in seeming startled 
disbelief(104). 

To more fully appreciate the authentic child, we should recognize the 
limitations of our cognitive map regarding childhood, cease appropriating the 
child's voice and admit the complex, multi-dimensional 
reality of child, embracing in particular the darker side, which we all 
know from personal experience does exist. Only by so doing will be enable 
children to reappropriate their full voice and be the true subject of their own 
discourse. 

Let us return to Wallace Stegner's sensuous little savage and consider 
part of his account of the savage (darker) aspect, the portrait of a real child 
for sure: 

I learned dirty words and dirty songs from the children of construction 
workers and from the. . .cowpunchers. With others, I was induced to 
ride calves and engage in "shit fights" with wet cow manure in the. . 
.corrals. Then or later I learned to dog-paddle, first in the irrigation 
ditch, later in the river. . .We put.22 cartridges or blasting caps on the 
tracks ahead of approaching handcars or 

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CARPENTER IN OUR OWN IMAGE 

speeders, and once we got satisfactorily chased by gandy dancers. 
Around Christmas we all watched the first soldiers go off to the [First 
World] war, and then and afterward we had trouble with some Canadian 
kids who said the United States was too yellow to fight. (164-65) 

This picture of the child is not wholly admirable, perhaps (and that is without 
the scatological ending), but it is human-the real-life experiences of living 
children which deserves recognition and valorisation. The ideal child of our 
imagination must cease to silence the real child so that the actual lives 
children lead in this country accord with their truly, fully human nature. 

* * * 

1975 was the International Year of the Woman, a commemoration that 
drove the Women's Movement forward around the world. 1979 was the 
International Year of the Child, but children have neither here nor abroad yet 
achieved a cultural position or voice comparable to that of contemporary 
women, for they have no political presence and require advocates. Recently, 
concentration on the image of child as victim (of abuse in particular) has 
engendered considerable genuine empathy for children and prompted many to 
speak out for them. These victimization accounts may serve Canada's children 
as the guilt literature of the seventies did the Native People. They should prod 
us forward toward what we know we ought to do: stop doing to our children 
and let them do and be themselves while accepting and respecting them in the 
process. 

Our cultural ideals, our cultural superego, confront us-a child, whose 
voice needs to be heard, whose existence as a child must be validated, whose 
freedom to be demands affirmation, whose full humanity must be recognized. 
Not only must we let our children be, we 
must also enable them (gradually as they are capable) to assume control over 
their existence, actively cope with life and, potentially, triumph over rather 
than passively become victims of the adversity they surely will encounter. 
According to a popular saying, frequently cited in contemporary popular 
culture as an African proverb, "It takes a whole village to raise a child"16 We 
need to provide effective villages-spaces in our culture where children can 
come into themselves, surrounded by and connected with supportive adults. 
Childhood must not be "something we live to recover from," as historian 
William Westfall recently termed it.17 To this end, young people everywhere 

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should be freed to experience the sheer, immediate joy in living and be able, 
each and everyone individually and collectively, to assert that joy. If, as 
Johann Huizinga suggested, the best designation for humans is "homo 
ludens," we will be most human and best realize our ideals as Canadians 
when we let the culture of children reverberate through our lives. 

We are all but fellow-travellers 
Along Life's weary way; 
If any man can play the pipes In 
God's name, let him play.18 

Afterword 

In the years since I gave this lecture, some encouraging changes of 
orientation to child, children's culture and childhood have occurred, notably 
within academe. Numerous calls for a more holistic and child-focussed 
approach to the study of children and their worlds (variously defined) now 
emanate from many disciplines. Europeans have spearheaded this trend and 
recently produced a body of singularly illuminating research that 
demonstrates the merits of the approach. North Americans have more 
recently, but quite vociferously, joined the movement to appreciate children's 
culture and legitimize the area of "children's studies." In an insightful article, 
Kenneth Kidd discusses "this new enthusiasm for culture as representing 
continuity as well as innovation."(147) Certainly it opens the door to 
curricular developments that may have long-range impact. 

At York University in Toronto where I teach, the appetite for inter-
disciplinary courses on child-related topics appears to be insatiable. The 
enrolment in my first-year Humanities offering, "The Worlds of Childhood" 
has more than doubled within five years and the course ranks amongst those 
with the highest unmet need in our Faculty of Arts which, with almost 10,000 
students, is larger than most universities in this country. The course aims first 
and foremost to "hear the voice of the child" and demands that each and 
every student undertake fieldwork with this intent. It is a revolutionary 
experience for most, who bear the imprimatur of the developmentalist 
hegemony, but it is indisputably the most rewarding assignment on the course 
for most participants. The demands for more study along this line escalate 
every year with the result that we are now in the process of mounting an 
interdisciplinary undergraduate "Children's Studies" program, the first of its 
kind in Canada. 

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 CARPENTER IN OUR OWN IMAGE 

Like many other interdisciplinary programs, this one will be housed in 
the Division of Humanities, itself an interdisciplinary unit which, along with 
the Divisions of Social Science and Natural Science, has provided among its 
offerings the core General Education (now Foundations) courses since York's 
establishment over forty years ago. The Children's Studies program will have 
most in common, however, with Women's Studies—a highly developed area 
at York, offered through the School of Women's Studies. Students will have 
many options through Children's Studies, but basically each will major or 
minor in a discipline (from Arts, Environmental Studies or Fine Arts) and 
take a series of four core interdisciplinary courses plus electives in Children's 
Studies. Of the core, one course is planned as a practicum or internship 
involving placement in a child-focused setting in the larger community (a 
library, publishing house, community center, heritage site...as relevant to each 
student individually). One other will be a course in the ethics and 
methodologies of working with or for children. Students will, then, be able to 
graduate with a spectrum of concentrations from writing for children 
(Creative Writing/Children's Studies) to advocating for/with children (Social 
Work/Children's Studies) to appreciating children's interface with the natural 
world (Environmental Studies/Children's Studies). In each case, the emphasis 
will be on hearing from children, on liberating their voices and on making 
them authorities on childhood. 

A research unit, the Canadian Children's Culture Collection, has been 
established to support the program. Already the repository of many past 
student projects, the CCCC will facilitate further research by students, faculty 
and, as appropriate, community members. It will also pursue the development 
of its resource collections of children's art, hand-made toys, books and 
relevant secondary sources. One of its primary aims will be to disseminate 
research results in order to develop greater understanding of children's culture 
and to effect changes in the condition of being child in Canada and beyond. It 
is hoped that the program (planned to begin in fall 2004) and its allied 
research unit (well established and soon to open for use) will therefore 
contribute significantly to achieving the goals laid out in the preceding paper. 

York University 
Toronto, Canada 

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IN OUR OWN IMAGE CARPENTER 

NOTES 

1 Gwyn Dow and June Factor, eds. Australian Childhood, 1991.  
2 In 1986 she received the Vicky Metcalf Award given annually by 

the Canadian Authors Association for a body of work deemed inspirational to 
Canadian youth (in her instance, folklore of or for children). Further, in 1993 
she was the recipient of a Life Achievement medal from the Children's 
Folklore Section for her contributions to the field. 

3 A Canadian painter who lived from 1871-1945. She is best known for 
her representations of the Northwest coastal forests and the tangible artifacts 
of the Native People who inhabited the region. 

4 A weekly comedy program shown in prime time by the Canadian 
Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and known for its sociopolitical com-
mentary. 

5 For instance, a section (albeit contested) of the Canadian Chart of 
Rights and Freedoms specifically allows for disciplining children by physical 
means, whereas no other Canadian can lawfully be hit by another. 
 6 One of the models for the proposed Toronto Museum of Child 
hood. 

7 Just one example being an exhibit at Harbourfront in Toronto of works 
by Spring Hurlbut incorporating French children's beds, March-April 1995. 
 8 This was during the threat of strong separatist sentiment in Que- 
bec that threatened the Canadian union. 

 9 I am grateful to Robert Graham who does not know how much his 
comment has influenced my thinking in the intervening years. 

10 A point frequently made in such works on children's folklore as One 
Potato, Two Potato: The Secret Education of American Children (1976) by 
Herbert and Mary Knapp and Captain Cook Chased a Chook: Children's 
Folklore From Australia by June Factor (1988). 

11 In this research, undertaken in the early nineties for her dissertation in 
Social Anthropology at York, Dr. Caputo was replicating the fieldwork done 
by Edith Fowke some thirty years earlier in the same Toronto schools. 

12 For instance, the text of one parody collected by Dr. Tucker in 
Binghamton, New York and also reported to me in Toronto turns the first 
lines of the Barney theme song, "I long you, you love me, We're a happy 
family" into "I love you, you love me, Homosex-u-al-i-ty." 

 13 It is worth noting that when this lecture was first published, the 
paragraph received more commentary than any other part of the work. 
 14 From Lansky & Carpenter, The New Adventures of Mother Goose 
(1993), as reported by Dale Anne Freed in "Georgy Porgy cleans up his 

70 



 

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CARPENIER IN OUR OWN IMAGE 

act," Toronto Star, 7 February a994, Section E, 1 & 3. 
15 Northrop Frye maintains in "The Cultural Development of Canada" 

that our most important learning and that which stays with us longest comes 
through such interpersonal communication (p. 16), a position long held by 
folklorists. 

16 Similar in meaning to the recorded Bantu proverb, "The child of your 
neighbour is yours" which is listed in S. G. Champion, Racial Proverbs (New 
York: Barnes & Noble, 1963), p. 597. 

17 Personal communication, 1994 
18 John Bennett, p. 21 Bartlett s Familiar Quotations. 

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I wish to express my gratitude for continued support from the Robarts Centre for 
Canadian Studies at York University who gave permission to republish this work. 

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