【2017年整理】新标与准大学英语三unit2.ppt

; Cultural Childhoods 1 When I look back on my own childhood in the 1970sand 1980s and compare it with children today, itreminds me of that famous sentence The past isa foreign country: They do things differently there (from L. P. Hartleys novel The Go-Between). Even in a relatively short period of time, I can see the enormous transformations that have taken place in childrens lives and in the ways they are thought about and treated. ; 2 Looking further back I can see vast differences between contemporary and historical childhoods. Today, children have  few responsibilities, their lives are characterized by play not work, school not paid labour, family rather than public life and consumption instead of production. Yet this is all relatively recent. A hundred years ago, a 12 year old working in a factory would have been perfectly acceptable. Now, it would cause social services intervention and the prosecution of both parents and factory owner. ; 3 The differences between the expectations placed on children today and those placed on them in the past are neatlysummed up by two American writers, Barbara Ehrenreich andDeirdre English. Comparing childhoods in America today withthose of the American colonial period (1600–1776), they havewritten: Today, a four year old who can tie his or her shoes isimpressive. In colonial times, four-year-old girls knitted stockingsand mittens and could produce intricate embroidery: At age sixthey spun wool. A good, industrious little girl was called Mrs‘instead of Miss in appreciation of her contribution to the familyeconomy: She was not, strictly speaking, a child. ; 4 These changing ideas about children have ledmany social scientists to claim that childhood is asocial construction. They use t