is one movie I would recommend all parents (and certainly the parents of my pupils). It has lovely pictures and simple plots, also there's a tragic part where the main supporting role dies (and she was such an incredible little girl) where I cried whole-heartedly, but I still I would watch this again, perhaps with my niece and nephew. It's about friendship and being a child in its purest meaning, which means having an open mind and an imagination without bounderies.
It's quite sad and strange to find out that many children nowadays are so "psychologically" contaminated and lacking in imagination. I had a good example of both cases in one pupil of mine. He's a little boy of 6 and he's taught by his parents to call her nanny-maid by name only and already he has a discriminative attitude towards people that his parents hire. The same boy spends his day with gameboy and ipod and has trouble everytime I ask him to imagine "what's your song about".
Who's to blame? Probably TV and those electronic games and gadgets. I was lucky that TV in my childhood was such a joke that it's just not worth seeing. My brother and I spent almost all my childhood in nature, playing in trees, crossing creeks and climbing hills. We could be anything we want at that time: from pirates to heroes or even characters in our favourite Japanese cartoon movie, Voltus Five. And when confined at home, our parents had supplied us with lots of books to keep our imaginations alive.
Could be also that schools today are what's making them the way they are. My colleagues and I, we all seem to be in one opinion that kids nowadays are less resourceful and we must always tell them what to do, how to think and when to act, and they don't even want to know why. I really think that (Indonesian) children shouldn't be spending too much time in school as the traditional teaching method here is simply to give without asking for feedback and this forms a passive behaviour.
(Imported old blog, originally written on March 7, 2008)
