A Quote by T'Keyah Crystal Keymah

Adults sometimes think children don't think. That's what propels them to order children around. But children do integrate thoughts and make sense of them. When I was a child, I thought about everything in the universe.
Every generation likes to think that children don't read as much as they used to when they were young! You listen to some adults saying they were going around reading 'Ulysses' when they were seven or eight! I think children are voracious readers if you give them the right books and if you make those books accessible to them.
The new concept of the child as equal and the new integration of children into adult life has helped bring about a gradual but certain erosion of these boundaries that once separated the world of children from the word of adults, boundaries that allowed adults to treat children differently than they treated other adults because they understood that children are different.
When I met Akira Kurosawa in Japan, one question he asked me was, "How did you actually make the children act the way they do? I do have children in my films but I find that I reduce and reduce their presence until I have to get rid of them because there's no way that I can direct them." My own thought is that one is very grand, like an emperor on a horse, and it's very hard for a child to relate to that. In order to be able to cooperate with a child, you have to come down to below their level in order to communicate with them.
In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.
In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults.
I'm thought of as a celebrity. Everything I've ever done... has been for children. As long as I was working constantly, that was fine, because, although I don't have any children, I do relate better to them than adults.
Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more 'respectful' teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children.
I'm always loath to make generalizations about what is for children and what isn't. Certainly children's literature as a genre has some restrictions, so certain things will never pop up in a Snicket book. But I didn't know anything about writing for children when I started - this is the theme of naïveté creeping up on us once more - and I sort of still don't, and I'm happy that adults are reading them as well as children.
It distresses me that parents insist that their children read or make them read. I think the best way for children to treasure reading is for them to see the adults in their lives reading for their own pleasure.
Children will go with any story as long as it's good, but white adults sometimes think that if a black child's on the cover, it is perhaps not for them.
I don't think it's a coincidence that comic books appeal so strongly to children. Not that it negates any of their power for adults, but there is something about comics that makes them a perfect storytelling system for children.
Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.
Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more 'respectful' teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children. Many 'well-adjusted' adults are bitter, uncreative, frightened, unimaginative, and rather hostile people. Instead of assuming they were born that way, or that that's what being an adult entails, we might consider them as people damaged by their education and upbringing.
Although adults have a role to play in teaching social skills to children, it is often best that they play it unobtrusively. In particular, adults must guard against embarrassing unskilled children by correcting them too publicly and against labeling children as shy in ways that may lead the children to see themselves in just that way.
I think any good literature, whether it's for children or for adults, will appeal to everybody. As far as children's literature goes, adults should be able to read it and enjoy it as much as a child would.
Let them get at the books themselves, and do not let them be flooded with diluted talk from the lips of their teacher. The less the parents 'talk-in' and expound their rations of knowledge and thought to the children they are educating, the better for the children...Children must be allowed to ruminate, must be left alone with their own thoughts.
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