FloraDora
09-11-2017, 02:50 PM
I watched the secret life of 4 year olds last night and I felt very uncomfortable. It was no longer, in my opinion, ‘secret life’ but a series of experiments on children for no reason other than to entertain adults and upset children....with secret life bits in between.
DH and I had a long discussion afterwards around the ethics of it, given both our experience of Educational research and having to fill in detailed ethics forms if we or University students conducted research in schools .....as outlined by the ‘Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research ‘ published by the British Educational Research Association.
I was concerned about the experts and their reaction or explanation to some of the distressed children during the experiments.
I didn’t like that the games were set up knowing that some of the children would be scared or to stimulate conflict.
Watching them interact was interesting but the games led by the adults was not, it was scary.
The dinosaur section just sent me over the edge and I shouted at the tv, the air, the parents of the children who allowed it...
I couldn’t believe that there hadn’t been a negative feedback from the press, presuming, as in the case of Michael Gove’s recent gaff, that the public find all sorts of things funny that I don’t.
Then, this afternoon Michael Rosen wrote a piece with the exact same thoughts, he is an author and lecturer and so expressed his outrage far more eloquently than I did, but quoted the same ethics as we had discussed last night and added further information around psychology.
I wonder what others thoughts are?
I have added below some extracts from MR’s piece:
Needless to say, the contests or competitions were presented to the children as fixed and rule-bound according to the rules set by the adults - a mixture of the people running the nursery and the academics who watched what happened on video, making comments. Remember - the claim being made here is that these contests showed the 'secret life' of these children. In fact, it showed the children responding to fixed rule contests devised by adults in order to show that one or more children would be distressed by losing. In fact, it emerged that the child in question was probably more distressed that he didn't win the prize than actually losing. Educationally speaking, what is a TV programme doing telling children that if you answer some questions right, you win chocolates? Or, worse, if you answer them wrong, you don't get chocolates! In the aftermath of the contest, the child in question cried and seemed to be uncomforted for a while. Then we watched while the experts discussed why and how the child was distressed without any commentary on the fact that the whole situation had been engineered - unethically - by the researchers.
Later in the programme, they set up another experiment which caused the same child distress. They showed that the boy knew a lot about dinosaurs. They asked him if he was scared of dinosaurs. No he wasn't. Then a man dressed as a 'keeper' brought in on a leash, a 6-7 foot tyrannosaurus rex (with someone inside). The boy was clearly scared. This was presented to us as revealing that in some way or another the boy was dishonest about his real state of fear. This again was clearly unethical and at the same time absurd. The more we know about T-Rex the more scared we should be, especially if grown-ups surround us with nonsense of notions that dinosaurs co-existed or still co-exist with humans! So the little boy cowered and - again - was distressed.
What was all this for? What did it prove? Who benefitted from this 'research'? All it did was assert the right of adults to limit the choices of children, set up situations in which it could be predicted that one or more children would be distressed. This was done for our entertainment, showing us...what precisely? That grown-up researchers are clever people who know how to make 4 year olds cry?
Of course there are programmes that can be made about the 'secret life' of young children. All you have to do is set up situations in which young children can discuss things, make things, play with things, plan things. To be fair to the programme, we did see scenes where children played in the home corner a couple of times, but these seemed to be interludes between the real 'knowledge' of the programme in these adult-led experiments, with predictable outcomes of conflict and distress.
Wihat is particularly worrying is that two academics were involved in this, sitting as it were to one side, commenting on and laughing at what the children were doing.
Excuse me while I say something extreme. On many occasions in the history of psychological testing over the last 120 years there have been experiments conducted on children and adults. Some of these have been unethical and at a distance, we can easily see how monstrous they've been, with terrible consequences for the participants. Sometimes we scratch our heads and wonder how could people calling themselves psychologists have done such things? I think the answer to that question lies precisely in the way this programme was set up and carried out: the children were treated as if they were fodder for experiments, with no volition, sanctity of the person, no sense of their potential, no sense that an experiment could open up new possibilities, new educational insights. In fact, the educational value of the dinosaur experiment was precisely the opposite: it was educational rubbish from several perspectives at the same time.
DH and I had a long discussion afterwards around the ethics of it, given both our experience of Educational research and having to fill in detailed ethics forms if we or University students conducted research in schools .....as outlined by the ‘Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research ‘ published by the British Educational Research Association.
I was concerned about the experts and their reaction or explanation to some of the distressed children during the experiments.
I didn’t like that the games were set up knowing that some of the children would be scared or to stimulate conflict.
Watching them interact was interesting but the games led by the adults was not, it was scary.
The dinosaur section just sent me over the edge and I shouted at the tv, the air, the parents of the children who allowed it...
I couldn’t believe that there hadn’t been a negative feedback from the press, presuming, as in the case of Michael Gove’s recent gaff, that the public find all sorts of things funny that I don’t.
Then, this afternoon Michael Rosen wrote a piece with the exact same thoughts, he is an author and lecturer and so expressed his outrage far more eloquently than I did, but quoted the same ethics as we had discussed last night and added further information around psychology.
I wonder what others thoughts are?
I have added below some extracts from MR’s piece:
Needless to say, the contests or competitions were presented to the children as fixed and rule-bound according to the rules set by the adults - a mixture of the people running the nursery and the academics who watched what happened on video, making comments. Remember - the claim being made here is that these contests showed the 'secret life' of these children. In fact, it showed the children responding to fixed rule contests devised by adults in order to show that one or more children would be distressed by losing. In fact, it emerged that the child in question was probably more distressed that he didn't win the prize than actually losing. Educationally speaking, what is a TV programme doing telling children that if you answer some questions right, you win chocolates? Or, worse, if you answer them wrong, you don't get chocolates! In the aftermath of the contest, the child in question cried and seemed to be uncomforted for a while. Then we watched while the experts discussed why and how the child was distressed without any commentary on the fact that the whole situation had been engineered - unethically - by the researchers.
Later in the programme, they set up another experiment which caused the same child distress. They showed that the boy knew a lot about dinosaurs. They asked him if he was scared of dinosaurs. No he wasn't. Then a man dressed as a 'keeper' brought in on a leash, a 6-7 foot tyrannosaurus rex (with someone inside). The boy was clearly scared. This was presented to us as revealing that in some way or another the boy was dishonest about his real state of fear. This again was clearly unethical and at the same time absurd. The more we know about T-Rex the more scared we should be, especially if grown-ups surround us with nonsense of notions that dinosaurs co-existed or still co-exist with humans! So the little boy cowered and - again - was distressed.
What was all this for? What did it prove? Who benefitted from this 'research'? All it did was assert the right of adults to limit the choices of children, set up situations in which it could be predicted that one or more children would be distressed. This was done for our entertainment, showing us...what precisely? That grown-up researchers are clever people who know how to make 4 year olds cry?
Of course there are programmes that can be made about the 'secret life' of young children. All you have to do is set up situations in which young children can discuss things, make things, play with things, plan things. To be fair to the programme, we did see scenes where children played in the home corner a couple of times, but these seemed to be interludes between the real 'knowledge' of the programme in these adult-led experiments, with predictable outcomes of conflict and distress.
Wihat is particularly worrying is that two academics were involved in this, sitting as it were to one side, commenting on and laughing at what the children were doing.
Excuse me while I say something extreme. On many occasions in the history of psychological testing over the last 120 years there have been experiments conducted on children and adults. Some of these have been unethical and at a distance, we can easily see how monstrous they've been, with terrible consequences for the participants. Sometimes we scratch our heads and wonder how could people calling themselves psychologists have done such things? I think the answer to that question lies precisely in the way this programme was set up and carried out: the children were treated as if they were fodder for experiments, with no volition, sanctity of the person, no sense of their potential, no sense that an experiment could open up new possibilities, new educational insights. In fact, the educational value of the dinosaur experiment was precisely the opposite: it was educational rubbish from several perspectives at the same time.