[SCA] Pennsic policy games

[cellio]

The big new bit of stupidity -- this time not from the SCA board of directors -- is a new Pennsic rule that minors, meaning people under 18, cannot attend classes without being accompanied by an adult. I guess it's just too dangerous for a 16-year-old to learn Italian dance or a 17-year-old to learn how to spin wool, or something. This is totally bizarre, as there is not a general restriction on teenagers at Pennsic. They can go (unaccompanied) to shop (even to the blacksmiths!), or to shoot archery, or to watch the fighting, or to any private camp they choose. (Kids under 12 are more restricted.)

Sadly predictable is the reaction of many people in the face of the ensuing discussions. The original rule said minors had to be accompanied to classes by a parent or legal guardian, which is totally crazy, and in the face of much protest they "clarified" that they really meant a responsible adult, meaning any adult appointed by the parents, and not something involving legal process. And today, with that change, people are saying "oh, well that's not so bad then" and "that's reasonable" and "we can find people to take our kids to classes, then". It's as if they've forgotten that the fundamental policy itself is broken. They're saying "oh, if you're just going to take an arm rather than costing me an arm and a leg, that's ok then". Hello? And it only took a day! Amazing.

I'm not saying people need to Stand Up And Do Something Now, because I don't know what we can do. Yes, I want to fix it, but I don't know what to do today to do that. (I can think of small, tactical things to do to mitigate the damage, but that's not a solution.) It seems obvious to me that there is something deeper going on, and I'm not dialed into it. But I do know that it's a short step from "well, that's less bad" to "that's ok" (we're seeing this already) to "of course that's reasonable and you're a reckless idiot if you don't agree". We've seen this before from the SCA (mandatory membership, no wait an unjust tax instead, to point to biggest but not sole case) and it's certainly not unique to this organization. Heck, we see it in marketing too; remember New Coke?

Regardless of where it happens, its success depends on people focusing on the here-and-now and not taking the longer view. I guess hill-climbing is a popular algorithm. (For the non-geeks, this means you take an alternate path if it will directly improve on where you are, but you rule out paths that make it worse -- even if those paths then lead to something much better.)

I'm talking here mostly about process and meta-issues. As for the base question of how we treat children (of all ages), the best comment I've seen has been from Cariadoc, who wrote: "I have long held that there are two fundamental views of children: That they are pets who can talk, or that they are small people who do not yet know very much. The wrong one is winning." This non-parent says: yes, that.

Comments

[cellio]

The pets-versus-small-people thing is actually more nuanced in my mind than I said here. I think they're both, at different stages of development. A newborn is a pet that knows how to cry (not talk, yet). A developmentally-typical eight-year-old (or so) is a small person who doesn't know very much (I don't just mean facts but also behavioral norms). Somewhere in between a transition occurs; my gut feeling is "around kindergarten age" but I'm not in the best position to judge. It doesn't seem terribly applicable to this case in particular; pets that can talk are unlikely to be interested in attending classes.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

It's multiple transitions, but they happen through teenage-hood and early 20s as well.

There are a bunch of huge cognitive leaps that kick in at various stages, although they vary enormously even among adults. Some kick in very young. For example, the idea of "object permanence" does not generally kick in until about age 3 or so. "Object permanence" is the idea that an object as permanence. This is why the "peek-a-boo" game works on babies. Babies don't know that your face is still there when it's covered. It's something they learn not simply through experience, but because at some point they develop mental capacity to actually store, absorb, and remember the specific experience and generalize it out to all experiences.

A young child generally lacks an ability to foresee long term consequence. Again, that's not a lack of knowledge/experience thing. Its a cognitive inability to generalize out from specific information to an abstract, indefinite future.

Another raft of changes kick in at puberty, which are often masked by the fact that other physical changes are releasing lots of hormones that play hob with emotional reactions and processing.

All of this is gross generalization, and is also based on the current prevalent theory of cognitive development (or at least, the parts with which I am current). understanding around this stuff changes a great deal, and individuals vary wildly amidst these general rules. There are certainly children who acquire particular cognitive abilities at a very young age, and adults who lack more than basic ability to generalize from specific data.

The bottom line is that there really is a concept of "age appropriate" that is neither pets nor small, less knowledgeable grown ups. An 8 year old child has characteristics as different from a 4 year old child as from a 12 year old child, and treating an 8 year old like a 12 year old is not any better for the child than treating an 8 year old like a 4 year old.