VIEWPOINT
Heather Mallick
Disney's delusion? That babies are just too boneheaded
Last Updated: Friday, October 30, 2009 | 2:37 PM ET
By Heather Mallick, special to CBC News
The news that Disney is offering full refunds to anyone who bought its Baby Einstein videos — and admitting they don't in fact make infants smarter — has come too late for an embittered generation of parents. Their babies are playing with jam jar lids, as babies always have, instead of staffing the Large Hadron Collider project.
My baby won't even need diapers, was probably how the thinking went when the craze for these videos — offering music, puppets and almost no words — began in 1997. But Disney mashed those dreams like ripe bananas for Little Mr. Intellectual in His Baby Stupid High Chair, resentful social-climbing parents have been heard to mutter. By 2003, fully one-third of American babies had one of the videos.
Thanks a lot, Disney.
But if the target babies turned out to be less than geniuses, it appears the Disney “imagineers” were not at the top of the intellectual sand pile, either. They sit in front of their now-disgraced DVD babysitter, babbling and wailing along with their “dumb” little customers. (Disney's competitors, the people who make Brainy Baby products, are not just refusing comment, they're holding their breath and turning blue, I hear.)
As for the credulous parents, I note an indignant online blast to the New York Times from a distraught mother, one “Tammy” of Maryland.
“I don't care if they were not ‘educational,' ” Tammy wrote last week. “My kids ADORED those videos, and despite having spent hours watching them before and until about the age of four, they are now high-achieving elementary school students.” She also said that shoving the kids in front of the TV screen saved her sanity (let's keep that between ourselves, Tammy, shall we).
George W. Bush similarly raved about Baby Einstein in his 2007 State of the Union address, but later that year, two studies revealed that the videos named after the explosive-haired oracle actually decreased babies' language acquisition.
For studies have proved that babies lip-read. They learn the connection between mouth movements and sounds by watching adults speak, and they can distinguish between English and French. This is only one reason why watching cartoon television rather than being with other humans slows them down intellectually.
For more on the remarkable intelligence of babies, read Alison Gopnik's The Philosophical Baby. Far from being blank slates, she writes, babies are intensely curious creatures, smarter in their own way than adults. “Babies explore; adults exploit” knowledge, as she puts it. “Babies can learn a great deal just by exploring the ways bowls fit together or by imitating a parent talking on the phone. (Imagine how much money we can save on 'enriching' toys and DVDs!)”
Take that, Baby Einstein.
What worries me about Tammy is her description of her kids as “high-achieving.” In grade school, you draw circles. You splodge paint, you glue macaroni. Then your teacher praises you to the skies and your mother slaps your industrial-quantity versions of John Constable's The Hay Wain on the fridge. This is many things — cute, sticky, annoying — but it's not high-achieving in the sense of being measurable. It's just what kids do.
What worries me about Disney's Baby Einstein is the product line includes videos called Baby Galileo and Baby Van Gogh. I have just finished reading van Gogh's letters, which run past the ear incident and right up to the suicide, and I cannot think the painter is a role model for any infant, even if Disney has planted his ghost in, I am sorry to report, a puppet named Vincent Van Goat.
But there's another disconnect here. Tammy is trying to nudge her unfortunate kids into attaining an adult IQ measure of achievement while Disney is trying to dumb down a manic, violent genius into something “cute and adowable.” She's trying to magnify a childish thing and Disney's trying to cute-ify the tragically magnificent.
They are at cross-purposes. I don't know whether this helps explain why American (and Canadian) students aren't rating highly on international science tests.
They think us dunderheads
I recoil from everything Disney.
It isn't just the pastelling of the world, the cheesiness of the costumes and the marketing machine behind each sugary project — or even the fact that for one year of my life, everything I bought had "Lion King" on it. Parenthood means abandoning good taste. I accept that.
What I object to is Disney's literalism.
“Look, Mom, I'm a warrior.”
“No, you are dressed by Disney in cruddy camouflage gear sewn by exploited peasants for corncob wages.” (The fact that you are a violent little boy who will come to a bad end is being concealed by your Disney accoutrements.)
I most despise Disney for its former master, Michael Eisner, who bought Baby Einstein in 2001. His ghostwritten autobiography, Work in Progress, is on my political bookshelves next to Alexis de Tocqueville's eerily prescient U.S. travelogue Democracy in America and What's the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Frank.
Here's the nut: Eisner felt American children were “appallingly” ignorant of history. He was thrilled that the U.S. Holocaust Museum was using pioneering Disney techniques like film, animation, music and voice-over narrative “to re-create and evoke the horror of the Holocaust.”
“I sat through many [American] history classes,” Eisner said, “where I read some stuff and I didn't learn anything. It was pretty boring.”
Eisner was saying that young people can't learn from teachers or books. Words don't work. Rather, they have to smell the leather of the abandoned shoes of the gassed children, hear music for the death scenes, and watch cartoons of historical events in order to learn about them.
Eisner, whose marketing for Baby Einstein created a monster brand and a monster problem, thought the mass Disney audience was as dumb as babies.
But babies are smart. They are the most curious adventurous creatures on this Earth. They are helpful, empathetic, questing, experimental, loving and, of course, meltingly attractive.
We're at our best in babyhood, and thoughtless schemes like Baby Einstein are what make it all downhill from there.
