What? Dinosaurs are not Real?

by Eddie French | April 9, 2008 at 08:13 am | 477 views | 2 comments | 2 recommendations

When I was a child I had a collection of rubber like plastic dinosaurs. I learned the names of each of these fabulous beasts by heart. There is something about dinosaurs and kids that just gels, it seems it's always been like that. Dinosaurs fascinate kids.
The thing is, I knew that they were just toys, dinosaurs were from another age, another world, they did not exist in our world. I also had a huge encyclopaedia, which I lovingly browsed, entranced by the pictures of space, far away countries and yes, dinosaurs.
From a very early age I wanted to know what happened to the dinosaurs, why they died out, how they lived. These are the images that filled my developing mind.
Recently, I had to explain to my five year old grandchild that dinosaurs didn't exist any more, they were from an age which has long passed. She didn't like it, not one bit.
The reason for this confusion is not difficult to find. It's all the fault of brilliant CGI. First we had Jurassic Park, then along came Walking with Dinosaurs.

More recent productions are even more lifelike than these seminal productions. Children are increasingly finding it difficult to distinguish between computer generated 'realities' and actual reality. As they grow older they have the additional burden of separating fact from fantasy, a task which was never so difficult during my formative years.
The images I see on my TV are wonderful, there's no doubting that, and watched within the context of 'learning about the world we live in' are invaluable tools.

The problem seems to be that very young children are watching this stuff with no balancing commentary other than the program narrative, which kids are expert at filtering out when the images are as enchanting as some of these are. As the art and skills of the video animators get stronger, and the tools with which they bring their creations to life continue to improve, how are kids going to be able to distinguish between what is actually real and what is a computer generated image in the future.
I fear the world is set to become a very confusing place for future generations of children, adding to an already delicate time as they try to reason the reality of the world they live in.

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Pasi
Pasi
flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 05:51 on April 10th, 2008

In the video my son Paavo thinks that Moomins are real, he is just arguing if they can speak or not.

I think that continuous discussion with children is needed, about if something they see is true or not. I don't fool my children even with Father Christmas. But if they see something live or something very realistic in video, they seem to believe very easy, what they see.

I think you make a good question, as few months ago, there was an article about Briton's believes. Young adults believed more on Robin Hood, which they had seen in the movies, than Winston Churchill.

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Eddie French

Good point Pasi.

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April 9, 2008 at 08:13 am by Eddie French, 477 views, 2 comments

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