Revolution
within
by Sammy Kunina
published by Praxis, price £8. ISBN 0-9545 062 0 0
Sammy Kunina has written an impassioned plea for the child's right to be
recognised as a person, and to have all the freedoms that personhood implies.
She tells us that she often wept as she wrote, so strongly does she feel that
children in our present society are prevented from developing, forced to absorb
capitalist values, groomed to accept man's dominance over woman.
Kunina
herself nearly died in hospital when she was a child, and she wrote 'books.
These books were, she writes, 'illustrated with wax crayons, pictures sellotaped
to the text, pages and pages stapled together, written in the language of make
believe, loop after loop joined together in imitation of the grown up writing I
had seen but couldn't read. Those words told the story of a dying child ,but
nobody could read them. Even I forgot what they meant.' This book is her
reaction as an adult to that incomprehensible text she wrote as a child.
Kunina
quotes a passage from 'Of Woman Born', by Adrienne Rich, describing a short,
happy period of family life without men, routine or rules. Her personal views
are presumably based on similar experiences of her own, but she does not tell us
about them. Her rhetoric is strong but she provides little evidence. She just
appeals, over and over again, for a new, libertarian approach to parenting. The
child must be free, whatever the cost to the parent. This, she believes, will
result in the child being happy. Co-operation between generations she condemns
as domination of the weak by the strong.
She
longs for children to experience 'truly autonomous living and learning,' but she
underestimates children's natural empathy and good sense. In her ideal family
'there isn't even a whiff of any expectation that children will please anybody
except themselves.' She describes children's 'need to please their parents' as
'a requirement which all parents instil in their children, at some
level, from infancy onwards.' The idea that children may love their parents
and wish to please them for that reason alone is not considered.