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education's response to environmental concerns not only will help to improve the ability of the next
480 generation of lawyers to meet the environmental challenge but also may help to improve the quality of
legal education generally. As William Rodgers notes, «There is no reason why environmental law can't be
the vehicle for making learning fun all over again».
From: Environment, 1994, Volume 35, Number 3
THE GENESIS OF THE MODERN TOY
by John Brewer
1.It is a commonplace that a culture can be understood by an examination of its artifacts. Yet the history
of "material culture", as opposed to the history of a society's finest works of sculpture, art and
5
architecture, is still an embryonic science. Costume, the tools of a man's (or woman's) trade, household
utensils, furnishings, playthings — all of these, especially those that did not belong to the elite or leaders of
10
a society, have not received the attention devoted to "high" culture. Yet many aspects of everyday life
exhibit the beliefs and social experience of the bulk of a nation's people. Costume can tell us how the
members of a society are ranked and ordered, how sexes are differentiated (if at all), and what qualities are
15
least or most admired. Toys are equally revealing for they almost always contain statements made by adults
(often though not invariably parents) either about the culture in which they live and/or the values that they
think desirable. Toys mirror a culture — or at least, aspects of it; conversely, if we wish to understand the
significance of an individual toy or game, we must set it within a broad context, looking at it in the light of
20
prevailing attitudes towards work and play, the psychology of man, the nature of learning and the place of
the child in both family and society. Toys are cultural messages — sometimes simple, occasionally
complex and ambiguous, but invariably revealing.
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2.Yet the idea of the "educational toys — indeed, even the concept of the toy as a plaything peculiar to
children — is a relatively recent one. Before the eighteenth century there were virtually no toy
manufacturers nor toyshops in Europe and America, equally, there were almost no books written or
30
produced especially for children, who shared most games and recreations with adults. The world of the
child was not precisely separated from the realm of the adult; no special sector or segment of the culture
was devoted exclusively to children·
‘
.”Thus Dr. Johnson defined "toy" in his famous Dictionary as "a
35
petty commodity; a trifle; a thing of no value; a plaything or bauble! There was absolutely no mention of
children. The term "toy" meant any small inexpensive object or trinket sold to young and old alike. The
travelling pedlar or chapman, the town's "toyman", offered cheap jewellery, buckles, bangles and hairpins.
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Even "dolls" were not intended for children but were in fact miniature mannequins, clothed to display the
latest fashion, fad or frippery, There were therefore almost no toys in the modern sense. This did not, of
course mean that the children had no playthings; it simply meant that they had to fall back on the things
45
that they shared with their elders. They improvised and invented toys and games. Domestic utensils, the
resources of field and forest, the debris of the urban environment: all of these contributed towards
imaginative and open-ended play.
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3.How do we explain this almost total absence of toys in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century English
and colonial American household? Historians have advanced several explanations, nearly all of which
attribute the lack of toys to parental attitudes towards children and social attitudes towards play. Judged
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by modern standards, it is argued, parents treated their children either with an indifference that verged on
callousness or were actively brutal towards them, heating them with monotonous frequency. The world of
the Anglo-American child before the modern era is therefore often portrayed as cruel, cold, unemotional
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and lacking in the sort of family affection that might encourage play. These attitudes are usually explained
as a reaction to the horrifying rates of infant and child mortality which militated against a close parent-
child bond, and by the prevailing contemporary view that when children came into the world, they were,
65
like all human creatures, tainted with original sin against which a constant and brutal war had to be waged.
4.Those historians who look on the history of childhood as the gradual emancipation of the child from
70 this callous and cruel regime have used several types of evidence to demonstrate the harshness of
seventeenth century childhood. English infants, they point out, were swaddled, bound so tightly that they
could not move their legs and arms. This does not, however, seem to have been the practice in the thirteen
75 colonies of America where babies wore loose-fitting garments. Nevertheless in both cultures parental
breastfeeding was far from universal, and the infant was often packed off to a wet-nurse, where quite