Some people may be critical of encouraging children's creativity - filmmaking, etc.. Well for starters, what else is being 'encouraged' from the time their brains begin to develop, with no controls: any activity to keep them distracted, games and toys that lead nowhere, sitting in front of the idiot box 5 hours a day until old age, TV commercials, teeth-rotting sugar products, dump them at 'childcare centres' (which is about all a lot of expensive clubs, camps, tutoring schools and talent agencies are - your kid is just another sign-up, another name on their membership database, hundreds of names and out-dated photos); and then there's the cost, affordability and long-term damage of these activities.
You may even navigate through all that crap, all the way to graduating the kid from university. To find... their profession is now obsolete, or demand fluctuates, unemployment is high, or the jobs are now out-sourced overseas to some developing country with no labour regulations.
Let's face it, from the beginning we parents are competing with companies whose marketing departments have billions of dollars to think up of new ways to brainwash our kids with junk, straight from the cradle.
Instead, children's theatre and filmmaking activity now! It nurtures creativity, reading, social skills, the making of lasting positive friendships; could lead to careers in play production, writing, acting, management, the possibility of branching out into other areas of the entertainment industry.
And they can oscillate between the two disciplines - just look at great careers like Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. They won Oscars in the movies but were just using the money from film-acting to to fund their latest play.
And viability? What's one of the oldest professions in the history of civilization? What's the profession that's gonna be around when all the latest high-tech industries fizzle? Putting on a play to be shown to 3 or 4 friends locally, or thousands of fellow earthlings on the Internet!
Some other points:
- You may think that there are other ways to do this or on other websites - that's fine if you have lots of money - especially inherited, but it's not so easy coming from the lower classes.
- The importance of the entire KXOL website to Australia and society generally has been officially recognized by the National Library of Australia's "Pandora" Archiving Program. How about your work?
- Just like Tara's webpage gets out there thanks to fair dinkum search engines we get lots of thank you emails for many other important KXOL webpages. For instance check out Pelvic Floor Care and if it wasn't for KXOL no (emphasis on "no" as in zero) Australian would know what a Billjim is!
More points on what Tara's father, Pete, is trying to do with this website can be found here.
Finally, apart from being a hypocritical burgher armchair critic what are you doing to contribute to the ascent of civilization?!
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