Posted on 12/15/2014 10:32:22 AM PST by The Looking Spoon
Apparently, Elf on the Shelf is evil...
No, not that kind of evil (are "fun-loving" antics from inanimate dolls "evil"?) This kind of evil.
Could there be something more sinister behind the little elf sitting on the shelf who returns to the North Pole each night?
Yes, says Laura Pinto, a digital technology professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.
She recently published a paper titled “Who’s the Boss” on the doll, saying the idea of it reporting back to Santa each night on the child’s behavior “sets up children for dangerous, uncritical acceptance of power structures,” according toinsideHalton.com.
From her paper:
When children enter the play world of The Elf on the Shelf, they accept a series of practices and rules associated with the larger story. This, of course, is not unique to The Elf on the Shelf....The difference, however, is that in other games, the child role-plays a character, or the child imagines herself within a play-world of the game, but the role play does not enter the child’s real world as part of the game....
“You’re teaching (kids) a bigger lesson, which is that it’s OK for other people to spy on you and you’re not entitled to privacy,” she tells the Toronto Star.
She calls the elf “an external form of non-familial surveillance,” and says it’s potentially conditioning children to accept the state acting that way, too.
My family has been doing EOTS for a couple of years now. It's something fun that makes the Santa part of Christmas more real to kids....KIDS...who STILL believe in Santa.
The only long lasting effect, to me, is the remembering how magical it must've felt to have one of Santa's actual elves visiting them at Christmas time.
This isn't going going inculcate them with a tolerance for being spied on by an authoritarian government because when they get old enough to be smart enough to know that Santa doesn't really exist they'll also be smart enough (I will certainly make sure of this) to know the difference between the two.
This is nothing more than just another miserable and bored officer in the fun police looking for something to moan about. Besides the results are in, Santa is conservative and not a liberal statist. :-)
I would, however, fully support an "academic" paper (the quotes are totally justified in Ms. Pinto's case) accusing the EOTS makers of employing mercenary sock and underpants gnomes of invading homes and "losing" the darn elves so we have to spend another $30 bucks to keep the "tradition" going for the kids.
Not that I had to do that this year for my kids...except that I did... :-/
I just roll my eyes and know that this person spent about a hundred grand for their degree that makes them talk like this.
There’s nothing that says you can’t do both. As long as parents make sure their kids know what’s really going on.
LOL! YES!!! May I use this?
It’s AWESOME!
Use away. I swiped it from somebody else.
Bump for graphics
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