Free Thinking 2013 - Who's Got Hold of Children's Imaginations?
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 8 November 2013
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As we strive to protect our children’s imaginations from negative influences, are we running an even greater risk – of starving those imaginations altogether? Writer Patrick Ness, author of the ‘Chaos Walking’ trilogy, and Dr Charles Fernyhough, whose writing examines the development of childhood language and memories, join Matthew Sweet to explore what stimulates young minds and how children cope in an unstable world. Recorded on Saturday 26th October 2013 in front of a live audience at Sage Gateshead as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking festival.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music |
| 0:27.0 | when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | This is a special download from the BBC Free Thinking Festival. |
| 0:35.9 | For more information and our terms of use, go to |
| 0:38.3 | BBC.co.uk.com.com. Radio 3's annual meeting of minds, gathered under the clean white |
| 0:47.5 | apron of Sage Gateshead. This year we've been wrestling with the question, who's in control |
| 0:52.9 | of politics, of of society of capital |
| 0:55.6 | of culture but in this program we're going to ask who's in control of something that seems very |
| 1:01.5 | powerful and is much written about but may ultimately be impossible to describe or understand |
| 1:07.8 | the imagination of children parents are envious of it, sometimes rather scared of it, |
| 1:14.1 | and also worried that it might be vulnerable to influences that we don't like. |
| 1:18.9 | Children exercise it but can't tell us much about it. |
| 1:22.5 | Novelists and psychologists do their best to capture it on the page or in the lab. |
| 1:29.3 | So let me introduce you to two specimens of both professions. With me here is Patrick Ness, whom grown-ups know as the author |
| 1:35.5 | of the crane wife. But he's also a giant of British young adult fiction. Only the middle-aged |
| 1:41.8 | will need telling that he's the creator of Prentistown, a place |
| 1:46.0 | where thoughts are as audible as this program and the setting of his chaos walking trilogy. |
| 1:52.0 | As you'll hear in a moment, a child's imagination is the territory on which the events of his new |
| 1:56.9 | novel are played out. And Charles Ferniho is here too. Charles experiments on children, |
| 2:02.5 | his own included. He's a professor in the psychology department of Durham University, where he's |
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