Medical Correctness & Humpty Dumpty
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Here's a bit of Internet frivolity:
Nursery rhymes put kids 'at risk'
Some nursery rhymes send dangerously inaccurate messages to young listeners, according to Canadian researchers.
They are concerned that characters in popular rhymes suffer major injuries without receiving proper treatment.
The characters include Humpty Dumpty, who had a great fall, and Jack and Jill, who tumbled down a hill.
Children are told these stories "without people stopping to really look at what's happened", according to the tongue-in-cheek research.
The page includes a "medically correct" nursery rhyme. It is a joke.
This inspires visions of preschoolers, taught the proper response to true emergencies, dialing 911 and administering CPR whenever they judge they are called for. Or, better yet, conducting surgery when they think it's needed.
Um, why did they take on nursery rhymes when TV provides much more fertile ground for this sort of analysis?