Learning Responsibility On City Sidewalks Reading Flashcards
Prior to reading the actual essay, what was the author’s general source of anguish?
Jane Jacobs opposed the conventional wisdom of most architects and city planners in the 1950s and 60s by championing the value of human interaction on “lively” city streets, streets like those of Jacob’s own NYC neighborhood of Greenwich Village.
According to the author, how did lively sidewalks impact the lives of children?
Lively sidewalks have positive aspect for city children’s play, and these are at least as important as safety and protection.
How does the presence of adults in lively sidewalks come into play for children?
The people of cities can, and on lively diversified sidewalks they do, supervise the incidental play of children and assimilate the children into city society. They do it in the course of carrying their other pursuits.
What is the author’s perspective regarding substituting the presence of every day adults for alternatives?
To waste the normal presence of adults on lively sidewalks and to bank instead on hiring substitutes for them, is frivolous in the extreme. It is frivolous not only socially but also economically because cities have desperate shortages of money and of personnel for more interesting uses of the outdoors than playgrounds.
Define Child Rearing
The process of bringing up a child or children.
Define Frivolous
Not having serious purpose or value.
Define Adjuncts
A thing added to something else as a supplementary rather than an essential part.
Define Folly
Lack of good sense; foolishness.
According to the author, what is an essential flaw that city planners have when it comes to their duties?
City planners do not seem to realize how high of a ration of adults is needed to rear children. Nor do they seem to understand that parks and recreational equipment do not rear children. These can be useful adjuncts, but only people can rear children and assimilate them into civilized society. It is folly to build cities in a way that wastes this normal, casual manpower for child rearing and either leaves this essential job too much undone-with terrible consequences- or makes it necessary to hire substitutes such as playground monitors.
What is the author’s stance regarding guards being wholesome for children and ordinary adults being evil for them?
The myth that playgrounds and grass and hired guards or supervisors are innately wholesome for children and that city streets, filled with ordinary people, are innately evil for children, boils down to a deep CONTEMPT for ordinary people.
According to the author, why is the presence of ordinary adults so essential for children on lively sidewalks?
In real life, only from the ordinary adults on city sidewalks do children learn- if they learn at all- the first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other, even if they have no ties of kinship or friendship. This is a lesson nobody learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship take a modicum of public responsibility for you.
What was the name of the locksmith in the essay?
Mr. Lacey
How many children were there in the first instance of the essay?
28
What are the first-hand effects of children taking responsibility as a result of the active presence of adults?
They volunteer-before they’r asked- directions to people who are lost; they tell a man he will get a ticket if he parks where he thinks he is going to park; they offer unsolicited advice to the building superintendent to use rock salt instead of a chopper to attack the ice on the sidewalk.
Why does the author believe that civic responsibility cannot be taught by people who are hired?
This is instruction in civic responsibility that people hired to look after children cannot teach, because the essence of this responsibility is that you can do it without being hired. It is a lesson that parents, by themselves, are powerless to teach. If parents take minor public responsibility for strangers or neighbors in a society where nobody else does, this simply means that the parents are embarrassingly different and meddles on, not that this is the proper way to behave. Such instruction must come from society itself, and in cities, if it comes, it comes almost entirely during the time children spend at incidental play on the sidewalks.
