What would you think if someone said to you, "You don't know anything about the world!"

It might not be so disturbing if the comment came from someone more experienced and in a higher position or from an older person, but most people would be offended if it came from one of their peers. And anyone would be irritated if told this by someone younger or in a lower position.

So, is it a good thing to be knowledgeable about the world? If we encountered a child who was familiar with life and how the world works, I think we would find him or her cocky or cheeky. In other words, sophistication is not necessarily seen as a desirable trait in children. This is because it's sometimes good for children not to know how the world works.

Why do I bring this topic up? If you keep reading until the end, you will understand, but first let me tell you about two different experiences that spurred me to write this.

The first is the American literary work, Winesburg, Ohio, a popular best-selling book by Sherwood Anderson written at the turn of the 20th century. It consists of short episodes in the private lives of people in a fictional small town in Ohio. One tale titled "Sophistication," tells of a young man and woman, childhood friends who grew up together in the town, and how they gradually become aware of each other as members of the opposite sex. The young man finally professes his love before he is due to leave town to attend university. For Anderson, awareness of the opposite sex is clearly one aspect of learning about how the world works, but I bring this up here to point out that the word "sophistication" in the English title was translated as "sekenchi" or "knowledge of the ways of the world" in Japanese. Today, in the United States, "sophistication" tends to refer to something "refined," but English language dictionaries from the 1920s indicate that the word was used to mean "impure" and "brazen." We see that for Anderson, being aware of the opposite sex had this connotation. The tale also conveys the slightly humorous sense that children become "brazen" as they become adults.

And in a previous blog, I wrote about the self-esteem of children. I am now conducting comparative research on children's self-esteem in several Asian nations and examining whether the self-esteem of Japanese children is really lower than that of children in other countries. The research has produced interesting results. In the survey, five-year old children and their parents were asked the same questions about children's sense of self-esteem (a positive sense of self). With a few exceptions, the survey clearly showed that children evaluated themselves far more highly in all areas than their parents did. Worldwide studies on children's self-esteem show that children in all countries report a sharp drop in self-esteem after entering elementary school from kindergarten or preschool. Elementary school teachers evaluate children's abilities more objectively than parents do, and it is within this environment that the self-esteem of children drops. Becoming familiar with the ways of the world involves learning how the world works and one's relative position within it, so by becoming more sophisticated, their self-esteem declines.

As they learn about the world and how it works, children start to lose the sense of capability and competence that they had as infants and preschoolers.

Now after reading this, don't you feel that you understand how Peter Pan feels?