Hi-5 Album: “Hi-5 Hits”

This is a super-charged, high energy CD. Pre-teens will love it and even the younger set will bop to the beat. I've been playing this CD in my pre-school class and the little ones absolutely love it! Aside from the Hi-5 theme song, which really gets them hopping, they love the fun-loving "Pizza, Pizza, Pizza" and "Opposites". You'll even find yourself humming some of the tunes. I can understand why this program is number one for children in Australia. Hi-5 is high energy!

There should be a law against marketing exercises in dumbed down Pop culture to children. Hi-5 represent the big world of marketing, vanity and shallowness. They were set up by Channel 9 in Australia as an answer to various ABC children's programs which were doing well.

There is something rather icky and phoney about Hi-5, too.

Educational value of this material? Hard to say. I guess it does teach young children to uncritically accept low-brow Westernised Pop culture and become a future consumer of this stuff.

Children have open minds and are unprejudiced. You could bring up a child on a steady diet of the piano music of Olivier Messiaen and Schoenberg - the child isn't going to think that this music is "too hard" for him or her! My father used to play me Stravinsky and Bach at bedtime. I loved that music and I still do.

Why ruin our children with mediocrities like Hi-5? There is plenty of time for children to find their own dumb music for a while when they are teenagers.

There is also a creepy element of para-paedophilia in the approach of Hi-5 - it is the overtly sexual nature and beauty-pornography of the members. The members of this group were chosen for their looks.

Is that a good message we should allow to be sent to the young, especially the very young?

Become a Hi-5 refusenik and boycott this group and their heavily marketed paraphernalia.