In “Kid Nation,” CBS’s most talked–about new show, forty children—carefully selected to reflect multi-culturalism—are on a mission. Their task is to rebuild the New Mexico ghost town of “Bonanza City.” Can they do it, we are prodded to wonder? Can forty American children create a viable society from desolate wasteland?

The premise of this ‘reality’ series immediately brings “Lord of the Flies” to mind. But “Lord of the Flies” it’s not; these are not children governing themselves (and failing) but rather children governed (and never with the chance to fail). Nor is “Kid Nation” a study in innocence and education like Rousseau’s “Émile,” which similarly traces the development of youth in the countryside. Rousseau’s goal was to nurture human nature, but the only apparent goal of “Kid Nation” is to nurture revenue by flaunting our ability to fit children into our often-warped capitalist mold. “Kid Nation” exhibits a world not ‘for kids by kids,’ but instead one constructed for voyeuristic adults by voyeuristic adults. Kids are used as funny, adorably awkward little pawns.

The show itself is beyond eerie, even before one considers the likely breach of child labor laws. American parents were so eager to achieve fame and fortune for their kids that they agreed— mind-bogglingly—not to hold the producers or CBS responsible if their child received inadequate medical care, underwent injury or emotional distress, lived in unsafe housing, obtained sexually transmitted diseases—or even died.

In the series premiere, the 8–to 15-year-olds are loosed upon the scorching desert to fend for themselves—though not before the ever-present host Jonathan introduces them to their pre-selected political representatives (four “Town Council” leaders: the “capable Boy Scout,” the “competitive pageant queen,” the “smart spelling bee champ” and the “respected student leader”). As the episode continues, it becomes clear that the kids will never really be left to fend for themselves; good ol’ micromanaging Jonathan is always there to save the day. Jonathan implements the introduction of a cash economy to Bonanza City, along with a social system comprised of an upper class, merchants, cooks, and laborers—really—and determined by results of a ‘Wild West’-like showdown. It’s fortunate that an adult intervened to establish a stratified class hierarchy, as the kids left to their own devices wreaked such havoc as filling a pot with too much macaroni in ratio to the water.

No wonder darling eight-year old Jimmy from New Hampshire bursts into tears in the first episode. “I’m really homesick,” he whimpers. “It’s scary. I’m too young for this.” Jimmy votes to leave Bonanza City at the first Town Hall meeting. While a handful of other children say they’re homesick, too, they don’t want to miss a chance to win big: at the end of each episode, Jonathan explains, one especially cooperative child is selected to receive a gold star, worth $20,000— which could be quite a raise for a member of the ‘laborer class,’ regularly paid ten cents an hour.

The “Kid Nation” producers love to show how mature these children are, except when they’re showcasing their naïveté with sweet music in the background. In the second episode of the series, the children debate killing town livestock for food. Serious moral contemplation ensues, which escalates into heated and passionate argumentation.

“Oh my God, what is happening in this town?” cries noble little Emilie, when she sees how many want to kill the chickens. Kids need their protein after all! Emilie attempts civil disobedience by locking herself into the chicken coop. Her comrade Savannah wonders how they’ll take the chickens’ lives: “Are they gonna hang them like they did Saddam Hussein?” Eleven-year old Jared is reminded, he tells the camera, of that famed Shakespeare quote, “to kill or not to kill.”

Once the tense ‘town vote’ rules in favor of slaughter, fifteen-year-old Greg, the veritable Ayn Rand of the bunch, begins decapitating the chickens. Though he’s in the upper class at the moment, Greg is eager to help out with extra labor. “I need the gold star,” he confides to the camera, “I have no money put away for college.”

At the second Town Hall meeting, the gold star is awarded instead to Michael, a sweetheart who the producers have been playing against Greg and his more dubious motives.

Greg complains bitterly at the end of the episode. “I did a hell of a lot more work than Michael did… and I’m gonna do something about it,” he threatens.

From comments like Greg’s, or from the uncanny chant of “upper class” by the “Kid Nation” cast, it’s clear that our model of consumption entered the minds of these kids long ago. These children never have to face the difficulties of forming a viable society; they already have a sense of how capitalist society works.

“Kid Nation” is no social or psychological experiment, but rather evidence of the perverse joy we get from watching kids act as grown-ups after making them act like grown-ups. (A similar case can be made for the Upper East Side liberteens of the CW’s “Gossip Girl”—though the show is a hell of a lot less creepy to watch).

Outside of our television boxes, we as a society lament how poorly things have gone for those kids “forced” to play grown-ups, not for CBS, but for American higher education. Oh, how hard kids have to work, from such a very young age, and how very quickly they have to grow up these days! How sad it is that we all have to overachieve!

It doesn’t seem to me that we know whether we want kids to be utter naïfs, in all their protected vulnerability, or miniature adults, in their precocity and feigned world-weariness. Either way, it seems letting kids just be kids is too much to ask.