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Archives
- February, 2007
Another Reason Not to Send Them to School –
February 22, 2007
You might remember a couple of summers ago the media reported an
investigation by the California-based
Center for Environmental Health (CEH) that found lead contamination in
children’s vinyl lunchboxes. Just weeks after the CEH test results
were released, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC)
announced that its testing showed no lead problems from lunchboxes. Now,
I’ve received a press release from CEH stating that it has government
documents, obtained under Freedom of Information legislation, showing
that at the time CPSC made its announcement, its own laboratory testing
showed that vinyl lunchboxes had levels of lead as much as 16 times
higher than those allowed in paint. Even worse, the documents reveal
that at the time the agency was about to announce that lead lunchboxes
are safe, CPSC had just changed its testing procedure in an apparent
effort to minimize findings of lead in lunchboxes.
“CPSC told parents that these lunchboxes were
safe, but their own tests showed that lead in these lunchboxes could
pose a threat to children,” says Michael Green, Executive Director of
CEH. “It is shocking to see an agency entrusted with our safety
playing Russian roulette with our children’s health.”
Since its initial investigation, CEH has tested
hundreds of lunchboxes bought from store shelves and received from
concerned parents, and has initiated legal action against the retailers
and manufacturers of these dangerous products. Through this litigation,
CEH has created industry-wide reformulation of vinyl lunchboxes to
eliminate lead threats to children, in groundbreaking settlements with
15 manufactures and retailers of vinyl lunchboxes. The U.S. Food and
Drug Administration also last year issued a warning to manufacturers of
vinyl lunchboxes, advising them to eliminate the use of vinyl in
lunchbox interiors. Ironically, FDA based their recommendation in part
on CPSC’s test results. Mind boggling.
Posted: 2007/02/22
8:04 PM
Green and Growing – February 21,
2007
The fear factor is at work again and I, for one, am very tired of it.
So, apparently is British climate change economist Sir Nicholas Stern,
who told the media yesterday in Toronto that governments are wrong to
argue that combating climate change will create economic hardship.
“You can be green and grow,” Stern said. “I do not think it’s a
horse race between growth and being responsible on climate change. Good
policy can give us both.”
In fact, he said, the costs of action
to correct global warming are far less than the costs of inaction. But
politicians are busy telling us that we can’t make greenhouse gas
emission reduction targets without risking economic collapse.
Canada’s new Environment Minister John Baird said just two weeks ago that the
country “should brace itself for an economic hit when limits are
imposed on emissions from industrial polluters.” Stern, a former chief
economist at the World Bank, admitted cutting global greenhouse
emissions by 30 percent by 2050 would cost about one percent of the
world’s economic output. However, he said, the cost of failing to act
could be as much as 20 times higher. Meanwhile, Canada’s emissions continue to rise and are currently about 34 percent
higher than the goal.
I’m hopeful that the recent rise in
public interest in fixing our environmental errors will force
governments to get moving. But the auto and oil industries (and their
respective unions,) to name just two sources of greenhouse gas
emissions, aren’t going to appreciate being forced to redefine
themselves. So it will take bold and unwavering action backed up by a
strong conviction – not things most politicians are known for.
However, I think that we may be reaching a tipping point and that many
people are ready to accept much greater change than the politicians give
us credit for. So get on the phone to your elected representative today
and tell him or her you want them to put away the green paintbrush and
start to take real action on climate change. Fast, while there is still
a future for our children and grandchildren.
Posted: 2007/02/21
3:50 PM
The Messy Room – February 18, 2007
Rolf and I were straightening up our basement and moved a brass daybed
belonging to our daughter Melanie from one side of the room to another.
As we do whenever we move the darn thing, we chuckled as we reminisced
about its history. Rolf had promised it to Melanie when she was a child
if only she would keep her bedroom neat for a year. Since it’s now in
our basement, the bribery obviously worked, although I didn’t particularly agree
with it at the time and don’t recommend it now. And I don’t think
there is any connection between the bed and the fact that Melanie now
lives in a neat house. (However, I often think that perhaps someone
should have made the same offer to her dad at some point, because he
still hasn’t learned to clean up his piles of clothes!) At any rate,
our discussion reminded me of a humorous article that we published in
Natural Life magazine’s
Natural Child column back in 1997. It was written by
British Columbia
homeschooler Linda Boulter and entitled “The Messy Room.” Linda
concluded with these wise words: “In the end, the key is that they do
learn. And we learn that learning cannot be imposed from without because
it only has true value when it comes from within.”
Posted: 2007/02/18
5:58 PM
Supporting
Homeschooling in Germany – February 12, 2007
Writing is hard. It’s always hard, but this morning it’s been harder
than usual. I recently agreed to write a letter of encouragement to
German homeschoolers, to be presented at a gathering being held there
later this year. I’ve been keeping informed about the awful
persecution of homeschoolers that’s been happening in Germany, where homeschooling is illegal. The most recent
case involves a 15-year-old forcibly confined to a mental institution
and removed from her parents’ custody!
But in spite of the seriousness of the problem, I have
found the letter incredibly difficult to compose. Although I’m very
sure of the desirability of learning without schooling, I am also
conscious of not knowing much about Germany’s current
politics, culture or education system, even though my husband Rolf
was born there and still has family there. So I can’t presume to know
how to fix the situation.
I can share what helped here when I began
advocating for homeschooling back in the mid 1970s (although it was
legal here, so we were starting from a different place) and that is
what I began to do. However, as I researched the German situation, I quickly
understood just how
complex it is, in spite of some attempts by outsiders to
distill it into a war between Nazis, socialists and Christians. (Here is
a good
history and commentary from
Home Education magazine columnist Valerie Bonham Moon.) And I also began
to realize that while I can most certainly share my concern and
philosophical support, there must be a made-in-Germany solution to the
problem. But how to communicate that, while providing moral support and
not seeming to dismiss the
awful problems of this nascent homeschooling community? Like I said,
writing is hard.
Posted: 2007/02/12
11:27 AM
Who
Creates the Structure? – February 11, 2007
Thanks to readers for some lovely bits of feedback about my unstructured play posting,
mostly reminiscences of outdoor childhood games that were gloriously free of rules
and adult supervision. However, as a friend sadly reminded me, there are
now many situations where it is dangerous for children to play without
some adult supervision, if not structure.
The term “unstructured” is probably misleading.
“Self-directed” might be a better choice because, of course,
everything – play, learning, life – has some sort of structure
(thanks for the reminder, Sandra!). The issue for me is not whether something
has structure, but who is in control of creating the structure. Play is,
I think, a state of freedom…of movement, action, exploration,
enjoyment. As such, it is inherently both unstructured and
self-directed. Anything else probably isn’t play.
Posted: 2007/02/11
2:45 PM
Too Busy Playing
– February
8, 2007
I have received a couple of responses to yesterday’s post about Baby
Einstein. They’ve all been along the same lines of some critical letters
sent to us at Life Learning a few years back after we published an
article about the Alliance for Childhood’s study about children and computers. In addition to
pointing out that unschooled children use television and computers
differently, in a different context, than schooled kids, Pieter from
Los Angeles suggests that I’m being inconsistent with an article in Life
Learning’s current issue entitled “Fear of TV Beast.” That piece,
by Julie Persons, describes how she and her husband gave up restricting
television and allowed their son to watch as much as he wanted. But
there is a world of difference between parents buying Baby Einstein and
its ilk (which Mendizza calls “junk food for the developing brain”)
in order to supposedly kickstart their babies’ intelligence and
trusting an older child’s ability to choose quality activities for
him/herself.
Person’s son eventually gravitated away from the
TV and toward other play activities, as Mendizza suggests children will.
And that’s because they are hard-wired to play. Unlike adults, for
whom play is something to be done when more important jobs are finished,
children live to play. And it’s crucial to their development.
Unfortunately, unstructured play makes many parents fearful that their
children are wasting precious time. And so they try to control that play
and create or buy products that make the “work” of learning seem
like “fun.”
I’m working on some articles about the value of
unstructured play for a future issue of Life Learning and welcome input
or contributions.
Posted: 2007/02/08
1:49 PM
Too Busy Learning From the Real World – February
7, 2007
In his recent State of the Union address, the U.S. President applauded
Julie Aigner-Clark, founder of
Baby Einstein for her entrepreneurial and philanthropic spirit. I guess
it’s a huge honor for a business person, especially a woman, to be
mentioned in such an important speech, so congratulations are due to
Aigner-Clark, whose business was bought by Disney in 2001. But I’ve
always had a problem with Baby Einstein and other such concepts that
fall into the “infant developmental media products” category. So I
was pleased to see documentary film-maker and author Michael Mendizza
ranting against them in his recent newsletter.
He wrote: “Baby Einstein, however, is one of my
Orwellian ‘double speak’ pet peeves, for there exists compelling
evidence that the more time a young child spends watching Baby Einstein
the less like Einstein that child will become.” He goes on to note
that Einstein’s imagination was fueled by reading descriptive
language, not by watching pictures flash by on a screen, which is a
sensory experience (like skipping rope) rather than an imaginative one.
In fact, he claims, “Babies would never buy Baby Einstein videos. They
are too busy playing and learning from the real world.”
Mendizza has posted an article on the subject,
entitled Just
Say No to Baby Einstein on his
Touch the Future website.
Posted: 2007/02/07
4:10 PM
Molly Ivins
Will be Missed – February 4, 2007
“We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And
every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take
some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to
make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them
and trying to get them out of there…We need people in the streets,
banging pots and pans and demanding, ‘Stop it, now!’” That’s how
the progressive author and syndicated political columnist Molly Ivins
ended her last column on Alternet a few weeks ago. This past week, she died after a long battle
with breast cancer at age 62.
Molly Ivins was an eloquent writer and speaker,
with a large dose of down-to-earth wit…and one of the women
journalists who has inspired me over the years. She was bold,
insightful, outspoken, even outrageous at times (in 1991, she wrote a
book called Molly Ivins Can’t Say That – Can She?), passionate about
writing and a champion of liberal causes and the underdogs of society.
She was also a master of satire, which she aimed mostly at politicians
– George W. Bush being one of her favorite targets in recent years.
She wrote famously: “The next time I tell you someone from
Texas should not be president of the United States, please, pay attention.” Born in
California, she considered herself a Texan, working at a number of
Texas papers over the years, as well as The New York Times. Her writing will
be missed; we need more voices like hers these days.
One of my favorite Ivins quotes is: “What you
need is sustained outrage...there’s far too much unthinking respect
given to authority.” Here are
some more.
Posted: 2007/02/04
7:54 PM
It May Not Be Too Late – February 4, 2007
Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper has appeared startled by the depth of Canadians’ concern about the
environment. He has done a complete turnabout, suddenly painting his
relatively new, right wing minority government green in a cynical
response to negative reactions to the slashing it had done to
environmental programs just months earlier. I am skeptical about the
depth of his commitment to the climate change problem, given that his
base of power is in the oil country of Alberta. And he’s already muddying up that new green paint by saying emission
cuts are unrealistic and emission stabilization is more practical. But
what is really astounding is how guys like Harper, his buddy George W.
Bush and Tony Blair have underestimated the problem and misread
voters’ serious level of concern about the precarious state of our
Planet’s health. Perhaps they’re to be excused, since the tipping
point has come about in a remarkably short time.
I am seeing a huge and sudden increase in the
number of people wanting to learn to live sustainably, as demonstrated
by the rising sales of subscriptions to Natural Life magazine. Sales of
everything organic, energy-efficient and otherwise green are
skyrocketing. Corporations are realizing that sustainable business can
be profitable. I’m hoping the momentum can be continued, making 2007
the year that citizens, governments and the business sector alike
mobilize to save the Planet. Never have the opportunities been greater,
but never have the stakes been higher.
And for that reason, look for the conservative
naysayers – funded by the fossil fuel industries – to rev up their
activities. With the release of the UN’s latest climate change report,
they have begun creating a cloud of PR pollution, trying to convince
voters to convince the bandwagon-jumping politicians that climate change
is just part of a normal cycle and isn’t caused by human
activity…and therefore the lucrative activities of big commerce
shouldn’t be obstructed in its name. Be wary of groups with
obfuscating names like Natural Resources Stewardship Project and Friends
of Science trying to convince you that you won’t like the economic
fall-out from sustainability. Dinosaurs can make a loud noise as they
fall.
One of the places to monitor the activities of the
dinosaurs is
DeSmogBlog.
Posted: 2007/02/04
12:04 PM
Broadening Their Horizons – February 1, 2007
From time to time, a misguided parent finds what he/she regards as an
objectionable book in their child’s backpack and goes running to the
school or local library with censorship on their mind. The latest
incident that I’ve heard about took place recently in a
Toronto suburb. The Peel Catholic school board has pulled the award-winning
novel Snow Falling on Cedars from high school library shelves after one
parent complained about its sexual content. School officials were quick
to point out that the 12-year-old book, which has been the subject of
controversy and bans in the U.S. as well, hasn’t been
banned…although what else can one call it if the book isn’t
available to students?
This is a novel about significant social issues like
racism and morality. Its content is pretty
innocuous compared to what’s available to teens on the Internet and in
movies (and the book was actually made into an Oscar-nominated film.)
And there is, for me, a fascinating irony here. The author is David Guterson. He was a high school English teacher before
he was able to support himself as a novelist. And, as the father of
four, he was/is a homeschooler whose book Family Matters: Why
Homeschooling Makes Sense was first published in 1992. In it, he talks
about the complete breakdown of our school systems, including their
increasing social irrelevancy. I don’t remember if he talked about
censorship specifically, but his idea of homeschooling (a term that he said he hoped
would disappear from use, a sentiment with which I heartily agree) is to broaden his children’s horizons, which includes
allowing culture to have a life outside of classrooms. Try to tell
that to the censors...parents and school officials alike.
Posted: 2007/02/01
11:48 AM
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