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Archives
- June, 2005
Honouring Children With Song – June 23, 2005
In 1976, my three- and four-year-old daughters were given a newly
recorded album by a new children’s singer called Raffi. It was called Singable
Songs for the Very Young. Over the next four years, three
more Raffi albums found their way into our home: More Singable Songs, Corner Grocery Store and Baby Beluga. The words to some of those songs still periodically
loop through my brain. At least ten more award-winning Raffi albums followed over
the next few decades, selling over 12 million copies in total, but the
environmentally-aware, Vancouver-based, Egyptian-born singer with a
gentle, peaceful style left my growing daughters’ radar.
Given his obvious respect for children and
ecological advocacy, I wasn’t surprised to recently receive
information about Raffi’s Covenant for Honouring Children, a poetic declaration of our
responsibilities to children and the Earth, and of respect for the child
as a whole person. It is being circulated through child advocacy and
environmental health groups, and an audio
version, featuring the voices of Raffi, Dr. Jane Goodall and the Dalai
Lama, has been created. The Covenant (© 2004 Homeland Press) reads in
part: “We find these joys to be self evident: That all children are created
whole, endowed with innate intelligence, with dignity and wonder, worthy
of respect. The embodiment of life, liberty and happiness, children are
original blessings, here to learn their own song. Every girl and boy is
entitled to love, to dream and belong to a loving village. And to
pursue a life of purpose.
“We affirm our duty to nourish and nurture the
young, to honour their caring ideals as the heart of being human. To
recognize the early years as the foundation of life, and to cherish the
contribution of young children to human evolution.”
Raffi
is now devoting most of his time to reaching adults with that message.
He is currently writing a book entitled Child
Honoring: How To Turn This World Around, an anthology promoting
respect for the first years of life as the best way to create a humane
and sustainable world. Sounds syrupy, eh? It’s not. This guy is the
real deal. Given his popularity and trust with kids, he gets tons of
corporations wanting to license his songs to sell things to kids. And he
always refuses, saying he won’t violate the kids’ trust. He even
backed out of the Vancouver International Children’s Festival in 2000
after arriving to find it awash in corporate sponsorship. More about
this refreshing guy and his work can be found at http://www.raffisongs.com.
Posted: 2005/06/23 12:25 PM
Learned Incompetency – June 16, 2005
Perhaps the main thing I learned at school was what I couldn’t do. I
learned that I couldn’t do math, was a poor singer, couldn’t run as
fast as most other people, and had no aptitude for drawing. I remember
wondering when they were going to start teaching me the stuff that I was
bad at, as opposed to only teaching me the stuff
I was good at, like reading and writing. I felt let down by school, that they
weren’t doing their job as I saw it because I kept waiting for them to
teach me how to sing if I couldn’t sing and to teach me how to draw if
I was bad at art and to teach me to be athletic if I wasn’t. But they
never did. I was written off early in those classes. They just
reinforced the fact that I couldn’t do those things and kept teaching
me stuff that I already knew how to do.
I became famous for not being good at math and
within my family it became legend-like, this belief that Wendy just
wasn’t good at math. And so I started to believe it too. I was left
with a lifetime of catching up to do in those areas in which school
taught me I was incompetent. Now, I refer to this school outcome as “learned incompetency” and believe it’s one of the worst things
you can do to someone, especially in the name of education.
Posted: 2005/06/16 11:45 AM
Ranking Kids and Comparing
Schools – June 11, 2005
The conservative Canadian think tank the
Fraser Institute has just released its ranking of
Ontario’s 2,850 publicly funded elementary schools. Taking the abominable
notion of ranking and slotting of kids by their scores on standardized,
province-wide testing one step further, they have decided that some
schools are better than others based on those same test scores.
Predictably, four upper middle class neighborhood Toronto-area schools
“won” and in all, 36 schools received perfect 10 scores, the
majority of them in the Toronto area. At the bottom end, five schools received ratings of zero. The
ratings are based on scores from annual province-wide testing of grade
three and grade six students in math, reading and writing, conducted by
the Ontario Education Quality and Accountability Office.
Such assessments – of children and of school
systems – measure whether or not individual kids learn all on the same
timetable. That says little about kids but a lot about the stupidity of
a system which would dare to expect that everyone learns in the same
way, that there is such a creature as “an average kid” who can
provide a benchmark for competition to the front of the pack. Kids are
positioned by these assessments as ignorant, empty vessels and schools
as the filler-uppers, with the most efficient winning the race. They
turn well-meaning teachers into drillers of facts that can be
regurgitated on a test so that their schools can, in turn, perform well.
What these poor kids are really learning is to be apathetic, bored and
competitive.
Peter Cowley, director of school performance
studies at the Fraser Institute and co-author of the Report Card, waxes
enthusiastic about the rankings. “Comparisons are the key to
improvement,” he says. “There is great benefit in identifying
schools that are particularly effective. By studying the techniques used
in schools where students are successful, less effective schools may
find ways to improve.”
If school systems and conservative think tanks were
really interested in finding ways to help kids learn better, they’d
study the “techniques” of those who learn outside of schools. They’d
ask their students what they want to know and try to figure out ways to let kids
control their own learning processes. That, of course, would require the abolition of
pre-packaged curriculum and other so-called “techniques”. Oh yes,
and they’d get rid of testing. But I guess it’s too much to ask an
institution to dismantle itself!
Posted: 2005/06/11 5:40 PM
Composting Loses an Advocate – June 10, 2005
As I returned from my vacation, I was saddened to hear that Mary
Appelhof has died. You might know her better as the “Worm Woman”. My
path and Mary’s first crossed in the early 1980s when she wrote and
self-published the book Worms Eat My Garbage, which we reviewed in
Natural Life magazine and which went on to become a classic among
composters and recyclers. Over the next 25 years, we occasionally
updated our readers about her message of vermicomposting and were
pleased to have her as an advertiser in both Life Learning and Natural
Life magazines. A former high school teacher, Mary was an energetic woman
who loved to share her enthusiasm and knowledge about worm composting
with people of all ages, but especially with children. She was very
kind and generous with her time.
As owners of small publishing companies, Mary and I had a few
exchanges about publishing over the years. She celebrated the value that
small presses contribute to society and felt that mainstream corporate
publishers help “dumb down” our culture, creating mediocrity
rather than excellence. Their focus, she felt, is only on profits, rather
than on presenting information and insights that will lead people to
live better lives. And that is why she chose to self-publish her books.
There is no doubt in my mind that not only did her books, video and
talks help people around the world to live better lives, they have
contributed to making Planet Earth a cleaner place.
Mary Appelhof, who lived in Kalamazoo Michigan, died of cancer at age 68. Her partner Mary Frances Fenton and
assistant Nancy Essex intend to keep her work alive through her business
Flowerfield Enterprises.
Posted: 2005/06/10 1:22 PM
Gone
Fishing – June 1, 2005
Well, I don’t actually expect to do any fishing,. But I’m off
now to visit my daughter in Nova Scotia for a week and to have a
much-needed rest before it’s time to start work on the
September/October issues of Life Learning and Natural
Life magazines.
Posted: 2005/06/01 10:07 AM
No Spanking Allowed – June 1, 2005
Spanking has just been outlawed (well, sort of) in the Boston suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts. The Town Meeting in this above-average income, largely white
town has passed a non-binding resolution
that encourages residents to refrain from using
corporal punishment on children. This was the third try in as many
years for the resolution, which was sponsored by resident Ron
Goldman who has no children but a Ph.D. in psychology.
That commendable action (too bad it doesn’t
have more teeth) came just a few months after a six-year-old in a
Chicago suburb was suspended from a Christian private school
because his mother refused to spank him for such infractions as
talking, chewing gum, bringing toys to class and not finishing his
work. The mother has refused to back down and withdrew her son
from the school.
Meanwhile, a Life Learning reader forwarded
to us her 11-year-old son’s letter to the editor of the Boston
Herald, which says it all. He wrote: “When I was little I used to be hit by my
birth parents. I don't wish that pain on any other child. Now I'm
living with a new Mommy who doesn't lay a finger on me- except for
hugs and kisses! I'm glad that Brookline has brought some more peace to the
USA by not tolerating corporal punishment of children in their
city!”
For more info, including an index of
articles, about protecting children from physical punishment,
visit the Project No Spank
website.
Posted: 2005/06/01 10:01 AM
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