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Archives
- October, 2004
Compulsory Childcare? – October
27, 2004
A report on the state of
daycare in Canada has been released by the Paris-based Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). European researchers
reviewed 20 countries for the child care report, released earlier this
week. They said Canada’s system is chronically under-funded and is a patchwork of dismal programs offering little more
than basic babysitting.
Now, I am the first to agree that we need stable, well-funded daycare (and
other kinds of babysitting) for those who want and need it. And we
shouldn’t tolerate the shabby centers, poorly trained and underpaid
workers, and lack of outdoor play space that the OECD researchers
apparently found on their cross-country tour. Canada has among the
highest percentage of working mothers of young children, yet it invests
less than half of what other developed nations in Europe devote on
average, according to the report. It recommended that federal and
provincial governments each pay 40 percent of daycare costs, with
parents making up the remaining 20 percent.
However, I’m very worried about where this is going. In a Toronto Star
article yesterday about the report, social worker and former
Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick Margaret
Norrie McCain was quoted as using the term “evidence-based
early childhood development”. She said, “In the past, people thought
of [daycare] as a babysitting service for moms to go to work.” Uh,
yes, isn’t that what we’re talking about (with the possible
inclusion of dads)? Nope, what we’re really talking about, according
to Norrie McCain, is “falling behind in the ability of our people to
compete on the world stage, in the global marketplace. It’s serious
business.” Ah yes, that report was authored by an economic
development organization, wasn’t it?
Nervous yet? Well, how about this? OECD project
manager John Bennett believes that neglecting child development is a
pity because children are “very competent learners”. They can, he
says, “do a great deal and if they’re given the right situation and
the right support and the right professionals looking after them,
children will learn to read and write quite quickly, they’ll be
curious about nature, about their environment, it means they can
communicate well together.” His report notes the importance of young
children taking part in “an active, exploratory curriculum”. Such
professional arrogance, such a lack of understanding about how kids
learn! Why not put some public money into supporting parents so they can
stay at home with their young children? Why not put some money into
creating and supporting community institutions to help families learn
together?
But that’s clearly not where we are headed. In
response to the report, Minister for Social Development Ken Dryden, who has responsibility for drafting a
$5 billion national childcare plan, told reporters, “What the
OECD report said, and very clearly and effectively, is we’ve
approached child care in the past as a service... Now what we need to do
is move from that to something that is a system.” He favorably
compared the development of a childcare system to the way the public
education system developed a century ago. And in doing so, he has
inadvertently described one of the main problems with the public
education “system” – it has never been a service!
So...“evidence-based”, “curriculum”,
“professionals”, “system”. How long until attendance at
childcare becomes compulsory?
Posted: 2004/10/27 11:48 AM
Like Parent, Like Child – October
25, 2004
According
to the results of a study released today by Statistics Canada, children
raised by punitive parents are more likely to bully others, get into
fist fights and be mean. The research
paper entitled Aggressive Behaviour Outcomes for Young Children:
Change in Parenting Environment Predicts Change in Behaviouris
based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. That
research looked at 2,000 Canadian children over a period of six years.
It was found that children aged two to
three years who were living in punitive environments in 1994 scored 39
percent higher on a scale of aggressive behaviors, such as bullying or
being mean to others, than did those in less punitive environments. The
difference was even more pronounced six years later in 2000, when the
children were eight to nine years old. Those who lived in punitive homes
scored 83 percent higher on the aggressive behavior scale than those in
less punitive homes. Both at age two to three and also at age eight to
nine, children raised in a non-punitive parenting environment were much
less likely than others to exhibit aggressive behavior, according to
their parents. The level of aggression was not affected by household
income or gender of the children.
However – and here is what I find really interesting – the study found that
as parents adjusted their parenting styles, their children were able to
change as well. When parenting styles that had been punitive when
children were two to three years old became less punitive six years
later, children’s aggressive behavior scores also tended to be lower,
regardless of how aggressively they had behaved while very young. In
other words, children whose parenting environment changed from punitive
at age two to three to non-punitive at age eight to nine scored just as
low in aggressive behavior as those whose parenting environment was not
punitive at either of those ages.
Posted: 2004/10/25 1:16 PM
Assembling a Life – October
24, 2004
As we encounter the second adulthood of life, as
Gail Sheehy puts it in her book New Passages,
many of us become interested in slowing down the fast pace of our lives
or at least looking for the soul in our busy days. So clearly, I’m not
part of the target market for a new twist on prepared food that involves
quickly assembling a meal at home from various precooked components
bought at the grocery store. Think whole beef pot roasts and meat
loaves, organic veggie stews and bean soups, pre-cooked in their own
gravies and sauces, and ready to re-heat at home in the microwave. The
assembled meal might also include pre-sliced and pre-spiced, ready-to-heat garlic
bread with cheese, and pre-washed and pre-cut ready-to-steam broccoli
and cauliflower pieces. It’s admittedly a far cry from take-out pizza,
fast food hamburgers or the old standby for those with no skills, time
or inclination to cook – Kraft Dinner.
This trend is described in detail
by writer Philip Preville in an article in
Enroute magazine. (Thanks to a reader for drawing it to my attention!)
And Preville does point out that “home meal assembly” is especially
a hit with the under-35s who are crunched for time but still feel the
need to somehow participate in meal preparation.
My first thought on reading the article was that
this supposed biggest food trend of the last decade has its opposing
trend – the Slow Food Movement, which is
dedicated to preserving the taste and general pleasure associated with
good food. Of course, slow food may be merely a reaction to fast food.
And perhaps its following is made up of contemplative midlife folk like me, rather
than the more frenzied under-35s.
However, on second thought, I focused on the part
about needing to participate in meal preparation. Perhaps people miss
those home-cooked meals of their childhood – even if, like me, they
didn’t experience many of them. Maybe they yearn for the camaraderie
of group food preparation and long to savor the pleasure associated with
gastronomy. Maybe the home
meal assembly and slow food trends are really two different aspects of
the same thing – a return to an understanding that food is much more
than something to shovel into our mouths to give us enough energy to
keep running the rat race.
Unfortunately, scratching this itch in this manner
isn’t exactly the best choice in terms of nutrition or the
environment, since these made-for-assembly meal components generally use
more salt and preservatives, as well as more packaging, than their raw
state counterparts. I think of my mother, a 1950s “homemaker” who
embraced every new “instant” food as it came on the market, from
powdered mashed potatoes to Jello, even though time wasn’t a
constraint, with a tiny home to make and just one child. I think, also,
of myself, who (in typical overblown reaction to my own upbringing)
managed to tend a vegetable garden, bake bread from scratch, dice
vegetables and soak beans for long-simmered stews, and more...all the
while tending two home-educated children and co-running a publishing
business.
So the ability to feed ourselves well doesn’t have to depend
on the amount of available time. I suspect that cooking skills and
priorities are more important factors. Oh, and could the corporate world
be, once again, pushing us along the road toward assembling our lives
(and our food) rather than creating them? The Enroute article mentioned
Canadian research that shows that food manufacturers are doing their
part to speed up the decline in people’s cooking skills. Fortunately,
one of the projects of the Slow Food Movement is to protect food
biodiversity – not only food animals and plants that are disappearing,
but also products, dishes and skills.
Posted: 2004/10/24 11:24 PM
On Stupidity – October
18, 2004
Albert Einstein said, “Two things are infinite:
the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the
universe....” Various dictionaries define stupidity this way: extreme dullness of perception
or understanding; insensibility; sluggishness; a poor ability to
understand or to profit from experience; tendency to make poor decisions
or careless mistakes.
Filmmaker Albert Nerenberg describes stupidity as a
chronic resistance to intelligence. And that is the theme of his film of
the same name, which premiers on television in Canada later this week. The documentary sets out to determine whether
our culture is hooked on deliberate ignorance as a strategy for success.
From actor Adam Sandler (of Coneheads and Airheads fame) to U.S.
President George W. Bush, from the IQ test to TV programming and the
origins of the word “moron”, Nerenberg examines the dumbing down of
contemporary culture, which is happening in spite of our unprecedented
access to information. The result is a sometimes funny, sometimes
terrifying look at the human race and the stupid things it has done over
the course of time.
One of the theories Stupidity puts forth is that
people prefer the act of “resisting intelligence” because it makes
them feel more comfortable. That, according to Jacob Weisberg in an
article on Slate explains why George W.
Bush gets away with so many contradictions and lies. People sympathize
with – and actually like him – because he appears like “an amiable
dunce”. Weisberg goes on to observe that while Bush may not have been
born stupid, he has “achieved stupidity”, and now he “wears it as
a badge of honor”. He is proudly anti-intellectual, not wanting to
know anything in detail and has actually expressed contempt for
knowledge.
In his film, Nerenberg
suggests that unless stupidity is dealt with, we may all be doomed. And
Einstein had something to say about that too: “The world is a
dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those
who look on and do nothing....”
Posted: 2004/10/18 10:50 AM
In Charge of Ourselves – October
12, 2004
When my husband Rolf and I started publishing our first magazine
Natural
Life back in 1976, the focus was on “self-reliance”. That being the
back-to-the-land era, many people understandably misinterpreted the
concept to mean “self-sufficiency” and were disappointed at the tiny
size of our vegetable garden and that we didn’t have chickens running
around the publishing office. The two concepts are related, but quite
different. The dictionary definition of “self-reliance” is
“reliance on one’s own capabilities, judgment, or resources;
independence”. “Self-sufficiency” is defined as “the ability to
provide for oneself without the help of others” and, in some
dictionaries, has the qualifier of “having undue confidence” or
being “smug”.
Our mission has always been to provide readers with information that will
encourage them to question the status quo and hence make their own
authentic choices about the food they eat, the things they buy, the
amount of natural resources they consume, the way they educate
themselves and their children, and so on. Or, in a word, to be
self-reliant.
Our meaning is in tune (aside from the 1840s
gender bias) with that of Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay entitled
“Self-Reliance”, where he wrote, in part, “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at
the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that
he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion....”
That sense of the importance of each of us
crafting our own authentic view of the world still underlies what we are
about almost 30 years after we published that first issue of Natural
Life magazine. If you are self-reliant, you realize the dangers inherent
in educating children in schools...and aren’t afraid to try the
non-institutionalized path. If you are self-reliant, you refuse to
believe at face value the spin that politicians put on health care, or
protecting our food supply and our energy resources...and you do your
own research and work together with your neighbors to build positive
community alternatives. If you are self-reliant, you take ownership of
your own feelings and emotions...and replace blaming others for your
anger with a decision not to be angry.
Yes, it takes time and effort to question conventional
assumptions. (And beware: questioning one assumption leads to another,
and so on....) But my own journey toward self-reliance has shown me that
doing so can make life far simpler, much less destructive and very much
happier.
Posted: 2004/10/12 11:13 AM
Not Yet a Learning Society – October 10, 2004
One of the principles behind most of the writing
and speaking I’ve done about education over the past 30 years is that
education is not something one produces in someone else; rather, it is
something one does for oneself. Real learning is that which we have
gained for ourselves, based on our own interests, motivations and
timetables. Now, that’s not news to adult educators, who regularly
toss around terms like “lifelong learning”, “learning
organization” and “learning society”. In the adult education
world, it is assumed that learners will set their own agendas, study
independently and think creatively.
The contrast between that and the way we treat
younger learners is striking...and a bit puzzling. A good example of
what I’m talking about is the recent study authored by academics at
two Toronto post-secondary institutions that called for less learning
autonomy and more “program experience” for young children (see September 2, 2004
blog archive).
This
is the very sort of academic who, years later, has to put more programs
in place to help all those teenagers with “program experience”
recover from it and learn once again how to be autonomous learners in
order to thrive at the post-secondary level! How much sense does that
make?
People are hard-wired to be autonomous learners
from birth. Developmental psychologist Robert White says we are born
with an “urge toward competence” – the need to have an impact on
our surroundings, to control the world in which we live. We do not just
sit and wait for the world to come to us. We try actively to interpret
it, to make sense of it. Of course, this drive to discover means we are
constantly learning...and experiencing the pride that comes with having
gained that mastery.
So then why is so hard for people – academics,
non-academics and even many home-educating parents – to trust children
to learn without interference? It has, I think, to do with what the
British writer Roland Meighan in his article in the upcoming issue of Life
Learning calls
“adult chauvinism”. The way our society looks at education involves
power, control and the arrogance that makes us think we always know what
is best for those younger than ourselves. Until we societally adopt the
principle that childhood is not a rehearsal for personhood and lose our
coercive attitude toward children – especially but not solely in terms
of how they learn – we will not be able to call ourselves a learning
society.
Posted: 2004/10/10 1:31 PM
Finding
Balance – October 9, 2004
I have been chatting with a friend about making lifestyle changes. She
was feeling guilty because on a recent road trip, she had stopped at a
fast food outlet’s drive-through window. She approves of neither the
politics nor the food at this restaurant, but was hungry and it was the
only place accessible and open. Nevertheless, a week later, she was
still beating herself up over the incident and seemed on the verge of a
self-imposed frenzy of deprivation in order to compensate for her
perceived backsliding. I told her that living lightly on the earth is a
journey, not a destination...a process not a product. There is no right
way, just a commitment to keep moving in the right direction (and not
worrying about the odd little sidestep).
I’ve been on this path for
over 30 years, but still the contents of my closet would outfit two or
three families, the number of books on my shelves would furnish a small
town library, and I love my morning latte. The way I see it, healthy,
sustainable living is all about finding a graceful balance. For
instance, I’ll gratefully eat turkey with friends this Thanksgiving
weekend, because the joy of sharing and caring is more important to me
than sticking rigidly to a vegetarian diet. Finding balance along a
challenging path means living mindfully, – knowing
who we are, where we came from, where we are going and why. That
awareness helps keep us focused on the larger goal of reducing our
negative impact on the planet while living a healthy lifestyle...and
enjoying our lives along the way.
Posted: 2004/10/09 11:38 PM
Smoke
& Mirrors –
October 3, 2004
Last week we learned that the Canadian Tobacco
Manufacturers’ Council has donated over $2 million to a non-profit
organization that has set up a smokers’ rights website. The
www.mychoice.ca site says it is “dedicated to restoring fairness and
civility to the way the country’s five million adult smokers are
treated by their governments and others.”
The website goes on to say that research shows adult smokers are
“tired of feeling powerless and voiceless as they are hit time and
again with increasing taxes, more severe restrictions, and social
stigmatization”. So this website is apparently going to give them a
powerful voice to be sure governments look after their interests. The
Tobacco Manufacturers’ Council claims the website is not about
encouraging people to smoke.
So who or what is the Canadian Tobacco
Manufacturers’ Council? It is a lobby association founded in 1963,
shortly after Canada began its first national anti-smoking campaign. Its
members are Imperial Tobacco Canada Limited, Rothmans/Benson &
Hedges Inc. and JTI-Macdonald Corporation. These are the companies that have a very long history of manipulation, obfuscation and
possibly even outright lying
to courts, governments around the world and even the World Health
Organization, not to mention the blatant use of seemingly benign “front” groups.
(Just spend 15 minutes on the website of the National
Clearinghouse on Tobacco and Health and you’ll get a potent taste of
their activities.) And we’re supposed to believe that they are
spending millions of dollars on a website that is not designed to
promote – or at least protect – this disgusting health hazard?
By the way, where is the fairness and civility
shown by smokers who breathe their smoke of death into my face while I
try to enjoy summer’s last warm weather on a café patio? Where is the
fairness and civility shown by smokers who drop their nasty cigarette
litter on street corners and in parking lots across the city? And what
is fair about taxpayers having to subsidize health care costs for the
victims – first- or second-hand – of a behavior that kills? The folks
who sign onto this website would be better to stop their self-righteous
huffing and puffing about their so-called rights and get some help
recovering from their addiction. Do they not realize the extent to which
they are being led to their deaths by wealthy corporations?
Posted: 2004/10/03 1:38 PM
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