Two Words, One Answer.
childhood
 Childhood's End (Del Rey Impact) $15.00 This masterful writing has one more captivated not only my interest but my psychological and mental capacity fit for fascinating inferences and a dynamic set of revelations all from the cunning words of Clarke. Clarke's writing is just about as outstanding as the tales he weaves. He gives a full-circle compliment of thought, not only allowing for thoughts to repeat themselves in characters but also in the readers own mind. Each time the revelation happens, a little bit more is understood. Although this short but engrossing tale reflects a kind of god of all gods science fiction theory it is the inferences beneath this theory that truly shines through. What are humans, truly, but mere life forms set on a particular world amongst incomprehensible numbers? And what is it that we will leave behind, if anything? Weaving evolution, religion, impeccable scientific thought and the paranormal Clarke delivers a strikingly shocking tale that will speak through the ages for as long as humans are around to read it.  Creative Resources for the Early Childhood Classroom $76.95 This book is very helpful to a Teacher with early childhood age children (2-5 years). It is well rounded and gives you a lot of great idears for projects for theme teaching.This book is a must for your in class teaching library.  Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life $24.95 A person who does honest research and looks at questions of what causes different life outcomes from all possible perspectives finds out that cross-adoption studies show that unrelated people who grew up in the same home are no more alike than any two strangers in the general population. To many in academia, the research on nature/nurture might as well have never been done. So why read a book like Unequal Childhoods? Annette Lareau, a sociologist at Temple University, is part of the know-nothing tradition of the human sciences. Building on observations of children from 88 families, she and her associates provide in-depth observations of 12 families with nine- or ten-year-olds -- six White families, five Black and one interracial. The families were divided into three categories based on education and economic situation: middle and upper class, working class, and lower class. From comparing the kind of interactions the children have with their families and the outside world, the author thinks that she can explain how unequal childhoods lead to unequal adulthoods. Although Lareau's conclusions are wrong, the book proves interesting for two reasons. First of all, she inadvertently shows that environmentalist ideology -- the belief that who we are is shaped mostly by what happens to us -- has led to the middle class being absolutely miserable. Secondly, she provides an intriguing account of how people of different IQs interact with each other and how they deal with government and private institutions. The main dividing line that the author finds is between the middle/upper class and the two lower ones. It's common among educated Americans to follow the advice of experts, who in recent decades have made suggestions such as avoiding corporal punishment and treating children as equals. The middle and upper class follow a parenting style the author calls concerned cultivation, while the lower and working classes follow one of accomplishment of natural growth. The author finds that there are few differences in child-rearing between Blacks and Whites of the same social class. Race is little more than an afterthought in the book. What Lareau fails to inform the reader is that middle- and upper-class Blacks do worse on standardized tests than Whites of the working and lower classes. This fact has led some gene-ignoring researchers to claim there's a sort of hidden institutional racism X-factor that holds Black children back. With this author, however, this inconvenient piece of data is ignored. Families are given their own chapters to illustrate each point. We start with the Tallingers (all names are fake). The parents appear to be of North European descent, both with Ivy League degrees. They are raising three boys, including nine-year-old Garrett who is the target of the study. He has an IQ of 119, but his passion is sports. A table of his activities for the month of May shows one week where he participates in soccer four times, baseball three times, swimming five times, and basketball once. Lower-class children participate much less in extracurricular activities, and, when they do, the parents don't attach nearly as much importance to them. The Tallingers live their entire lives around Garrett's sports practices and piano lessons. They will rearrange their work schedules in order to give him a ride to where he needs to be. The other two comparatively inactive sons are often dragged along and grow resentful of their brother. Middle-class children in general have relatively poor relationships with their siblings during childhood. Middle class children also have no relationships with their extended kin -- an element of the individualist tendencies of Western family structure. The family structure itself seems fragile: If a soccer match is scheduled for the same time as a family outing, the sporting event tends to get priority. While Garrett enjoys his busy schedule, he is often exhausted. The parents put up with the inconveniences because they're convinced that their son gains an advantage from all this activity. Middle-class children spend most of their leisure time in events organized by adults. The author calls this a "bureaucratic" existence. All these activities don't just consume time, but money. The Tallingers estimate that the extracurricular activities of Garrett alone cost $4,000 a year, and that excludes any lost work productivity on the part of the adults. Seeing the time and money middle- and upper-class parents are putting into each of their children, it's no wonder that they have so few of them. Environmentalist ideology has led society's genetic elite to absurdly overestimate what a stimulating environment can do for their children, and needlessly fear a less managed existence. After giving a son or daughter the basic necessities of life and educational opportunities, further investments likely result in diminishing returns. If intelligent parents knew this, they would be less busy, have much less anxiety and possibly have more children, since doing so would be more financially feasible and enjoyable. We have to remember that that the parent who is providing a rich language environment for the child also provides genes to the child so that the child is able to soak up this rich environment -- a phenomenon that behavior geneticists refer to as the passive genotype-environment correlation: The child is the passive recipient of genes and environments from their parents and the genes and environments mesh together. The same thing happens when parents like tennis stars Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf transmit genes for athletic ability to their children and also provide them with great environments for training in tennis. The section on language is ostensibly about variation in raising children, but it can just as easily be read as about passive genotype-environment correlations between people with high and low IQs. For example, when an upper-class child talks about something he learned, the parents will ask follow up questions. This is not the case among less intelligent caregivers. When the higher classes discuss why they like this or that car or X-Man character, they expect one another to present relevant reasons. Welfare mothers aren't able to verbalize why they prefer X to Y or to figure out what does or doesn't relate to an argument. Middle-class families are described as always talking to one another with brief interruptions of silence, and working and lower class families as doing the opposite, with silence being the norm. All these differences are the results of IQ inequality, not the causes of them. Lareau points out that the middle class parents in the study who grew up in the 1950s and 60s were themselves products of natural growth childhoods. She doesn't seem to see how this harms her theory of a generational transmission of different parenting styles being the source of inequality in America. On the other hand, the author does have some good ideas about why the middle- and upper-class parents do things differently from the way their parents did. The "institutionalization of children's leisure" is a product of the modern world, as are "scientific motherhood" and the attempted "rationalization" of all aspects of human existence. She writes: "The rationalization of children's leisure is evident in the proliferation of organized activities with a predictable schedule, delivering a particular quantity of experience within a specific time period, under the control of adults... areas of family life are growing more systematic, predictable, and regulated than they have been in the recent past." While the author believes that this new form of parenting at least has the redeeming quality of making children eventually more capable of dealing with the modern world, those of us who know the importance of nature in determining how humans turn out can see the modern upper-class forms of child-rearing for what they are: Wasteful in both time and money. |
|
