Robert Paterson: Children

The Lost Generation - Middle class Kids

Fri, 05 Sep 2003 09:42:13 GMT

Stuart sent me this. It is the best piece I have seen yet on why so many of our kids are in trouble

School and Slavery

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 23:26:45 GMT

Doug Adler and Dave Pollard on what school is really about.

Snip

It has always been in the interests of industrialized countries, or rather their captains of industry to have:

a large pool of uneducated workers
a rate of unemployment around 6%
Bread and circuses to divert the great unwashed.

It keeps the public's minds off how they are being manipulated. The purpose of school is not to educate but to socialize individuals, to get them ready for the rat race.

So, why is this becoming a hot topic again now? Maybe it's because the inherent tension between a system designed to numb minds and dedicated teachers who are tring to stimulate those minds has reached, through the constant de-funding of education - a breaking point. Maybe it's because the actions of our politicians have become so blatantly harmful that John Q. Public can't be distracted enough anymore to totally ignore them. Maybe the world has become so tumultuous and patently dangerous place, particularly for Americans, that the lotus eaters have started to awaken from their stupors and have begun to see reality through their dreams. Maybe Ajmerica is in the act of swallowing the red pill.. I don't know the reason - I can only hope that America is finally waking up.

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 10:54:28 GMT

Campaign to tackle bullying. Behavioural consultants are to be drafted into schools in attempt to stem the rising tide of bullying in the classroom. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]

There is a bullying epidemic going on in many schools all over the west. Is this because there are more "bad" kids? I don't think so. Maybe it is because there is so little structural identity available anymore. What does this mean? I think that we all need to know that we fit in somewhere. If a school offers no formal tribal structure such as "houses", the kids will make their own. In this Darwinian alternative tribal system, the strong and the cool persecute the outsiders - the different, the uncool and the weak.

Yet we persist in thinking that bullying is an individual issue. Why are we so blind?

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 10:35:38 GMT

Ivy had an educational technology breakthrough las .... Ivy had an educational technology breakthrough last week: she learned to use the computer mouse. Apparently this is not evidence of prodigy status, as there is already a booming market for toddler-targeted software. The article isn't particularly well written, and I found the idea of parents spending $2.8 billion on educational toys (including multimedia) sort of repulsive. Overzealous moms collecting every Baby Einstein title and talking about the importance of a good college for their 16-MONTH-old's future...isn't it all a bit disgusting?

Pushing very young children into predefined learning activities seemed rather odious, but that first impression may not be entirely fair. And the definitions of pushing and learning are tricky. I spend a lot of time online, and my two-year-old wants to participate, so we've found a few things that we enjoy doing together online. It's certainly learning -- play and learning are completely intertwined. I had shown Ivy how to use the mouse a couple of times before, and she enjoyed zooming it around the mousepad for its own sake, but had never made the connection between the physical motion and what was happening on the screen. The week before in the SuperDuperDolphin game, she suddenly understood that the dolphin did tricks when she clicked on the pail of fish, but she couldn't figure out how to move the cursor over the pail.

Last week's breakthrough came while playing a Flash activity called Sing-a-Song Clay-Along from the Disney empire (see screenshot). It's a simple piano with four characters, one of whom is performing at any given time. I gave her the mouse and showed her how to click the button again, then let her loose on the virtual keyboard. She was concentrating intensely, but smiling when the character would sing different notes as she clicked the keys. Then I asked her to try getting the pig to sing, and she slowly moved the cursor over the pig and clicked...then went back to the piano and started clicking virtual keys. Oink, OINK, oink...to her great delight.

I suppose this is happening for young kids all over the world these days, and shouldn't be a big deal. But for someone who believes in the power of the web to transform learning and knowledge, it seemed like a significant milestone -- a symbol of the online access Ivy will have to ideas, entertainment and other people throughout her life. She won't remember the first time she used a computer, mouse or software...it's just part of her environment. I wrote a bit about Ivy's favourite online activity from her pre-mousing days: The Snake Game, using me as a guide and the Google image search as her playground. It's a great way to spend time, but her new skill gives her more control over the world...well, the virtual world, anyway.

I guess I have this vague sense of lingering guilt that she's too young to be sucked into the digital vortex, but I think that's the Luddite in me. These things she's experiencing online are more interactive than anything she'll see on TV, and allow her more control to create, explore and manipulate than any reading session might offer. But $3.8 billion is just ridiculous -- one of the coolest things about the web is that this stuff is all free. [Jeremy Hiebert's headspaceJ -- Instructional Design and Technology]

I think that games have a lot to teach us about learning. Our instructional model is wrong. How we really learn best is by "Playing". Why boys love games and hate school.

Blogging and Education - eBay???

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 13:42:35 GMT

Enrollment for the media courses at our community college is way down this year. Is this part of the dot-com fallout or is something more going on?

What is on offer is a one year full time class based course that costs $10,000 and teaches you to create web pages. I asked my blogging friends on PEI, none of whom are older than 24 and most younger and all of whom are experts in web based communication, - note I did not say experts in web creation.- to tell me how they learned to be so good.

They were all highly motivated and started to "play around" on the web when they were very young
They learned from each other and still do
None of them see learning about a tool or a technique as being central - one said that when they see a resume that states that the person has mastered a set of named software, they bin it immediately - wrong approach. They do not take a product approach but a holistic approach

So who takes these courses? Maybe folks who have no talent but who think that the web is hot. What happens when they enter the workforce - they meet the web version of Miles Davis or Dave Brubeck with a high school band talent - result they are peons not masters.

So what do you do if you are our community college? Maybe you have to link those who want to learn to those that can teach rather than try and teach the sheep. This is a huge shift. Does it only fit with IT?

What about automotive trades. Until now you could go to a college and learn how to fix a car. But what about Hybrids and soon fuel cells - who will stop the train for long enough to create a conventional curriculum? It can't be done. We will have to learn on the job as the job will be changing too fast. So what does the Community College have to do to create the learning environment. The same process is true for many areas - think even of construction - post Kyoto we will change radically how we build and the material will change very fast. You can't teach stuff that is 3 years out of date.

Who can we learn from? eBay I think. They have made a business through creating a safe community where people can do business with each other.

For me the big challenge is how can we create a safe community where we can learn from each other?

eBay have revolutionized retailing as a result. No inventory! You think that education has no inventory - think again - it is all about inventory - they are called courses and departments - they build and sell. Changes in inventory are exceptionally slow. But the pace of change is accelerating. Formal learning cannot keep up and will only fall behind.

It is also all so expensive. Canadian university fees were up 7% this year while inflation is about 3%. School costs are rising much faster than inflation and the degree is falling in value as more kids enroll. Student debt will be cancer on the next generation. But if you get out of build and sell you get out of your main costs - inventory.

So here is the challenge. What small place that knows it cannot compete with the large traditional centres will have the balls to set up the eBay of learning?

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 10:01:50 GMT

Missing the Librarians for the Trees.

The Myth of Generation N

"For decades, social scientists and technologists have alternatively predicted the emergence of 'computer kids' or a 'net generatio'”—a cohort of children, teenagers, and young adults who have been immersed in digital technology and the digital way of thinking since their conception.

This new generation, the thinking went, would be everything that their parents weren’t when it came to technology: They would know how to type, partake in electronic communications, and be able to rapidly figure out how all this stuff worked. They would be so adept at using computers that calling them 'computer literate' would be an insult. They would see society as something to be mastered and hacked, not something that they need to fit inside.
Certainly, a lot of evidence supports a 'net generation' effect. Although there are no reliable statistics on computer literacy, good figures do exist on Internet usage, thanks to the Pew Internet Project. According to its survey released earlier this year, 74 percent of people in the United States age 18 to 29 have Internet access, compared with 52 percent of those age 50 to 64. Among the over-65 set, Internet access plummets to just 18 percent. And in my own age group, 30 to 49, 52 percent have some kind of Net access. These figures certainly argue for the existence of a 'Generation N.'

But the more time I spend with the kids who should be members of Generation N—today’s high school and college students—the more convinced I am that the notion of universal computer competence among young people is a myth. And the techno-laggards among us risk being relegated to second-class citizenship in a world that revolves around, and often assumes, access to information technology....

Experts in human-computer interaction say that the real difference between teenagers and their elders is teens’ willingness to experiment with computers, combined with their acceptance of the seemingly arbitrary conventions that are endemic to contemporary computer interfaces. In other words, teens aren’t worried about breaking their computers, and they’re not wise enough or experienced enough to get angry at and reject poorly written programs. The teens just deal with computers, as they are forced to deal with many other aspects of their lives. These strategies, once learned and internalized, are incredibly effective for working with today’s computer technology....

...Unfortunately, with the changes overtaking our society, today’s kids who don’t have tech experience and tech aptitude are going to be left behind much faster than their elders.

And that’s the danger in believing that time will give us a population that’s completely computer literate. Remember, the Pew study found that 26 percent of young adults do not have Internet access. An even bigger determiner than age is education: only 23 percent of people who did not graduate from high school have Internet access, compared with 82 percent of those who have graduated from college.

Certainly, more kids today are growing up wired—but millions of them are not. Meanwhile, we’re rebuilding our society in ways that make things increasingly difficult for people who aren’t online. For example, people who don’t want to (or can’t) buy their airplane tickets on the Web now typically have to wait on hold for 30 minutes with the airline or go through a travel agent and pay an agency fee—sometimes as much as $50. When I needed to renew my passport, the local post office didn’t have the form: they told me to download it from the Internet.

This is a problem that won’t be solved through more education or federal grants. As a society, we need to come to terms with the fact that a substantial number of people, young and old alike, will never go online. We need to figure out how we will avoid making life unbearable for them." [Technology Review]

First of all, bad title because when you cite statistics such as "74% of Americans ages 18-29 have internet access," that's pretty much a "generation." Did every member of the "greatest generation" fight in World War II? No. Did every member of the "baby boomers" smoke pot and protest the war? No. But yet 74% of a generation that has internet access doesn't qualify as a critical mass.

Actually, I don't even think of kids ages 18-29 as netgens. My personal definition would be kids age 15 and younger. If you're generous and figure that the internet has been mainstream for six years, then you really need to look at netgens as kids that have grown up during that six year period and their younger siblings. I know the 18-29 age group came of age with computers, but the internet is a whole new ball of wax. Email, the web, and instant messaging are changing our society even faster than computers did. And these kids that grow up taking this stuff for granted are already ahead of my 35-year old self in how they assume and assimilate an interconnected world.

I know folks like Walt will sigh when they read that, but it's true. The way we take time-shifting technologies like VCRs and walkmans for granted is how these kids take the internet and wireless access for granted. It's just there, as it should always have been there. You mean it wasn't always like that? As I've noted before, my kids think every laptop can connect to the internet, and at high speeds, too. They have no idea that you might ever need a cable to do it, either. They think every camera can instantly display the picture it just took and pretty soon, they'll think that all cell phones can take pictures.

But what about the author's original point that 26% of this generation won't be computer or net-literate? Well, my question is how sad is it that he doesn't note the single most important support net for those people - libraries? Who could teach them information literacy in the digital age, either in school or in general classes at the public library? Who can provide them with free access to purchase that airline ticket or download that form? Who can provide them with the backup print resources that they need? Who can find information for them when they can't do it themselves?

The same folks that are there for every other past or future generation - librarians. And you know why the article's author encounters high school and college kids who aren't information literate? It's because politicians keep cutting library budgets, insisting that they're not important anymore. In some states, like California, they cut school librarian positions until there are almost none left. In some states, like Florida, they decide that critical institutions like the State Library are expendable and no longer need to be funded.

So how come Technology Review doesn't mention that?

[The Shifted Librarian]

I have been talking about the low levels of traditional literacy on PEI. This article and Jenny's comments reveal an even greater need to be able to read. If you cannot read - you cannot participate in the online world. Soon there will be no alternative. Government services, business and social communication will increasingly go online and the alternatives will dry up. Maybe the Libraray will be the home of the illiterate? What a concept!

Boys in trouble at school - Trouble for all of us

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 11:58:30 GMT

I had coffee with a colleague yesterday who has a 7 year old son.. We were talking about education - specifically about the poor literacy rates on PEI. She works at our Community College we are working to find better ways of remediating this problem. But then we turned personal and I asked her how her son was doing. He is 7. A month into grade 1, she was told that she/he had a problem. Her son was too active. Here is a dialogue from another page but I think it sums up what she heard.

Snakes and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails
Is That What Little Boys Are Made Of?
Anyone who has had a little boy knows that the little darlings can run you ragged. Even before he crawls, he is naturally more active, more exploratory about his surroundings and more mobile than most baby girls.

          By the time your little boy is five, he's still as cute and playful but all the more hard to control. Is it only your child, or is it all boys?

          Soon the innocence of boyhood yields and it seems that the natural ants-in-the-pants that our boys have always had is an invitation to diagnose problems. That which was once considered normal behavior is now a cause for alarm.

          What happened?

          From infancy to the early toddler years, parents accommodate little boys. Experts say all toddlers should roam and explore, but it just so happens that the more unbridled sex is the male. Until he starts school, even the most disciplined little boy is not satisfied with long periods of quiet time. Then school begins, and the environment that once understood the boy for what he is now expects him to act complacently, quietly, and without the motion that predated his school years.

          "This child has attention problems," the Kindergarten parent hears.

          "Your boy is very sweet, but easily distracted," reports the first-grade teacher.

          "We've told him repeatedly that he is not allowed to wrestle and push others," the third-grade teacher sighs.

          "He's had four warnings and he still doesn't bring in his homework," hears the ninth-grade parent.

          Sound familiar?

          Much of the current drive behind school reform stems from the belief that the cookie-cutter approach to education doesn't work. Perhaps what is expected of a boy these days is in conflict with normal male energy and curiosity.

          Schools, for the most part, are dominated by women, and boys are taught to the "rhythm of girls," says Archibald Montgomery, headmaster of the all-boys Gilman School in Baltimore, Maryland and treasurer of the International Boys School Coalition. It's not an evil conspiracy, he points out. But it does lead to some troubling outcomes.

          For example, boys are ten times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, according to a 1997 American Psychologist article. Is it because they are more prone to ADD or have we ceased to distinguish between the different nature of boys and girls? It's partly both, but experts agree that ADD is often abused and overdiagnosed.

          Dan Kindlon, along with Michael Thompson, is the author of Raising Cain, Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys (Ballantine). He points out that a more effective approach to dealing with ADD-like problems might be to fix the environment, rather than focusing on a fix for the child. In other words, high-paced, hyperactive schedules can lead to lack of sleep and high-paced, hyperactive behavior.

          A mother of four boys recalls when her youngest was two and she took him to the doctor. Anne Roche Muggeridge describes what happened:

          "He was one of those kids who is never out of motion while awake. During the examination, he kept reaching out to the interesting medical paraphernalia around him, and I kept gently fending off his little fingers."

          "Is he always like this?" the doctor asked.

          "Yes, he is always like this," she replied.

          "Perhaps we should put him on Ritalin."

          "Over our dead bodies," said Mom. "He is not disturbed. He is disturbing."
Muggeridge has an intuitive mother's insight into the different nature of boys. They are more tactile, "squirmier," more active - especially in group settings - and often develop at a slower rate than girls.

          Parents who take time to question the suggested kid-fix often look to boys' schools for more understanding. When a school environment is designed to suit the needs of boys, that school then has the luxury - "the honor" Montgomery calls it - of structuring the curriculum to boys' special needs. Because their fine motor skills don't develop as quickly as girls, for example, he doesn't schedule cursive handwriting into the curriculum as early as it might appear in a co-ed setting. Boys at his school are also allowed to move around the classroom more and allowed to be tactile. Their activity level is celebrated.

          Not every parent can afford such an environment, and many would prefer the traditional co-ed school. But a parent can have a huge effect upon how her boys are treated. For starters, don't immediately accept the "Billy has a problem" approach from the educators. While they may mean well, it could be anything from the kind of reading instruction to the level of rigorous coursework (or lack thereof) that is making Billy fidget. While you want to cooperate, explore deeper into how the school is structured. Are there cooperative groups for the children? Oftentimes boys don't excel while facing other classmates as the teacher is teaching. Boys are naturally more competitive and less group oriented than girls.

          Is there enough activity time? Are children engaged in creative play throughout their school years and given a chance to express themselves through various art venues? Finally, does the school allow enough flexibility for teachers to address the uniqueness of their classes with materials, activities and special events?

          At one all-boy school, science class is done almost entirely outside. The boys engage in earth, wind and sky observations and the excitement of preparing for their "natural history" class is used as a carrot by the teacher when trying to get them through the more passive English or math classes.

          Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails? You bet. Rather than try to change their nature, we should find educators who see the challenge in it" (Parent Power)

How's it going with your sons? Is he a problem or merely a boy? Surely when more than 30% of boys are failing at school it is time to look at the school rather than at your son?

"Ha revenge!" you say as a woman. So what kind of man would you want in your life or in your daughter's life? An aware and capable partner or an angry deadbeat who is frightened of where women are in the world today? Behind PEI's bucolic vistas, are dark homes where sad men take revenge on capable women whom they fear. Last summer a young woman who was studying at our community college and breaking out of her life trap was murdered. Her murder has not been solved. So what might have been the motive? A visitor from away who is a serial killer motivated by deep desires or someone whom she knew motivated by fear of losing her? You make up your own mind.

Learning and Games

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 14:27:06 GMT

I had lunch with Dan and Steve yesterday and one of the items we talked about was why boys are so turned off by school. Our bottom line that real learning was as much about motivation as any other factor. Becoming expert at something seemed linked to motivation. Is this why boys like games so much? Is there a lesson for so called educators like me?

Jeremy Hiebert has some great stuff on learning and play.

I read last week that boys are starting to turn away from action flicks. The stated reason was that they preferred the interactivity of games and th amount of contro that they had in games.

I am old but here is a question for the young turks out there. Is there something deadingly passive about the instruction method used at school? Is there somthing about the teacher being a "Mom Clone" that pisses boys off?

Is part of the appeal of most good games that they demand real skill and that the skills cannot be learned quickly? Is another part of the attraction that the good games have compelling ladders of challenge? Is another part of the appeal that truly amazing games have all of this and allow you to compete with a large community?

Finally what if we made school more like games? Anyone read Scott Orson Card's books?

Marriage - Another Ptolemaic Construct?

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 11:46:38 GMT

As the debate about Gay Marriage builds, I wonder what is the "natural state of marriage". Much of what I read in our local paper righteously informs me that Jesus, God and the church determine what marriage is all about. In short in this view, marriage is a union of one man and one woman whose role is to have children.

Just for fun, let's explore the history of the union of adults a bit further than the few thousand year perspective that the CW allows for.

For most of the 4 million years that humans and our predecessors have been around, our primary social unit has not been a union of two adults of opposite sex but a small tribe of between 15 and 25. 25 appears to be the optimal size with the right threshold of complexity for survival. These tribes were in turn linked into their surrounding tribes into "nations" of about 150. These in turn were linked into federations of around 500-600. Why these numbers?

The Math of Genetics - There is also a genetic link to group size and Magic Numbers.

A person living alone has a "half life " of about one year. Set ups of one lose half their number in one year, half in the next and so on. Living alone is a very weak strategy in a natural environment where there are many risks and challenges. Today the power of the state is encouraging us to live this way - the state is the dependency creating family and its not a healthy relationship.

The half life of a group of 5 is a generation or about 20-40 years

The half life of 25 people is 250-500 years. 25 seems to be an ideal blend of comfort and complexity. A company that lasted 250 years would be a remarkable organizations. In a tribe about half a group of 25 would be adults - say about 8 men and women - now we see the core underlying magic number revealed. It is the ideal single sex work group derived from the ideal familial work group, the tribe.

The 500 person group is the ideal "marriage gene pool" Incest taboos prevent breeding in the 25 person tribe. Wives and husbands have to be found outside this group. But not too far outside. After all we don't want our daughter to mary a stranger or worse someone who cannot add wealth by his connections. We also want them to speak the same language and worship the same Gods. So being close means that we can enter your wife's family hunting ground and that it creates the potential to have large scale group hunts on occasion. 475 people = the ideal gene pool of 19 x 25 member bands.

Dave Pollard writes eloquently about how great it would be to live/work in a group whose sole aim would be mutual support - this is what this tribal set up was all about.

The reality is then that for most of human time, we lived not in units of two adults but in social units of 25 that include about 8 adults. The purpose of this tribal unit was obviously to raise the next generation but to do so in the context of doing all of the related work as a large team. This was above all a social and economic unit.

There was no clear line between work, play and society. No Work/Life balance issues here. Belonging to the tribe and having a tribe that functioned well was in every member's survival interests. No individual was safe on their own. No child could depend solely on her natural parents. They needed the power of the larger group. If we are honest with ourselves, this issue of safety and the need for a support group has not changed. The game can disappear - we are fired. Partners and children die. Our kids need a job. We get injured or sick. In our diminished social world, we now look mainly to the state or to insurance companies for the benefits of the protection of the group. The most important unit in our history was not the "family", it did not exist, but the tribe.

Ah but you have left out the best bits you say. So what about men and women and sex? Any study of primal people tells us that there are many arrangements for how sex was accommodated. There are tribes where the big man has most access to most women. There are matriarchal tribes where the power and the choice is in the hands of the women. There are tribes where most of the sex is homosexual and where mating for children is a by product. In most tribes your own gender is where your primary social and affection relationships reside.

My point? The tribe is sacrosanct - sex and sex partner rules are diverse. The point of the tribe is to raise children not simply to produce them. No two parents in a tribe focus on only their own offspring. They look after all the children as do all the other adults. With all property belonging to all members, there is no need to make a strong link of who was the father.

So where does this leave us now?

The reality is that most so called families are now one adult organizations lead by a woman. This is as small and as vulnerable a unit as is possible. Even with two parents, most are so stressed out at work that they have little energy for their children. We see the results in grade 1 when 30% of the kids have behaviour problems that are so overwhelming that they are unlikely to make it through school. Many families are blended but are so hooked into the CW that they blame the other for the breakdown and have little or no contact. So the children can be cut off from Grandparents and are shuttled between warring parents. Many blended families have the potential to be tribes if only the warring parents could see through their anger and see the potential.

Our view of jobs has meant that work and social life have been split apart and we vainly try and find a balance. Our social structures have been destroyed. In desperation we turn to the state or to the company benefits plan or help for those times when we as individuals cannot help ourselves. .

What marriage really means now is a legal construct by which the benefits of the state and from insurance companies, pensions etc, can pass from one party to a related party. This is what most Gay couples want - legal recognition and access to the state and company tribal benefits.

The church is fixated on sex. No surprise that this is its own weakness. The church assumes that we organize around sex which makes the conventional marriage the central organizational unit. BUT the observed fact is that humans do not naturally organize around sex - we organize around work and survival. Human social organizations are not built for procreation but to raise children so that they can take over the leadership of the tribe. Sex is not why my Gay friends want the recognition of their union. They want the protection of the state tribe. Most importantly, they want to be able to raise children so that they too have the ultimate benefit of dying in the knowledge that they have raised good people who will remember them as their ancestors.

Kane on Education

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 11:29:36 GMT

"The last obvious policy is in education. There is already a gathering counter-consensus in the UK around educational reform, led by voices like Tom Bentley of Demos, CreativeNet and the Scottish Council Foundation: they want to stop "factory schools turning out factory minds". The creative child can imagine new problems (rather than have them handed down to them); mingles ideas easily from one realm to another; makes mistakes, as long as they lead to more interesting solutions, and focuses on goals with all their powers of attention. That's a text-book list of the psychological attributes of play.

Yet creative education should be about more than producing fodder for the "creative industries", or a better class of info-worker. The democratisation of creativity could save lives - or at a minimum, turn those lives away from self-destruction. If the play ethic means anything tangible, it is about occupying the gap that drug culture occupies in our poorest communities. And that gap is created by the distance between "work" as it stands - job-seekers allowances, McEmployment of all kinds, the spiritual tedium of "workfare" Britain - and the individuals who cannot (or will not) conform to its dictates.

Drugs, you could say, are the dream-seekers' allowance: the most expedient way to boost your sense of human potential, when all the official routes heading towards that end seem rubble-strewn, or impossibly long, or depressingly unrewarding. This also explains the traditional hot-link between narcosis and pop culture. If your chemical dreams spur you to activity, then dancing, socialising and fucking - or making other people dance, socialise and fuck - is often the most gratifying way to make your mark on the world; to align your inner state with your outer reality.

What Ibiza has really "uncovered", for all its reckless, oafish hedonism, is an inarticulate but deeply-felt rejection of the false dignities of contemporary labour. "I’m largin' it" should be taken literally: it means, My precious self is bigger than this mousy, pointless social role.

An education for creativity which wanted to be truly “inclusive” would have to listen to this elemental and popular desire for playfulness. It’s an unruly vigour which has its subterranean link to an earlier, more carnivalesque Britain, evidently not entirely swept away by industrial capitalism. A time of "happy Mondays" and "the soul's play-day", when 18th century Gloucester bishops complained about "loutish mobs that are drunk with the cup of liberty".

Teachers would have to find ways to tap into these disruptive energies, and turn them into a repertoire of usable life-skills. That means, among other new approaches, that the much-abused "media and cultural studies" would at last get its proper curricular due. Bringing context and history to pop songs, computer games and tabloid tv could provide kids with an exit route from the cul-de-sac of these escapisms, into richer areas of cultural tradition and understanding. From Big Brother to George Orwell (or from Ibiza Uncovered to Epicurus) is surely a worthwhile educational gambit.

Economists who've read their Marx often talk about education as part of the "reproduction of labour" - the place where the character of the good worker is made. The play ethic wants an education which aims at the reproduction of creativity, the nurturing of the good player’s soul. Children should leave schools feeling motivated, in command of their faculties, and capable of expressing themselves in forms and behaviours which both please themselves and others. Why would such a child choose the temporary utopia of drugs, over the actual joys of skilful self-creation? Why would they not choose to play?"

If you woke up and found that you were 8 again and had to go back to school, how would you feel? Would you not want a school that was more on Kane's lines than the one you send your kids to now?

Play versus Work - Maybe the thought of a lifetime of "work" is putting boys off school?

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 11:18:47 GMT

Here is an extract from Pat Kane's body of Work on Play - Thanks to Ross Mayfield for the link

"Yet why believe in work, when work doesn't believe in you? The constant watchwords of the new capitalism are flexibility, creativity, self-improvement. Workers are urged to "get up to speed" with a runaway world: we must become mobile and tensile, enterprising and capable. We must harness our chariots to the sun of intense global competition.

Yet these injunctions come from companies which hire you for a year, six months, maybe even less; who might be taken over at any time in some City of London or Wall Street manoeuvre; who try to wriggle out of long-term entanglements like pensions, wage and holiday agreements; and who shed labour whenever their position in the global marketplace shows the slightest competitive disadvantage. Trying to excel for companies that are themselves transient, provisional and unforgiving might come to seem like the grandest folly.

When that realization comes - that is, when the work ethic crumbles before your eyes - then an intellectual vacuum opens up at the heart of contemporary capitalism, which desperately needs to be filled. Over the last decade, a procession of not-big-enough ideas have tried to fill the space - "downshifting", "work-life balance", all those slackers and idlers. None of them with much success or distinction.

They all try to speak to our deep common anxiety: that if we keep up our loyalty to the work ethic, in a world where competition, mutability and innovation rule supreme, we will destroy ourselves. The LSE's Richard Sennett calls this the "corrosion of our characters" - where the acids of the new capitalism eat away at the old industrial virtues of self-discipline, sacrifice and duty.

We need a new, similarly powerful social ethic for these hyper-demanding times. Some other world-view that can give a coherence to the frenzy of activities and interests that we scatter across our busy lives. Something - anything - that could make all these demands for "creativity" and "achievement" even worth the effort.

I PLAY, THEREFORE I AM

Welcome to the play ethic. First of all, don’t take “play” to mean anything idle, wasteful, frivolous or even necessarily childish. The trivialisation of play was the work ethic's most lasting, and most regrettable achievement. This is "play" as the great philosophers, and recently mind scientists, have understood it: the experience of being an active, creative and fully autonomous person.

“Man plays only when he is in the fullest sense a human being“, said the great German Romantic Friedrich Schiller. “As man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom, then his activity is to play", agreed Jean Paul-Sartre. The classic 20th century psychologists - like Jean Piaget, Donald Winnicott and Erik Erikson - all understood play as our most effective way of mastering the complexities of our world, rather than submitting to its routines.

And now that we can watch the very synapses of our minds perform, through medical neuro-imaging, the powers of play are even more confirmed. Those who clear space in their lives for activities that are pleasurable, voluntary and imaginative - that is, for play - have better memory, sharper reasoning, and more optimism about their future. As the dean of play studies, the University of Pennsylvania's Brian Sutton-Smith says, "the opposite of play isn't work. It's depression. To play is to act out and be wilful, exultant and committed, as if one is assured of one's prospects".

So to call yourself a "player", rather than a "worker", is to immediately widen your conception of who you are, and what you might be capable of doing. It is to dedicate yourself to realizing your full human potential; to take an essentially active, rather than passive stance towards your environment; and to be constantly guided in this by your sense of fulfillment, meaning and satisfaction.

The play ethic is what happens when the values of play become the foundation of a whole way of life. It turns us into more militant producers, and more discriminating consumers. It causes us to re-prioritise the affairs of our hearts, to upgrade the quality of our emotional and social relationships. It makes us more activist in our politics, but less traditional in their expression. And most of all, the play ethic forces us to think deeply about how we should pursue our pleasures - and how we reconcile that with our social duties.

So, like the work ethic, the play ethic is a set of feelings and principles about how we should be active in the modern world. But the difference between the two is huge. Work is always (to coin a phrase) the involuntary sector - the realm of compulsion and necessity, where men and women have to do what they have to do. But as Sartre says, play is what you do when you feel at your most free, your most voluntary. When every positive decision you make about your life carries both a risk, and a promise, of something new and challenging taking place. This is why the play ethic isn’t “the leisure ethic”: the last thing it involves is slumped relaxation."

This is an extract from a 4,00 word piece and a wideranging site with tons of material

What is going on with Boys and Men in Education

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 10:52:09 GMT

There is a North American problem for boys and school. Boys are doing very badly in the education system. But on PEI, we have reached a crisis.

We have the highest drop rate for males in high school at 22.6%. Male literacy is in the basement. In 1998 82% of females could read at a level 3 compared to only 60% for boys. Way below the national average. In a 2001 survey of grade 12 - 62% of females said that they planned to attend university. Only 42% of boys made the same claim. UPEI is granting 1.8 degrees to women for every one for men. In 1998 28% of women in the 25-29 age group had degrees, in line nationally, but only 17% of men.

Anecdotally I hear that in 2003 70% of freshmen are women at UPEI. I hear that medical schools, law schools even engineering are packed with women. There have been rumblings about boys doing badly but this is surely a crisis? We surely cannot accept that it is all the boys' fault. There is something really wrong about how we raise and school boys.

We have to have a serious look at schools and ask what is it about how we run them that turns boys off. We have to look at how we as parents raise our boys as well. How have we taken their desire to achieve away?

There have been rumblings about this issue but surely we are on such a poor track that we have to step back and apply our best efforts to re- engage the male gender in their education.

Innocent summers - Where have they gone?

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 12:41:46 GMT

Games People Play On Summer Evenings

I was trying to tell someone this weekend about the summers I spent as a kid in a really rural place with a gang of cohorts my age, no TV, bikes, rowboats, catamarans, pogo sticks, Monopoly, playing cards, dogs, flip flops and a lot of penny candy from the general store in town. It's hard to explain -- seems to be a childhood completely lost these days -- one that can never exist again. We had enormous freedom. We were outside all day and a good part of the night. We were relaxed and funny and silly and creative and very lucky to be so.

One thing we spent a lot of time doing was playing "Sardines" -- a game you play in a completely dark house -- no lights on. One person hides in the house, you give them 15 minutes while the rest of you wait in one room or outside. Then if they are ready, you call out "Ready?" and they DON'T answer. No answer means, time to start.

You wander around in the pitch dark, although it's also fun to play on a moonlit evening, in search of the person who is hiding. If you find him/her you go ahead and silently hide with them. If you have not found them, the only word you are allowed to say is "Sardines?" which must be answered by other players still looking for the hidden person. If you start with 20 people, the reply to your question "Sardines?" is quickly offered, "Sardines." "Sardines" "Sardines" you hear from all quarters, which means, yes, I'm still here.

After a bit, you notice the replies begin to thin -- and then you know a bunch of other folks have found the person and are hiding somewhere in the house with them, ready to jump out at the last unfortunate sucker. You know you're the last guy when your "Sardines?!" remains unanswered and then you think to yourself, "Oh, shit" knowing that any dark corner you turn into might have 19 people hiding ready to jump out at you and scare the hell out of you.

Needless to say it's a great game for teenagers as they are "forced" to pile into a small space together, body against body and try NOT to make noises or giggle, which is next to impossible.

I was so struck by Halley's views. What has happened to "play"? Everything is so structured today and parents seem obsessed by risk.

In the great English children's book Swallows and Amazons, the children have their own sail boats and have adventures on the Lakes in the Lake District without an adult in sight. My sister Diana and I ran wild for 3 years in Ghana. We killed snakes and rabid dogs, climbed trees and had a Ju Ju gang. In England we played in the next door bomb site and did not come home until the end of the day.

TV is the usual culprit but what about our need to "program" our kids to take up activities? We seem to have a need to Supervise. What are the real risks that we wish to shield them from? Is the world really full of pedophiles just waiting to kidnap our children. Why do we not allow our children the same freedom that we had?

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 15:56:10 GMT

collaborative learning and institutional culture. There have been a few interesting posts lately about collaborative learning. Many of them spout the relentlessly cheerful “we tried it and it was amazing and I wish more teachers would shift their paradigms because the students love it so much” line. (Hmmm. Perhaps my frustrations are already leaking through, eh?) Happily, Seb Paquet pointed me to Martin Blanche’s post on “Obstacles to collaborative learning.” (Permalinks are broken, alas, so go to his main page for now.) I’ll take the liberty of quoting them here: * Students and lecturers are more familiar with a knowledge-transmission model of education and don’t... [mamamusings]

More good stuff on the shift or not the shift to a more collaborative learning model. One thing I am sure of, try the transmission model on adults who have been away from school for a while. They hate it!

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 20:47:43 GMT

Enabling collaborative learning.

Sebastian has found Martin Terre Blanche's wonderful blog. He quotes a good post on obstacles to collaborative learning.

Students and lecturers are more familiar with a knowledge-transmission model of education and don't always understand what is expected of us in a more constructionist environment.
We have too little information about lecturers' and students' backgrounds, networks and skills - so often we don't realize that there is somebody in the group who could teach the rest of us a lot about some aspect of what we're studying.
No or very limited mechanisms for students to talk back to the lecturer and (especially) to talk to one another.
Inadequate 'course memory'. Lecturers often are the only bridge for this year's students to the knowledge created by last year's group - students don't get to see what last year's group did. There is no mechanism for students who want to stay in the group after the course is officially over (and who could be a useful resource for next year's students) to do so. [Martin Terre Blanche]

Reading through this list made me realize that the people who pioneer new modes of communication in hi-tech conferences these days are in the process of fixing these issues - through backchannelling and real-time blogging, the product of which most often gets turned into permanent, hyperlinked, googlable archives for the benefit of those who aren't there.

Here are some more obstacles elicited from one of Martin's readers.

[Seb's Open Research]

So good to have Seb back blogging again. The ideas in this post are dear to my heart as I teach online at UPEI. I have found that effective teaching online demands a really different pedagogy from the sage on the stage model of content transmission. I laugh when some e of my colleagues in the faculty worry about their content being stolen when I have found that what works best is dialogue, By about week 3, I hardly post at all and the class have taken over.

What I find works is to have a big idea for a class - This term we look at how businesses that use the principles of the Natural Step are not only doing good but doing well. Thus solving the paradox of the supposed choice between the planet or jobs which seems to paralyze movement.

We have at the core of the class 2 books The Ecology of Commerce by my old mentor Paul Hawken, who comes here to PEI on August 13-14th, and The Natural Step for Business by Brian Nattrass and Mary Altomare. Each week we have a series of questions that we use as a formal structure and we have assignments which are posted for all to see. So far it looks pretty conventional. But 40% of the mark goes for participation judged on quality and quantity. I have found that this feature gets the juices going. With a class of 20 we get about a 1,000 posts in a 6 week half semester. Very soon we shift gears up from the abstract to how each of us can make a difference. We leave the world of the case studies and we look at ourselves. By week 4, we have lost the academic voice and we are in Cluetrain territory where all of us are revealing a great deal about who we really are as people. The material has become an excuse to explore our lives.

If we are lucky a student goes very deep and this stimulates the rest of us to open up as well. So the content is really only a catalyst. We have gone back to the Socratic method and it is hard to tell the prof from the student. We use WebCT which is very clunky but we mainly just use the discussion tool. I would love to use Groove which I find very smooth and has great features such as images and drawing tools. I have found that it is the quality of the conversation that counts the most. Asynchronicity is a popular feature with both me and the students. I get up very early and many of them work and post late. I have even taught while on vacation in Thailand! There is huge resistance to this type of approach from most faculty because they know no other way of teaching. Many of the younger students have a problem too as they have come from school, and also know no other way of learning. I have found that my adult students fit best as they have long ago left school and are very comfy with taking a leading role themselves. They also want o lear so that they know something new while many of kids take a course because they need the credit - very different.

A lot more has to change before this approach is commonplace. School itself is a huge barrier as it en-cultures the kids to be passive learners.

Fathers and Sons

Sat, 12 Jul 2003 17:29:56 GMT

It is only fair, if I was writing about Mothers and Daughters, that I should mention Fathers and Sons. There appear to be two areas of angst that I hear about the most.

The "Lost father" and the "I'll show him father" .

The Lost Father is a set up where the son feels that he never really knew his father. Where he saw his father have fatherly relationships with other young men - especially at work so he is aware that his father has the capacity to be a father but this relationship does not happen between the true son and the true father. The saddest example of this is Col John Boyd (the father of the OODA Lop and Shock and Awe) who was one of the great mentors of the modern era but who ignored his own sons. In the final irony, as he lay dying Boyd called out to his intellectual sons as his natural son sat by his bed in the vain hope that maybe, at the moment of death, his father would acknowledge him. For many of us in this category of sons, I am one, much of our adult life is a quest to find a father substitute. Sometimes these relationships can be nourishing and good - especially in the early years in boyhood or early adulthood. But others, if you keep on seeking into adult life, can be based on trying the same failed tricks to win the attention of the fake father that failed with the real father. If you are lucky, one day you find an older man who tells you that it is time to grow up and look after yourself. Thank you Fraser!

The "I'll show him father" - good examples are Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner. Both men had successful fathers whose constant discourse to their sons was that they were no good layabouts. For these men this was the lash of ambition that drives then so hard to "show him" that he was wrong. Like much mania, the it appears that the pinnacle can never be reached and that the need to show him never ends. The sadder side of this set up is the son who believes his father's sentence of failure and acts this out his entire life.

Are there fathers whose relationships fit their sons needs? I am sure there are - but good stories are never about comfort

Mothers and Daughters

Thu, 10 Jul 2003 10:07:38 GMT

What is it about Mothers and Daughters? Robin's mother is a much larger and more destructive figure in her life than her breast cancer. Not a day goes by with out some hurtful exchange or some mood, seeping across the property to depress us all. We built a Granny flat for Ann next to her house but the relationhsip is so awful between the two that Ann is having to move out this weekend. Both are miserable. While some distance will be good, only the grave - and I am not even sure of that - will reduce this sense of guilt on Robin's part that she cannot meet her mother's needs and her mother's anger that her needs are not met.

As we have struggled to make this work, I have thought aboiut all my close firends and have come to the conclusion that for the majority, their mothers are either domineering control freaks who treat their middle aged daughter as if she was three or are themselves pathetic 4 year old children who need the constant attention of their daughters. Whatever it is a feel bad situation.

On the surface men and fatrhers often appear to be larger than life and appear to dominate. But this does not last long in many families. The power lines shift especially in middle life. I am finding a "Grendel" like character in many older women. Some powerful set of needs, unfulilled in the active life span, emerge in later life and take over. Many of my women contemporaries show signs of becoming just like their mothers!

It was of course Oscar Wilde who said that "Every woman's greatest fear is that she will turn out like her mother. It is every woman's greatest tragedy that she often does."

Reading - Looking under the lamp for the lost keys - Time to look in the early years

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 17:37:37 GMT

All our research tells us that the reading battle is won or lost in the first 6 years of life - mainly in the first 3 years. This compelling graph that shows the complete lack of progress in the US in spite of massive investments in the formal school system have not moved the bar at all.

Follow the link for the results in the Early Years

We're From The Government. We're Here To Help.. Over the weekend I watched a little bit of a CSPAN program that had Bill O'Reilly, Molly Ivins, and Al Franken on a panel. It was a rerun of some political meeting. I don't remember what. At one point O'Reilly and Ivins were arguing about taxes, government programs, etc. Franken, that font of economic knowledge and all-around supporter of spending other people's money, made the statement, "The idea that government programs don't help anybody is just BS!" Of course, it's true. Government programs generally DO help someone, just usually not who they were designed to help, and not in the way they were supposed to help them. Here's a little graphic from the US Department of Education introduction to the "No Child Left Behind" program. Here's the roll-over text for the graphic:

"Chart shows that since 1965, when Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), through 2003, the federal government has spent more than $242 billion to help educate disadvantaged children. Yet, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the average reading score for 9-year-olds across the nation in 1975 is not significantly different from the 1999 score. During those years, the annual appropriation for ESEA increased six-fold -- from $2.3 billion in 1975 to $13.8 billion in 1999 -- while the average reading score for 9-year-olds was 210 in 1975 and 212 in 1999. ESEA appropriations for 1966-1974 and for 2000-03 are provided in the chart, but average reading scores for 9-year-olds are not shown because they are not available for all of those years. The president's 2004 budget request of $22.5 billion for ESEA is shown."

"No Child Left Behind" may be a terrible program. Testing students to see if they can actually *do* anything at certain points in school may be a terrible idea. But it's also pretty clear that pouring billions into federal education programs is about as helpful as tits on a bull. If I were the Dept. of Education this is not a graphic I would display proudly. It is an indictment of every tax dollar spent on federal education mandates since 1965. [b.cognosco]

Learning by Play - What kids look like when they are having fun

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 00:35:48 GMT

My daughter Hope is teaching a small class of kids how to cook this week in our cottage. Don't they look great!

Losing a Child - Loss and Suffering - Nature's Power to Heal

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 10:51:10 GMT

The Lake in fall

The International Children's Memorial Place opened this weekend on Prince Edward Island.

As a parent I cannot imagine how I would cope with the loss of Hope or James. I think that when a child dies, part of us dies as well. For me, as with many others, formal religion offers little support. But Nature can and does.heal this wound.

It is not just family who are hurt by the loss of a child. It is hard to reconcile the loss of a school friend and this happens often. Many of us are confronted by the early deaths of school friends in car accidents. My roommate at school Jamie Borwick died in a car with his brother Freddie on Freddie's 21st birthday. I was working in Botswana in the desert as a diamond prospector when I heard the news - I was 18. Living in the open and being able to look up at the star filled night sky helped me see that Jamie had made the shift into eternity.

Bill MacLean is a remarkable man who lost his son a few years ago. His dream was to create a place where family and friends could connect with the power of nature and , if they wanted, to each other, in surroundings that were "healingl". Bill has done this. Located at Scales Pond on PEI, the International Children's' Memorial Place (ICMP) is I think the most beautiful place on a beautiful Island. The lake is like the lake where Arthur found his sword.Excalibur. Early on a summer morning, the mists hover on its surface. The Dunk River travels majestically in a cathedral of trees. There is a pathway along its length. The water from the lake rushes through a dam and a fish ladder boiling with life and energy. You can plant a tree where we hope to create a new hardwood forest. There is plenty of space to be alone and there is a the choice of meeting other people. You can bring your dogs, swim and picnic. You can just visit a special place. You enter the "Kingdom of Nature".

The site is about 30 minutes from Charlottetown and from the Bridge - in the centre of PEI. See the maps on the site.

The Dunk

Regular Exercise - A Habit?

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 15:45:48 GMT

Why is it that I am 53 and have ignored well-intentioned and factual advice for 30 years to take regular exercise? I know that it will be good for me. I know that this is not baloney like many diets are. Taking more exercise is unquestionably good for me. For a while, I buckle under the social pressure and try it. I go to the gym, buy a rowing machine. If the barrier was only awareness, I should have taken it up years ago.

Why is this important? Because our health system will buckle soon if we don't find a way of living better. On PEI 59% of Islanders are overweight and the trend for children in particular is frightening. This is a health epidemic for the developing world. We are trying lots of things and making lots of excuses for why we are making no progress - the trend is getting worse at a non linear rate.

There are lots of theories for why we participate so poorly in taking exercise. The influence of TV as a passivity driver. The lack of organized sport at school. Busing at school. The lack of time in adult life because the demands at work are so great. The lack of coaching and facilities - if only we had a community pool, gym track etc. The diversion of sport money for the masses by a focus on elite sport etc. I wonder if the answer is both simpler and more complex than this?

I have been talking to my friend Brian Chambers and our bottom line as to why we have become the most slothful group in history is rooted in two questions. - Is taking regular exercise a habit? Is not taking regular exercise a habit?

Think a bit now. Is your day not right without exercise or is taking exercise an interruption to your day? Do you have withdrawal symptoms if you do not take exercise or do you feel worse if you do? These feelings are symptoms of habits. Habits are hard to change. You are a smoker and you know you should quit but cannot. You drink more than you should but you cannot stop. Merely having a lot of information is not enough to stop an ingrained habit. Acquiring a new habit is equally a challenge.

If taking/not taking regular exercise is a habit then much of how we have approached the issue of participation in regular exercise is probably not going to work. This is quite a statement - so let's do a bit more digging.

Why is it that we see only a few of us - we used to call them Fitness Freaks or Nuts - come rain or shine pounding the roads? Why do some some middle-aged men still get out every week in the season and play hockey while most of us only watch it?. Why do some women have to go to the gym every day and others not? Brian and I believe that those who take regular exercise have a habit. They have a need to take exercise every day. It is part of their whole life - they cannot imagine not taking exercise. Regular exercise defines them - it is part of their identity - it is who they are.

I bet that the opposite is true. Some people cannot "see" themselves taking exercise. Let's look at me and see how hard it is for me to take up this new habit and to break my lifetime habit of not taking exercise.

I have never taken to the habit of regular exercise. I think I have to go back to my early days to find out why. My parents did not take it seriously. They in fact sneered at it. Any prowess in this regard was ignored at home. In my home the habit was to use the mind. This is where the family reward system kicked in. "Sport" at home was winning the argument, breaking into the conversation or being seen as amusing. Secondly I had low conventional physical skills. In particular I have very poor hand ball foot coordination. I had to play "sport sport" at school but for me with no natural aptitude, "sport sport" was for me an exercise in humiliation. In primary school the team would groan when I was picked usually - last. At Harrow, I was the star of the 5th 11 in cricket. I dreaded Sports Day at my prep school where the only event I could be in was the 200 metres where they put all the slobs. Sport was defined in my youth as a team sport that usually involved skill with a ball of some sort. I can't do this. Now if I had been introduced to yoga, tai chi or rowing I might have found a mind/body sport that fitted me - but that was not the culture of sport then nor is it now at schools.

I never developed the habit of exercise as a boy. In fact I developed another habit - a lifelong dislike of using an awkward body and a lifelong love of the world of the mind. I have instead the habit of reading - in a poor week only one book. In a good week maybe 7 books. (This has been a good week) Many of my athletic friends tell me that they do not have the time to read. I sense that we are at two ends of a polarity.

There are the habits of the mind and the habits of the body. There appear to be extreme positions for each habit. If you are extreme at one end it may preclude you having time to indulge in the other. Some manage both but I sense that there is only so much time. Then there seems to be a huge group in the middle of people who neither read nor take exercise.

Habits can be formed and broken. At the right time habits are easy to form. All established habits are very difficult to break or change. It is important to consider this if we want to find a way of increasing the overall participation of people in regular exercise.

When are many of our habits formed? I suggest to you that regular reading and regular exercise are both habits that are mainly set when we are very young? Homes with no books rarely produce compulsive readers. Homes with no trophies rarely produce folks who define themselves through the use of their bodies. I am sure there are exceptions but this is my observed experience. I point out the home because we currently look to school and to the workplace as the frontier for improving participation. I am not saying don't try there. I am suggesting that we look earlier as well.

Breaking habits is so difficult. If not taking exercise is a habit then exhortation and more information will not get us to change. How easy is it to acquire the habit of literacy as an adult? How easy to give up drink or to give up smoking? Breaking bad habits is very hard. It took my father's death to give us as a family the motive to pull back on our drinking.

Some questions for you:

Do you take regular exercise? If the answer is yes or no - Did you have a role model/support at home? Did you have a natural aptitude for ball and team sports?
Do you have a habit such as smoking or weight or drink. - Can you give this up? Has it been easy to give this up? Could you do this without a support group? What type of support group might you need - of peers or experts?
Are you a team sport person? If you are when did this begin and why
Do you like individual activities? If yes when did this begin and what influenced you?
Are you a big fan of professional sports? If so, did elite sport get you involved in taking exercise yourself ? If yes - what age were you when you gave it up and what do you do now?
Did you play pavement hockey or some kid organized sport when you were young (skateboarding?) If yes, what do you think of adult organized sport?

Please help Brian and I with these questions and with our main thesis that regular exercise is a habit. Brian is the Chairman of Sport PEI and is tasked with the challenge of finding a way to take Canada's most inactive and fattest province and making it the opposite - no small thing. We are convinced that doing what we have been doing but harder will not work. So we are going outside of the box and asking ourselves the odd question - why if we know that exercise is good for us are we not taking this advice.

If we are right and the core issue is habit, then we will have to develop strategies to encourage the formation of the habit. This implies working with the families of very young children before they get to school. It implies finding out how to motivate parents to behave differently. What would be a motivation that would work?

We know that many kids will self organize. Ball hockey and skateboarding are being surppressed in the guise of safety and order. Should we not look at the effectiveness of kid organized sport?.

It implies developing strategies to do the really hard stuff of helping people like me to change a habit of no exercise. How could we do this? What are the lessons of smoking and drinking that may help? What is it about schools and the workplace that are barriers and what can we do there to help?

What are the convenience issues? Where are all the places and where is the time? Why do so many schools close their doors and hence gyms and pools after 3pm? Whose school is it anyway? What is the reality of our climate for taking regular exercise where we have 6 months of winter? Can we take back the time between 2.30 when school finishes and say 5.30 when 80 % of parents return home and fill this with a fun time for exercise? Can we fill the 6 weeks of summer vacation when parents are working with a fun time when kids take exercise. Can we make it convenient to nip out for lunch at work and take exercise?

Bullying at School - Can understanding "Magic Numbers" help? Can Hogwarts help as well?

Fri, 27 Jun 2003 10:14:21 GMT

I was having dinner with my favourite cousin who is a teacher this week. We talked about the rising trend in bullying at school. Apparently the worst place for bullying is on the bus - all PEI Kids are bused.

This conversation got me to think more about how magic numbers could help. We know that if we violate these social groupings, that there will be a breakdown in civility. In addition there is the risk that other forms of tribes, gangs and cliques, will emerge to fill the void. Gangs and cliques are power groups that drive a lot of persecution of the outsider and hence bullying. So worse than chaos, the risk is the emergence of social groups that are designed to bully.

There are no formal subgroups in Island Schools. Schools can run from 300 plus to over 1,000. We know that there has to be formal sub groups of no more than 150 for a natural; social order and that it is even better to have further formal sub groups of about 8 and 35. These match the organizational building blocks of any army and are the social, cognitive and reproductive groupings of all tribal organization. With no formal subgroups, gangs, cliques (the female version of a gang and just as awful) have to arise and bullying will become pandemic. It works like this. We are all hardwired to see the "outsider" as outside our protection - as not even human. Hence a kind family man who loves his children and pats his dog can justify his work to himself and to his family of being a concentration camp guard. . The "other" is at best to be ignored - more often persecuted.

Darla Thompson and I wondered if we could as an experiment set up a tribal society in her school. Think for a moment about Hogwarts, now the best known school in the world. Like many English boarding schools, Hogwarts breaks down the large number of students in the school as a whole into groups that fit magic numbers

. There are 4 "Houses" at Hogwarts that are the centre of life for the individual. On the train ride to the school the 1st yearer is isolated and alone. He or she has no protection and has no source of information about what is going on. However, the first act of arriving is to have the Hat choose for each new student their House. From that point on you are part of a tribal society where the role of the elders is to organize, discipline and protect the young. Each house competes with the others in academic achievement - the collective not only the individual. Each house competes for points for good and bad deeds - so behaviour becomes a collective issue. Each house competes for sporting achievement - participation again becomes a collective issue. House prefects are responsible for most of the discipline and not the teachers who are largely freed up to teach and to mentor. At all times the individual has to consider what they learn, how they behave, and what sport they do in the collective context of their allegiance to the tribe - the house.

In this structure the "other" are not the younger or the more vulnerable but the other houses. Each house protects its most vulnerable collectively. In this structure the age cohorts are connected on the vertical axis as well as the older kids have responsibilities for the younger ones.

So how might we do this on PEI?

Darla's great idea - to make the bus the Tribe. On PEI the bus you take is the 1-2 hour time of the day where all the kids of all ages in your community are together travelling back and forth to school. You travel with the same group for years and you all live close to each other. The bus is currently the hot bed of bullying. What if the Wood Islands Bus stopped being yellow and having only a number but had a distinctive paint job with the Wood Islands Logo? What if new kids were inducted into the Wood Islands Bus? What if there were prefects on the bus? What if teachers who lived in Wood Islands were the official coaches of the Bus Tribe? What if there was competition between the bus tribes on points for learning, behaviour and sports? What might happen with the parents whose kids were members of a bus tribe?

What do you think?

Healthy Living - If I was the Premier of PEI

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 11:14:10 GMT

If I was the Premier sitting in cabinet and I was serious about Islanders becoming healthier what would I do?

I would divide the issue into two. I would look at what Government could do directly and then I would look at how government could influence behaviour indirectly. At the core I would position the issue as being behavioural and I would focus the direct and indirect work on levers that influence our behaviour.

The Direct Approach

Sugar

The research is in that sugar and simple carbs are the main culprit in both adding the pounds and in creating the addiction and system changes. The best analogy is tobacco. For years we all thought that smoking was cool. Now we know it is at the heart of our public health crisis. The same is true for sugar. We all grew up drinking pop. Smart parents gave their children juice in the bottle. As we became time- stressed, we relied increasingly on processed foods where a large ingredient is always sugar. It will be Government's job to help us all understand that sugar is possibly a larger threat to our public and personal health than tobacco. The irony is that we have done this job for fat but our fears have largely, not entirely, been misplaced. Low fat as an idea has been a goldmine for the food processors.
I would start with getting agreement with the other Premiers who all have health systems that are groaning under the pressure, to begin the same type of information campaign about sugar as with tobacco - the objective will be to shift our perception that sugar is ok to that it is a risk. We would then nationally build a campaign using real people whose lives had been turned around by getting off a high sugar/carb lifestyle to tell us how much better they were. This would not be a campaign of experts but of neighbours. Key to the campaign would be mothers talking to mothers about the risks of a high sugar diet for their kids and giving them tips on the alternatives. The habits begin here. What failed in tobacco was the expert talking down. What worked was a neighbour telling us that we as smokers would harm not ourselves but innocent bartenders.

With a shift in public opinion we would have the room to begin to act.

School

Kids are bused home on PEI between 2.30 and 3. Most parents work and do not get home until 5.30 - 6. Madness! I would set up a sports program for all kids that would extend until 5pm. There is no shortage of gyms, rinks grounds. The shortage is a universal program of sport for children that fits the school day and that fits the reality of the workday for parents. The objective is twofold to significantly increase the weekly rate of activity and to set the habit of taking exercise as a lifetime habit
- This strategy would be inclusive and broaden the effort from elite sports and elite players. It would still get behind the school teams but would offer a comfortable place for all types
School meals - I would set up a healthy breakfast club at school. Many Kids miss breakfast - time pressed, no habit or worse no money. Breakfast is arguably the most important meal of the day. This meal would be billed to public health. This would be a real meal and would avoid Mr Kellogg and Mr Tim Horton.
Ban soft drink vending machines - Coke has preyed upon poor school boards with deals on vending that are driven by volume.
I would teach cooking and nutrition as part of the core curriculum especially for the younger kids. One of the reasons so many eat only processed or junk food is that no one knows how to cook anymore. Again we aim to create the habit of cooking and we teach nutrition not from a book but from learning how to cook well and to enjoy what we have cooked.

Waste, Labelling & Taxation - A Counter Attack on Food processing

As part of my communication partnership with the other premiers I would also get national agreement to push back at food processors. They have taken over food and they spend over 10 billion dollars a year in the US to persuade us to eat their products. I would move on two fronts. Packaging and labelling. - I would use the inventory management software of the distributor to track the items and I would give the industry 3 years to eliminate waste that could not be recycled easily and to reduce waste as a percentage. After three years I would double or triple the PST on packaging that failed this test. In other words I would push back at waste at the source. At the same time I would demand, as with tobacco, that health warnings be put on all processed food and in places that served it that contained high levels of sugar/Carbs/trans fats. So at MCD you would see a sign on your pop cup that told you that you were taking a big risk in drinking more than one of these a day. Your pack of Sugar Pops would have a picture of a person giving themselves an insulin shot and so on. Very significantly I would include formula in this program. Formula should have a large health warning linked to obesity.
I would not change the tax rates for three years as so many are addicted and are poor and feel that they have no alternative. But then after the 3 year public relations war, I would bring in a series of significant tax hikes. Significant so that there would be no room for adjustment. Such a health tax might be a flat tax of say $2.00 an item so a can of pop would go up $2.00. I would also ban all ads everywhere that promoted high sugar/carb/trans fat foods
- Of course the food industry will go nuts. This is why only a national agreement will work. The alternative is to pay for the costs of an obese nation. We are winning the war on tobacco - why not for food? Let's be clear here, the food giants are acting in their own interest and not ours.They are the main driver in the dietary problem that we face as a society. They can be part of the solution as well. The smart ones will take that root- our time pressure will not go away - there will be a huge market for healthier alternatives

The Indirect Approach

Young Children - We have to change behaviour and to set new habits when we are malleable enough to respond. This means a focus on very young children and their parents. Most of the current effort on obesity and many other issues that are most plastic in early life, such as literacy, are being tackled with a focus on adults where changing behaviour is most challenging. I think that this is because those that have set themselves up as the experts, such as the university and the Heart and Stroke folks, obviously live in a world of adults and would like to help their constituency. But if strategy is defined as making the best choices, then we have to shift our focus to young children and those that influence them most, their family, the school system and the ad budgets of the food processors

Prenatal classes are an excellent channel. Parents are at the most ready to learn and have the most energy. The whole issue of diet needs to be explored perhaps with the meeting taking place around a kitchen table as well as on the floor with pillows. All aspects of diet especially the breast/bottle issue need to be explored
Family resource centres should be identified as the next channel as they influence parents right after they have their babies
Day care should be examined to ensure that it is aligned as well.

The point being that by the time children get to school in grade 1, there should be 7 years of focused effort on setting up good habits at home.

This is a strategy. What do you think of it?

How we eat - Changing the habit of a lifetime

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 09:29:38 GMT

Is the PEI Healthy Living Strategy a Paper Tiger or will it help?

The questions we need to ask are

1. What is the trend for obesity - frightening about 59% of Islanders are at least overweight

2. Is the trend accelerating or flattening out - accelerating exponentially

3. What is the potential impact now and in the future - one view would be to look at the incidence of type II diabetes and its related costs? Our health system will be overwhelmed. Type II diabetes has been normed from being a rarity to being on track to include 30% of the population. It has a myriad of poor outcomes and side effects and consumes a huge amount of system resources. It can be mitigated though by a radical change in lifestyle - giving up carbs and taking more exercise. Hard things to do until we have the motive of diabetes. But even then, many are so habituated that they cannot change.

4. What are the key factors for a lifestyle - habits! How and when are these set? Is this genetic or habit based? What are the 2-3 habits that are most deleterious? I would look at the amount of sugar/carbs that we feed to kids - tests with rats show a high sugar/carb diet fattens like no other and creates addiction. After all we fatten cows on corn =sugar. The tests show also that a genetic switch is thrown and obesity/diabetes tendency will be embedded in the next generation. What is at the heart of our inactivity? Why do some kids stay active and others don't? What is different from the activity levels of kids 30 years ago and now - busing, TV sport etc. These are powerful questions which are not being looked at by the strategy.

The healthy living strategy sounds good on the surface but is essentially flawed in my mind. How? They did not think about the deep reasons. The process behind it - let's all get together and shout more loudly that we should eat better and take more exercise.

We can all say - we don't take enough exercise or we don't eat the right foods. We can all expose each other to more information about why we should change but without addressing the deep reasons why, we are wasting our time.

Government do this all the time - they confuse intellectual heavy lifting with consulting the community. If the Heart and Stroke folks were doing such a good job, why are deaths from this area on the rise? A lesson for us all.

If you see a problem and think that you will solve it by asking all the current "suspects" how to fix it - you will go no where. Why - because they are all inside the problem themselves and will only be able to see the the issues from the aspect of the problem

Eating and exercise are habits. These habits have a powerful grip on us and are formed when we are very young. We will find the answers when we look at how we as parents set the habits at home and at the habits set at school.

What do we habitually put on the table? Do we give toddlers lots of juice thinking that this is a good thing and not understanding that we are setting the palate. How big a role does pop play in our house? Do we all eat a lot of processed food especially breads, cakes and cookies? Do you eat margarine rather than butter? Is the TV the main baby sitting aide? How big a role is TV in our lives? Do we sit around at home and take little or no exercise? What is our habit for the kid's lunch box.? Does our local school have a deal with Coke and have a drink machine on the premises. What food is served at school. What exercise do our kids take as a matter of course at school?

I have hardly mentioned the big bugaboo - fat. The evidence is in. The addictive substance and the substance that is at the core of the problem is sugar/carbs. You don't believe me? Then correlate the rise in obesity with the rise in the consumption of sugar/carbs.

At the turn of the century the average American ate two pounds of sugar. Do you know what it is now? 160 pounds, and for many of us it's probably twice that. The human body didn't evolve to handle that kind of input. The pancreas works overtime to flood your system with insulin several times a day, every day. By the end of each day, it's completely exhausted and your bloodstream is still jacked up with dangerously elevated levels of sugar. Eventually your pancreas functionality is borderline to failure and you've got adult-onset diabetes. Eventually it fails for good and suddenly you're a diabetic.

A study about a year ago got a lot of press. It showed that a child who drank two cans of soda a day WILL be overweight. That's two cans of soda, not "lots of high fat foods."

At the turn of the century something like 2 or 3 percent of people were dying from heart attacks and stroke. What is it now? 70% and rising? You don't go from 2% to 70% with a slight decline in lifetime physical activity. But what about a typical lifetime sugar (carbohydrate) consumption increase of eight thousand percent?

What do YOU think the connection is?

Missing Fathers - Bless you all

Sun, 15 Jun 2003 10:44:20 GMT

I woke up this morning to be greeted by my daughter who is home for the summer. I have my card and downstairs I hear the noises and smell the smells of a massive English breakfast being cooked for me. But I feel sad. Where are all the fathers of my age group? All of them are dead. Not one of my school and univrsity friends has a living father.

So here's to you Dad. I miss you

Your devoted son

Rob