Monday, June 20, 2005
Lack of free outdoor play is alienating children from nature and contributing to childhood distress, according to a new book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Author Richard Louv, a San Diego journalist, points to diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of physical and emotional illness as consequences of alienation from nature. The causes, he says, are not only the attractions of TV and computer games, but the loss of wild space from urban areas and family back yards, as well as a certain fear of untamed nature.
An Australian baby bonus introduced by the Federal Government last year has been given the credit for raising the country's birth rate for the first time in a decade - to 1.77. The $3000 bonus for every baby born last year played a significant role in halting the nation's declining birth rate, said demographer Peter McDonald. He predicted it would rise to 1.8 this year. The bonus increases to $4000 on July 1.
Fatherless boys have a significant risk of going to prison, a study by Princeton and California researchers shows. Tracking the histories of 2,846 young men from ages 14 to 30, the team found that, even taking into account poverty and residential moves, sons in mother-only families were 73 per cent more likely to go to prison than peers in mother-father families. Boys fatherless from birth were more than three times as likely to do time as those from intact families, while the risk of those whose fathers leave home when they are 10 to 14 years old is about 2.4. The researchers were surprised to find, however, that remarriage of a divorced mother did not lessen this risk but increased it - "youths in step-parent households faced incarceration odds almost three times as high as those in mother-father families, and significantly higher than those in single-parent households, even though step families were relatively well off on average".
~From "Father Absence and Youth Incarceration", Journal of Research on Adolescence 14, 2004; Howard Centre, Jun 14, 2005
There are many ways in which the UK school system is very different from New Zealand. For instance: The Department for Education there is to boost incentives to meet a massive gap in the provision of Religious Education teachers. An estimated need for 700 teachers has been accelerated by the popularity of one-year GCSE RE courses. From September 2006, some RE teachers will see their bursaries rise from £6,000 to £9,000 and they will receive a welcome payment of £2,500 when they start their career. [In NZ, education bureaucrats are doing everything they can to kick religion out.]
But do the UK schools want this? British schools are to become community centres opening 10 hours a day and offering before and after-school care and clubs by 2010. They will also stay open during school holidays to provide care, Education Secretary Ruth Kelly has announced. "Extended schools will not only help children in their education but also support hard working families to manage their home and work life," she said. The Government is putting in £680 million to launch the scheme, which is for children up to the age of 14. Parents will be able to drop kids off in time for breakfast at 8 a.m. and pick them up by 6 p.m.
A Nigerian-born bishop has got the number 2 job in the Anglican world. The Bishop of Birmingham, Rt Revd John Sentamu, is to be the new Archbishop of York. The appointment will make the former barrister the UK’s first black archbishop. Bishop Sentamu has been praised for his work as a "missionary bishop". [His appointment will be a strong support for those who have criticised the western church's liberalism in recent years.]
Francis Fukuyama (he who proclaimed the "end of history") points out that for the last several decades, a strange liberation movement has grown within the developed world. Its crusaders aim much higher than civil rights campaigners, feminists, or gay-rights advocates. They want nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints. As “transhumanists” see it, humans must wrest their biological destiny from evolution’s blind process of random variation and adaptation and move to the next stage as a species. What are the social implications of this movement?
By 2050, it’s expected that only one in five Christians worldwide will be white. In 1900, 82 percent of the world’s Christians were in Europe or North America. By 2025, that will drop below 30 percent. Nigeria had 50 million Christians in 2000; by 2050, it’s projected to have 123 million — more than Germany and France combined. The Congo’s Christian community is expected to more than triple, to 121 million. There will be more Christians in Ethiopia than England, more in India than Italy.
