The Human Odyssey

New Group Called "The Elders" Brings Wisdom to World Problems

Yesterday I was watching Charlie Rose on TV and he had Richard Branson, the maverick billionaire, on the show talking about a new philanthropic effort that he is supporting called The Elders.  This consists of a group of twelve individuals who have attained world recognition for their work in supporting peace, justice, health, and other positive values around the globe, including Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, and former president Jimmy Carter.  The idea is that they can use their "1,000 years of collective experience" to help solve existing problems around the world. Their first project was to travel to the Sudan last year to help with the Darfur crisis.  They have recently concluded a trip to Kenya to help mediate the violent partisan dispute over leadership there.  The group is sponsored by a number of individuals and organizations that have raised $18 million thus far to support their efforts.

This strikes me as an extremely worthy enterprise, because it values the elders of our society to generate solutions to age-old problems.  Historically, cultures have often turned to the elders for answers to life's deep problems.  Unfortunately, in our modern age, we have too often put the reigns of control and leadership in the hands of youngsters who have not yet gained the experience necessary to make good decisions.  This project is an acknowledgement that we need to turn once again to our elders to access the wisdom they have in solving the great problems of our world, including war, poverty, human rights abuses, and environmental pollution.  For more information, go to www.theelders.org.   

The Twelve Gifts of the Human Life Cycle

A guest blog I did appears today on Basil & Spice:

Which stage of life is the most important?   Some might claim that infancy is the key stage, when a baby’s brain is wide open to new experiences that will influence all the rest of its later life. Others might argue that it’s adolescence or young adulthood, when physical health is at its peak.  Many cultures around the world value late adulthood more than any other, arguing that it is at this stage that the human being has finally acquired the wisdom necessary to guide others.  Who is right?  The truth of the matter is that every stage of life is equally significant and necessary for the welfare of humanity.  In my book The Human Odyssey: Navigating the Twelve Stages of Life, I’ve written that each stage of life has its own unique “gift” to contribute to the world.  We need to value each one of these gifts if we are to truly support the deepest needs of human life.  Here are the twelve gifts of the human life cycle:

1.      Prebirth:  Potential – The child who has not yet been born could become anything – a Michaelangelo, a Shakespeare, a Martin Luther King – and thus holds for all of humanity the principle of what we all may yet become in our lives.

2.      Birth:  Hope – When a child is born, it instills in its parents and other caregivers a sense of optimism; a sense that this new life may bring something new and special into the world.  Hence, the newborn represents the sense of hope that we all nourish inside of ourselves to make the world a better place.

3.      Infancy (Ages 0-3):   Vitality – The infant is a vibrant and seemingly unlimited source of energy.  Babies thus represent the inner dynamo of humanity, ever fueling the fires of the human life cycle with new channels of psychic power.

4.      Early Childhood (Ages 3-6):  Playfulness – When young children play, they recreate the world anew.  They take what is and combine it with the what is possible to fashion events that have never been seen before in the history of the world.  As such, they embody the principle of innovation and transformation that underlies every single creative act that has occurred in the course of civilization.

5.      Middle Childhood (Ages 6-8):  Imagination – In middle childhoood, the sense of an inner subjective self develops for the first time, and this self is alive with images taken in from the outer world, and brought up from the depths of the unconscious.  This imagination serves as a source of creative inspiration in later life for artists, writers, scientists, and anyone else who finds their days and nights enriched for having nurtured a deep inner life.

6.      Late Childhood (Ages 9-11):  Ingenuity – Older children have acquired a wide range of social and technical skills that enable them to come up with marvelous strategies and inventive solutions for dealing with the increasing pressures that society places on them.  This principle of ingenuity lives on in that part of ourselves that ever seeks new ways to solve practical problems and cope with everyday responsibilities.

7.      Adolescence (Ages 12-20):  Passion -  The biological event of puberty unleashes a powerful set of changes in the adolescent body that reflect themselves in a teenager’s sexual, emotional, cultural, and/or spiritual passion.  Adolescence passion thus represents a significant touchstone for anyone who is seeking to reconnect with their deepest inner zeal for life.

8.      Early Adulthood (Ages 20-35):  Enterprise –  It takes enterprise for young adults to accomplish their many responsibilities, including finding a home and mate, establishing a family or circle of friends, and/or getting a good job.  This principle of enterprise thus serves us at any stage of life when we need to go out into the world and make our mark.

9.      Midlife (Ages 35-50):  Contemplation – After many years in young adulthood of following society’s scripts for creating a life, people in midlife often take a break from worldly responsibilities to reflect upon the deeper meaning of their lives, the better to forge ahead with new understanding.  This element of contemplation represents an important resource that we can all draw upon to deepen and enrich our lives at any age.

10.  Mature Adulthood (Ages 50-80): Benevolence – Those in mature adulthood have raised families, established themselves in their work life, and become contributors to the betterment of society through volunteerism, mentorships, and other forms of philanthropy.  All of humanity benefits from their benevolence.  Moreover, we all can learn from their example to give more of ourselves to others.

11.  Late Adulthood (Age 80+):  Wisdom – Those with long lives have acquired a rich repository of experiences that they can use to help guide others.  Elders thus represent the source of wisdom that exists in each of us, helping us to avoid the mistakes of the past while reaping the benefits of life’s lessons.

12.  Death & Dying:  Life – Those in our lives who are dying, or who have died, teach us about the value of living.  They remind us not to take our lives for granted, but to live each moment of life to its fullest, and to remember that our own small lives form of a part of a greater whole.

            Since each stage of life has its own unique gift to give to humanity, we need to do whatever we can to support each stage, and to protect each stage from attempts to suppress its individual contribution to the human life cycle.  Thus, we need to be wary, for example, of attempts to thwart a young child’s need to play through the establishment high-pressure formal academic preschools.  We should protect the wisdom of aged from elder abuse.  We need to do what we can to help our adolescents at risk.  We need to advocate for prenatal education and services for poor mothers, and support safe and healthy birthing methods in third world countries. We ought to take the same attitude toward nurturing the human life cycle as we do toward saving the environment from global warming and industrial pollutants.  For by supporting each stage of the human life cycle, we will help to ensure that all of its members are given care and helped to blossom to their fullest degree.

To read my other blog entries on Basil & Spice.

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World Congress in Monterrey, Mexico Highlights the Importance of Early Childhood Development

I just got back from the 1st World Congress/7th International Early and Preschool Education Conference in Monterrey, Mexico.  In addition to participating in a colloquium with educators and politicians (see photo above), I also gave a keynote talk on "Awakening the Natural Genius in Every Child" to 4000 early childhood educators.  The Congress was part of the Universal Forum of Cultures, a three-month extravaganza of cultural events involving 1.5 million people in Monterrey (the third largest city in Mexico). I was impressed with all the work being done, particularly in Latin America, to further the lives of young children.  I visited a site in Monterrey created by CENDI (Centros de Desarrollo Infantil - Center for Early Childhood Development) that provides low income parents in Monterrey with child care, medical care, parent training, pre-natal instruction, and many other services (see photo on left).  I couldn't help but think that while I was visiting this full-spectrum developmental center, our president, George Bush, was busy vetoing a bill to provide medical care to more children in the United States.  Accompanying us on our tour to the CENDI site was Dr. James Heckman, the 2000 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, who has been focusing his energies on research demonstrating the positive economic impact of providing for the health, emotional, and educational needs of young children, as opposed to neglecting those needs and having to pay billions of dollars in costs as a result of mental illness, violence, illiteracy, and other societal ills.  His book Inequality in America, sheds important light on the importance of nations' investing in their young children.  Another important individual I met during the conference was Dr. Franklin Martinez Mendoza (below left), who was a key architect in the development of the early childhood development program in Cuba, a country with a literacy rate of 99.8% (higher than the United States). Also impressive was a presentation given by Dr. Osmar Terra, the Secretary of Health for the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, who laid out in most brilliant fashion the latest work in neuroscience chronicling the negative impact of trauma on the brain in infancy and early childhood.  There were in all over 100 presenters at the conference, and I count myself lucky to have met so many wonderful people who are working to make the lives of young children around the world better.

Support the Elder Justice Act in Congress

Everyday we read about elderly people who have been bilked out of their life savings, or stuck in sub-standard housing, or physically abused.  Elder abuse is a significant problem in our society.  In 2006, there were 565,747 cases of abuse reported and research suggests that only 1 in 14 cases ever see the light of day.  These figures are likely to increase dramatically with the aging of baby boomers.  However, as Senator Orrin Hatch R-Utah reports, "We don't have one federal employee working full time combatting elder abuse."  Versions of a legislative act that would begin protecting our senior population have been introduced in Congress since 2003, but, with one exception, they have failed even to make it out of committee, and in that one instance, failed in the Senate.  This year, the Elder Justice Act has been reintroduced in both the House and the Senate (S. 1070 and H.R. 1783).  It will, among other provisions, provide $400 million spread over four years to pay for strengthening state and local adult protective services agencies.  Please write your members of Congress and urge them to support this important measure.  For a state-by-state list of elder abuse resources (including information on reporting elder abuse), click here.  For information on the warning signs of elder abuse, click here. 

Appeals Court Rejects Patients Right To Take Potentially Life-Saving Drugs

Last week, a federal appeals court ruled that patients who have terminal illnesses do not have a constitutional right to take drugs that have not completed the labyrinthine approval process that is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.  This holds even if the patient can no longer be helped by any FDA-approved drugs, and even if the patient's doctor believes that the experimental drug(s) may help the patient live.  This case pitted the needs of dying patients against the need for safe drugs.  In this case, the dying patients lost.  The Food and Drug Administration has taken hits from both sides of the aisle; those who criticize it for releasing unsafe drugs on the market, and now, those who chastise it for not making life-saving drugs available to those who have no other hope left.  It seems to me that there should be a special process through which people with catastrophic illnesses can apply for special use of an experimental drug when it is being recommended by their physicians.  Does the constitution give us a right to live?  I hope so!  Read about this issue in The New York Times. 

The War in Iraq and Its Human Development Costs

There's a website on the net that everyone should visit.  It's called the National Priorities Project, and has on its home page an on-going run-down of how much this catastrophic war in Iraq is costing Americans.  As I look at it now, it's about $445 billion, and going up fast.  The site also provides statistics on what this money COULD HAVE BEEN SPENT ON to help support the healthy growth and development of individuals in our society.  As of my visit today, the money spent on the Iraq war thus far:

• Could have paid for over 59 million children to attend a year of Head Start; or
• Could have provided health insurance for 266 million children for one year; or
• Could have hired nearly 8 million new public school teachers for one year; or
• Could have built over 4 million additional housing units for low-income families; or
• Could have provided over 21 million four-year scholarships for students at public universities.

Instead, we've used this money to kill over 3500 Americans, wound over 25,000 Americans, kill an estimated 655,000 Iraqi civilians (see my post on this statistic), destroy countless homes, businesses, industries, infrastructure, cultural treasures, and more. 

This blog is dedicated to supporting the twelve stages of life.  American tax dollars used to kill and destroy could have been used instead to support the the educational, health, and economic needs of people in early childhood, middle childhood, late childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, midlife, and beyond.  There are no words that one can say here about this outrage.   Let us instead remember the sacredness of human life, and contact senators who thus far have opposed efforts to end this vicious war.  To find out if your senators are among those who are keeping the war going, go to this page on the Senate website, which provides the 52-47 vote on July 18, 2007 that rejected (by preventing it from coming to a vote) an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (H.R. 1585), to provide for a reduction and transition of U.S. forces in Iraq.  Write those senators who voted "nay" and tell them that American taxpayers want their tax dollars to support human development, not tear it down.

Dead Iraqi Children: Who Talks About Them in the Iraq Debate?

I just read that a U.S. helicopter attack against suspected insurgents in Bagdad today has killed a number of children at a primary school.  Also, another report today that a suicide car bomber killed many people, including children, at a holy Shia shrine in Kufa.  These reprehensible actions come on the same day that a report by Save the Children surveying 60 countries ranked Iraq as the worst country for saving the lives of children under 5.  According to their State of the World's Mothers Report, Iraq's child mortality rate has soared 150% since 1990.  Some 120,000 Iraqi children died in 2005 before reaching their fifth birthday.  Since the beginning of the Gulf War in 1990, children in Iraq have been subjected to war, terrorism, and a lack of medical services, food, and other necessary goods as a result of the sanctions placed on Iraq by the United Nations during Saddam's regime.  While politicians are talking about the best "exit strategies" for the war in Iraq, or how to "win" this terrible conflict, or how we're going to "support the troops," meanwhile, these poor children are being slaughtered right and left, and hardly any of this makes it onto the 6 o'clock news.  What would happen if, along with the photos of the U.S. soldiers who have been killed in Iraq, news organizations like PBS would also put up photos of dead Iraqi children and their grieving parents?  Perhaps the parents on all sides of this conflict (U.S., Shia, Sunni, Al Quaida etc.), would feel some sense of empthy for these families.  For once, I would like to see compassion for children overcome all the ideologies (Democracy, Christianity, Islam etc.) that have put us in this senseless mess.

The Best Schools Are Not Test Factories but Places for Developing Whole Human Beings

I've written a new book for educators called The Best Schools:  How Human Development Research Should Inform Educational Practice (publisher:  The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, December, 2006).  In this book I suggest that our educational climate has become totally overwhelmed by what I call an "academic achievement discourse."  This discourse concentrates on accountability, rubrics, benchmarks, "closing the achievement gap', a "rigorous curriculum," "tougher standards," and standardized testing.  The epitome of this discourse is the No Child Left Behind Act, which demands that schools make yearly progress on test scores or face tough sanctions.  What is missing from this conversation is any real discussion of human beings.  In my book I suggest that we need to start speaking (again, because we used to talk this way) "human development discourse."  That is, we need to focus on helping children develop their cognitive, social, emotional, creative, and spiritual potentials.  We need to measure student progress, not through "normative" evaluation (comparing a child to an ideal group), but through "ipsative" measures (comparing a child to his or her own past performance).  We need to stop spending so much time focusing on basic reading and science and math skills, and provide more time in the curriculum for social studies, history, the arts, physical education, vocational education, wellness education, character education, and other fields that taken together make for educating whole human beings.  In The Best Schools,  I suggest that educators need to take seriously the unique needs of children at each stage of development, instead of creating developmentally inappropriate instruction to raise test scores at all age levels.  I recommend that schools focus on specific developmental issues at each level of instruction. 

• In early childhood education (ages 3-6) play should be the center of the curriculum, with no formal instruction (teaching reading and writing at this early age is developmentally inappropriate according to early childhood expert David Elkind, a leading advocate of Jean Piaget's work in the United States). 
• At the elementary school level (ages 7-10), learning how the world works should be the focus of classroom instruction.  Children at this age are entering a more complex social world, they have more complex cognitive abilities, and they are hungry to know all about the world around them  about nature, culture, other people and themselves.  Too much time is being spent on preparing kids for tests, or teaching them silly irrelevant academic skills, and too little time is spent engaging students in rich encounters with the real world.  The model of the children's museum is a good one to use for this stage of schooling. 
• At the middle school level (ages 11- 14), instruction should focus on social, emotional, and metacognitive growth.  Adolescents entering puberty have a whole range of new emotions, social interactions, and intellectual insights descending on them, and to ignore these changes by focusing only on academic subjects like algebra and reading comprehension is to risk turning these kids off of school, and turning them toward gangs, violence, drugs, addictions, and other social problems.  Middle schools should teach using peer instruction, cooperative learning, and mentor-guided experiences.  They should teach school subjects by engaging the students' emotions (e.g. teaching the Revolutionary War by asking students if they ever felt like revolting against anything).  Students should also have their newly-developed "meta-cognitive minds" engaged (where they can think about thinking itself) both in academic learning, and also in thinking about the conflicts in their often emotional turbulent personal lives.
• Finally, high schools (ages 15-18) need to focus on helping students prepare to live independently in the real world.  In middle and late adolescence, students are beginning to take on responsibilities that will make them a part of the adult world (between 15-18 kids in many states are able to marry, open IRA accounts, drive, and engage in other adult responsibilities).  Instead of having to spend all their time cooped up in a large impersonal high school, where they have to raise their hand if they want to go to the bathroom, they should be out in the real world engaged in internships, field work, cooperative education, job shadowing, career academies, part-time jobs that link with academic instruction, and other educational models that help these kids across the great divide separating childhood from adulthood. 

All of these developmental goals require that schools that have become testing factories radically alter their direction, their purpose, and their structure.  The Best Schools provides many examples of schools at all levels around the United States that are already doing this; that are already providing developmentally appropriate instruction for kids and treating kids not as test-taking machines, but as whole human beings.

To read excerpts of The Best Schools, click here.

To read a review of The Best Schools in the online Teachers College Record, click here.

To order The Best Schools, click here.

TV Food Ads Contribute to Childhood Obesity

Most people know by now that there is an epidemic of obesity in the United States and that children are the most vulnerable victims of this trend.  Patterns of poor nutrition developed during childhood can set kids up for a huge wallop from health problems in adulthood, including diabetes, heart disease,and cancer.  Now, a new Kaiser Family Foundation report has revealed the extent to which television advertising contributes to the development of these bad eating habits.  In cooperation with researchers at Indiana University, the Kaiser study found that half of all TV ads shown during children's show are food related. Children between the ages of 8-12 see an average of 21 food ads per day, or more than 7,600 a year.  Of all the food ads that target children, 34% are for candy and snacks, 28% are for cereal, 10% are for fast foods, 4% are for dairy products, and 1% are for fruit juices.  Of the 8,854 children's food ads reviewed in the study, none of them were for fruits and vegetables.  Many of these ads have tie-ins to websites, or children's television or movie characters, or premiums such as games or toys.  Clearly, the profit motive is overriding the importance of healthy child development as far as these children's food advertisers are concerned.  Click here for further information about this study.  The Food Trust is an organization that is  working to create health food habits among children and families.

Childhood Obesity - A Ticking Time Bomb

Fast food chains, snack food companies, and beverage manufacturers that target young people are creating a health crisis that is like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode sometime in the next few decades.  Through promotional tie-ins, two-for-one deals, free beverage refills, and access to public schools and other places where kids congregate, corporate pushers of unhealthy diets are seducing our children into consuming too much sugar and fat.  Add to this the fact that schools have cut down on recess, and that video games and television promote couch potato kids, and you can see that the next generation may be set on a course to develop heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other health related problems at levels never seen before.  The Centers for Disease Control reports that the number of overweight children ages 6-11 has doubled in the past 20, and for adolescents 12-19 years old, the overweight figure has tripled.  Other studies suggest that 80% of all high school students fail to eat the recommended daily allowance of fruits and vegetables, and more than 60% of U.S. children consume too much saturated fat.  Only through a concerted effort by the public to improve physical fitness programs in schools, cut back on television and video game use at home, educate our kids on proper nutritional habits, and graphically show them what drinking sodas and eating fries and whoppers does to their physiology, can we turn this coming epidemic around. For more information, including recommendations and resources, click here.

Mass Culture Distorts Tweens' Body Image

Eating disorders such as anorexia or bulemia are serious illnesses that affect millions of adolescents and young adults in this country.  While much attention has been focused on these disorders, less has been said about how its seeds may be sown in the preteen years.  Surveys have shown that the more kids are exposed to mass media, the greater their concern about their weight.  Late childhood and early adolescence are particularly vulnerable times in the human life cycle, where the self-consciousness bourne of an emerging new identity creates a kind of obsession with "looking good" to other people, especially to friends.  Tweens, especially females, take their cues from their peers and mass media in terms of their clothes, accessories, and most importantly their figures.  Fifty-seven percent of children above the age of eight have a television in their room.  Exposed to svelt models, glamorous movie stars, and elegant cosmetic queens, preadolescent girls begin to see this as the standard to which they must attain.  As one mother put it, speaking about preadolescent peer culture in Sarasota, Florida:  “It’s a world where taunts of ‘fatty’ follow the chubby 10-year-old onto school buses, and even slender 12-year-olds try to live on Diet Coke and salads because they’re desperate to look like Jennifer Aniston.”

War is a Developmental Issue

A new study in the British medical journal The Lancet has estimated that 655,000 people have died in Iraq due to war-related causes since the beginning of the U.S. invasion in March 2003.  President Bush dismissed the figure as "not credible" despite the fact that the study appeared in one of the most reputable medical journals in the world, was funded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was conducted by researchers Johns Hopkins University using an epidemiological methodology based on random sample clusters where death certificates were used in most cases to verify mortality.

Why does this news item appear in a blog on human development?  Because war is a developmental issue affecting every stage of life.  Research suggests that war creates problems right at the beginning of life, with the stress of war experienced by the pregnant mother being passed onto the fetus, and the trauma of social conflict interfering with the natural birth processes of life.  There is a great deal of research in the United States showing a link between media violence and subsequent violent behavior in children (see for example, a recent study published in the journal Develomental Psychology).  This is second-order violence.  What then must be the impact of children in war-torn areas of the world seeing, not actors being killed on a television screen, but family members being killed in front of their faces?  In most parts of the world, children and adolescents are part of the military forces (even in the U.S., kids as young as seventeen may sign up to become killing machines). Early adulthood represents the stage of life for those who are most likely to be killed in combat.  Many of these individuals, male heads of households, leave families economically and emotionally fragmented after their untimely deaths.  These males will not enter the mature stages of life, and thus a culture will be deprived of the wisdom and benevolence of its elders in late adulthood.  Those who do survive and grow into maturity are likely to be emotionally mangled and unable to care for the next generation to keep the life cycle growing in a healthy and vital manner.

Anyone who truly cares about the stages of life - anyone who cares about nurturing human life at each stage of development - must be in their heart of hearts against war.  The fact that wars are routinely defended on all sides using rational arguments, patriotic fervor, or religious faith should not blind us to the fact that their ultimate end is the same:  the destruction of human life, and the shattering of the human life cycle.  To be pro-life cycle is to be anti-war.