In high school I always remember feeling fuzzy-headed after my school lunches. Well, now it turns out that school lunches do more than just create transient mental haziness. A study in the December issue of the American Heart Journal looked at 2000 sixth-graders and concluded that there was a clear relationship between obesity and school lunch programs. Of the 2000 students, 15% were judged to be obese. As expected, these students had higher levels of cholesterol, blood pressure, and other indicators of cardiovascular risk factors. But what was particularly troubling was that eating school lunches was considered an independent predictor of obesity! Some states are taking action against schoolhouse junk food, including Illinois which is proposing legislation to ban trans fats from cafeteria lunches. And new federal standards are being proposed that will cut sodium in foods, use only whole grains, and serve low fat milk. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the new standards will affect more than 32 million children. For information about health school lunch programs, go to the "Healthy School Lunches" website sponsored by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
I've just returned from the 8th annual conference on early childhood education held in Monterrey, Mexico. There were a number of excellent presentations on early childhood development, but in particular I was impressed with the work of Susan Linn, author of The Case for Make-Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World, who described her work with the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), which has been attempting to stop corporations from using characters like Sponge Bob Square Pants,Sesame Street's Elmo, and cartoon movie figures to advertise everything from sugar-rich cereals and unhealthy McDonald's "happy meals" to fish food and worthless technological toys. I thought it was interesting when she described how certain advertising companies had developed techniques to get young children to improve their "nagging skills" in asking their parents to purchase products for them. Thanks to the efforts of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, Scholastic Inc. will no longer be promoting the highly sexualized Bratz brand in schools. They have just published a press release directed at toy marketers to suspend holiday marketing aimed directly at children during the current economic crisis and target parents instead.
David Marshak, emeritus professor in the College of Education at Seattle University, has written a book, The Common Vision: Parenting and Educating for Wholeness (Peter Lang Publishing), that integrates the developmental ideas of three esoteric thinkers from the early 20th century: Rudolf Steiner, Hazrat Inayat Khan, and Sri Aurobindo. As the title indicates, Marshak examines the common threads that run through these visionaries work when it comes to the education of the child. Each of the three believed that the child was more than a physical body, but also inhabited other planes of existence. Although they gave different names to those planes, they ultimately agreed on the essentials related to these three major non-physical planes of existence that interpenetrate the physical: a vital plane of life-force, a higher plane of mental existence, and a still higher plane that exists at the level of spirit. Each of these thinkers (along with their followers), developed a comprehensive rationale for educating children according to these different planes of existence, and also according to their developmental level. Marshak does an excellent job of explicating in meticulous detail these developmental theories, showing differences as well as similarities. He also grounds the ideas of each of the three thinkers in special chapters that show how the ideas have been applied in concrete learning environments. For Steiner’s ideas, he visits a second grade classroom at a Waldorf School (a system of education Steiner developed in the 1920’s and which still exists in the U.S. and around the world today). To show Aurobindo’s ideas in action, Marshak travels to India and visits the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, giving details of the children’s school established there. Finally, Marshak interviews Murshida Vera Corda, a follower of the Sufi musician and mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan, who describes the Sufi Seed Center, a school for children based on his principles that ran in San Francisco from the late 1960’s to the early 1980’s. Marshak’s book integrates a huge amount of information from the voluminous writings of these three thinkers, and saves readers a lot of time from having to find often hard-to-obtain publications, and synthesizes it in a way that can provide practical strategies for parents and educators seeking to help their children learn. What Marshak emphasizes, perhaps more than anything else, is that the child has an “inner teacher” that is the source of inner motivation and learning, and that this inner teacher cannot be forced or manipulated into action, but rather trusted, listened to, and awakened by the outer teacher as facilitator and role model. Marshak’s book is a great contribution to the literature on child education, and provides a positive counterpoint to the usual “kill and drill” or “testist, bestist, westist” approach to learning that seems to predominate, especially in the United States, at this particular time in history. Each of these three thinkers provided a view of life that extended far beyond education, but Marshak has done the work of focusing attention on their views regarding the practical aspects of parenting and educating children, so that we can all benefit from the wisdom of these pragmatic mystics.