Speaking Up for Children

Speaking Up for Children

This cluster disrupts the common discourse to remind us to transform the world through our children.

Image of the Teacher

If we promote an advocacy for children’s strengths and children’s rights, why not simultaneously promote a parallel advocacy for teacher’s strengths and teacher’s rights? We may lack integrity if we work to honor the child and fail to honor the teacher.

Call Out Coercion

The time is now for a broad international movement to deconstruct system that has starved and constrained societal efforts to invest in the early education of young children and to alter the power structures that constrain human beings from participating in the social institutions that care for and educate young children and their families.

Sixteen Capabilities

We know it’s true: the social, physical, and expressive abilities we gain before age 6 or 7 alter the rest of our lives. We might think of the early years as consisting of two wombs—one inside a mother and one inside a community.

Those years before common school are an essential subsequent, equally nourishing, social womb for optimizing these first years of human growth. Most people agree the first womb is dedicated to optimization of growth we are as parents in care between conception and the time when children first walk and talk.

We could declare a second womb to be the care one step wider, but still safe and nourishing, as the community of peers and well-know adults before stepping out into the wider world at the age of common school. A village womb wraps them and provides what optimizes the fundamentals of being an energetic and capable human being.

Provisions for that second, wider space of care could alter how humans care for each other and the ecology of life on this planet. Communities of interdependence and full of rich encounters, locally determined without central control, could be guided by the study of these children, the ones we know and love, so they have rich and fruitful lives. The next epoch in evolution would begin by ensuring the full optimization of human capabilities in order to care for the world. We know this is true, too.

This is an existential necessity. We could today to build the revolution backwards, starting with the outcomes we seek for six- and seven- olds. If we could list the capabilities we sought for all children, we could evolve an agreement to  invest in the world’s children. I recommend we start with a list of what we dream for children becoming by age 7, at the end of their early childhood years.

The Sixteen Capabilities is and example of such a list. It would be different, of course, in different places.

Treating Children Compassionately

If you were a child in your own program, how would you want to be treated? The Foundation 15 is a summary of class constructions created by students at North Seattle College collected over a 6 year period. Their thoughts remind us of our challenge to feed the right wolf.

Values for Children, Childhood, and Schools

If you have those two tasks above, you can add this.

  • BELONGING We ensure the perception of being included.
  • WELL-BEING We offer an ethics of care for health in all its dimensions.
  • RECIPROCITY We are becoming and changing in a passionate, compassionate, and aesthetic relationship with those whose lives we wish to enhance.
  • PARTICIPATION We invite the participation of all into creating our possibility and defining our opportunity in spaces that are open and somewhat indefinite.
  • JOY  We playfully open up and take in to experience our relatedness.
  • WHOLENESS We conceive of others as whole, capable human beings connected to others.
  • TRUST We listen carefully to discover the ways of being of others as we stay truthful ourselves.
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