Do Americans Really Like Children



Do Americans Really Like Children . . . . Yet?

Now that we have determined that the Keniston Article was written in 1973 we will explore the context of living and learning in America by locating and then comparing today’s statistics. You and your partner will receive two items to research. Place the updated statistics in the year column and the source of your statistics in the third column

| |2007 |Cite Source |

|infant mortality--scandalously high fifteenth among 42 Nations |Infant Mortality | |

|adequate health care -- Approximately one-quarter of all American|*Adequate health care | |

|children do not receive anything approaching adequate health | | |

|care, nor did their mothers before they were born -- |*Percent of children with health insurance | |

| | | |

| |*Percent of children immunized | |

|Malnutrition. A United States Department of Agriculture survey |Malnutrition | |

|shows that between 1955 and 1965, a decade of rising | | |

|agricultural productivity, the percentage of diets deficient in | | |

|one more essential nutrients actually increased. Millions of | | |

|American children today remain hungry and malnourished. | | |

|Children in Poverty - One-third lives below that level defined by|Children in Poverty | |

|the government as "minimum but adequate". | | |

|School Achievement - gap between rich and poor and between |Achievement Gap | |

|black and white students as well, is greatest at the twelfth | | |

|grade level. | | |

|Maternal Employment - more than half of all mothers of school-age|Maternal Employment | |

|children in two-parent families worked outside the home, mostly | | |

|full-time. The highest rates of female participation in the labor| | |

|force occur in families of average and below average income | | |

|In 1949, about 50 percent of single parent families with children|Single parent families | |

|under six were headed by a relative other than the mother or | | |

|father. By 1973, this proportion had dropped to 20 percent. | | |

|Single women giving birth ratio – |Single women giving birth ratio – | |

|l out of every 8. (Taken together, these statistics mean that | | |

|more and more children are spending more and more time in homes | | |

|empty of people to look out for them.). | | |

|TV as a technological babysitter occupies more of the waking | | |

|hours of American children than any other single influence | | |

|--including both parents. |Technological babysitter | |

|Peer group. Other unrelated children play a larger and larger |Power of the Peer Group | |

|role in socializing the young. | | |

| Third replacement for the child's family members includes |Childcare/After-school care | |

|school, preschools, and the various child care arrangements that | | |

|must be made by working parents. | | |

|Latchkey children. They stay alone in empty houses, often locked |Latchkey children | |

|in, while their parents work | | |

|the intellectualization of the child- |the intellectualization of the child- | |

|- a growing emphasis upon the IQ-as–a-brain; upon the cultivation|Focus on testing | |

|of narrowly defined cognitive skills and attitudes; and, above | | |

|all, upon the creation, through our preschools and schools, of a |$$ spent on testing vs. $$ spent on education | |

|race of children whose value and progress are judged primarily by| | |

|their capacity to do well on tests of intelligence, reading | | |

|readiness, or school achievement. Our system of preschooling and| | |

|schooling largely ignores these other human potentials in order | | |

|to concentrate on cultivating a narrow form of intellect. | | |

|Head Start Statistics- the inordinate preoccupation with |Head Start Statistics | |

|intellectual development and our presumption that it can | | |

|be-handily measured have not only short-changed the general | | |

|population of children in our schools but have also tended to | | |

|hamper such efforts as we have made to give special help to those| | |

|children needing it most. This program was intended, more | | |

|fundamentally, to give power to parents, to broaden the | | |

|experience of children in non-cognitive ways, and to provide them| | |

|with many services such as health and dental care. It would seem | | |

|that the critics were impelled to overlook these other factors by| | |

|the veritable obsession of our society with cognitive development| | |

|and with standard tests as a measurement of the educational | | |

|well-being of the young. | | |

| | | |

| | | |

| | | |

|Now I, for one, see poverty as a manifestation, not of our |economic system role in poverty | |

|cultural system, but of our economic system | | |

|Test taking. The child who has learned to master test-taking gets|Test taking | |

|the goodies --promotions special tracks, educational credentials.| | |

|Indeed, our schools are so-structured that without the ability to| | |

|get good "objective-test scores" or high "grade point averages”, | | |

|a child is condemned to almost certain failure. Ironically, this | | |

|fact lives next door to our professed devotion to the qualities | | |

|we say we value: physical vitality, caring, imagination, | | |

|resourcefulness, cooperation, moral commitment. | | |

|Academic Standards -- We have allowed quantitative standards, so |Academic Standards -- "technism” | |

|central to our economic system and our way of thinking about it, | | |

|to become the principal yardstick of our definition of our | | |

|children's worth. Ours is a highly developed technological | | |

|society in which we have adopted, usually without knowing it, the| | |

|implicit ideology of what has been called "technism” | | |

|This ideology places central value on what can be measured--with | | |

|numbers-- assigns numbers to what cannot be measured and | | |

|redefines everything else as self-expression or entertainment. | | |

|The development of so-called objectives measures (which are, in | | |

|fact, not at all objective) of IQ and performance is an | | |

|expression of this broader propensity. | | |

|Gatekeeping--The school’s role in classifying and sorting the |Gatekeeping-- | |

|labor force reflects the intellectualization of the child. | | |

|The perpetuation of exclusion. |The perpetuation of exclusion. | |

|One-quarter of all American children today are being brought up | | |

|to fail. | | |

|One out of every seven children in America is nonwhite | | |

|One out of every three children lives below the minimum adequate | | |

|budget | | |

|One out of every 12 children is born with a major or minor | | |

|handicap | | |

|One out of every 10 children has a learning disability | | |

|Millions of children live in sub-standard housing | | |

|Millions attend deplorable schools. | | |

|The wealth and income in this nation has not changed materially |wealth and income distribution in | |

|in 150 years. |the nation | |

|We have created individuals and families driven by economic need | | |

|to accept menial, dead-end, low-pay, insecure, hazardous, and | | |

|boring work. | | |

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