Convention On The Rights Of The Child Quotes

The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another.

People who are not fully enlightened have no business becoming parents. This contradicts the conventionally accepted notion that people have an inherent "right" to have children. They do not. People who have a compulsion to traumatize a child, even in the mildest forms, are breaking the child's human rights, though of course the parental compulsion to find false pleasure through procreation obliterates their awareness of these rights. But interestingly, many parents would agree that convicted pedophiles and child murderers have no right to procreate, because of the dynamics in which they are so likely to engage.

It’s perhaps telling that the United States for years was, embarrassingly, the only country in the world besides Somalia and South Sudan that had not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. That has now changed: the United States is the only nation that hasn’t bothered to ratify it.

Thus, Dr. Seuss's books structurally empower children to participate in the reading process, while the narratives reinforce a child's autonomy and power. Through his avant-garde approach, Dr. Seuss was disseminating the same norms that would be enshrined in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, taking children seriously, and empowering them to play an active role in matters that affect them

In reality, pregnancy medical care seemed to be one long list of rules. In fact, being pregnant was a lot like being a child again. There was always someone telling you what to do. It started right away.

The obstinacy of antiquated institutions in perpetuating themselves resembles the stubbornness of the rancid perfume which should claim our hair, the pretensions of the spoiled fish which should persist in being eaten, the persecution of the child's garment which should insist on clothing the man, the tenderness of corpses which should return to embrace the living. "Ingrates!" says the garment, "I protected you in inclement weather. Why will you have nothing to do with me?" "I have just come from the deep sea," says the fish. "I have been a rose," says the perfume. "I have loved you," says the corpse. "I have civilized you," says the convent. To this there is but one reply: "In former days." To dream of the indefinite prolongation of defunct things, and of the government of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in a bad condition, to regild shrines, to patch up cloisters, to rebless reliquaries, to refurnish superstitions, to revictual fanaticisms, to put new handles on holy water brushes and militarism, to reconstitute monasticism and militarism, to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication of parasites, to force the past on the present, – this seems strange. Still, there are theorists who hold such theories. These theorists, who are in other respects people of intelligence, have a very simple process; they apply to the past a glazing which they call social order, divine right, morality, family, the respect of elders, antique authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, religion; and they go about shouting, "Look! take this, honest people." This logic was known to the ancients. The soothsayers practise it. They rubbed a black heifer over with chalk, and said, "She is white, Bos cretatus." As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it. Superstitions, bigotries, affected devotion, prejudices, those forms all forms as they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in their smoke, and they must be clasped close, body to body, and war must be made on them, and that without truce; for it is one of the fatalities of humanity to be condemned to eternal combat with phantoms. It is difficult to seize darkness by the throat, and to hurl it to the earth.

We’re told that parents push their children too hard to excel (by ghostwriting their homework and hiring tutors, and demanding that they triumph over their peers), but also that parents try to protect kids from competition (by giving trophies to everyone), that expectations have declined, that too much attention is paid to making children happy. Similarly, young adults are described as self-satisfied twits—more pleased with themselves than their accomplishments merit—but also as being so miserable that they’re in therapy. Or there’s an epidemic of helicopter parenting, even though parents are so focused on their gadgets that they ignore their children. The assumption seems to be that readers will just nod right along, failing to note any inconsistencies, as long as the tone is derogatory and the perspective is traditionalist.

The most notorious story is the Trovan antibiotic study conducted by Pfizer in Kano, Nigeria, during a meningitis epidemic. An experimental new antibiotic was compared, in a randomised trial, with a low dose of a competing antibiotic that was known to be effective. Eleven children died, roughly the same number from each group. Crucially, the participants were apparently not informed about the experimental nature of the treatments, and moreover, they were not informed that a treatment known to be effective was available, immediately, from Médecins sans Frontières next door at the very same facility. Pfizer argued in court – successfully – that there was no international norm requiring it to get informed consent for a trial involving experimental drugs in Africa, so the cases relating to the trial should be heard in Nigeria only. That’s a chilling thing to hear a company claim about experimental drug trials, and it was knocked back in 2006 when the Nigerian Ministry of Health released its report on the trial. This stated that Pfizer had violated Nigerian law, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Declaration of Helsinki.

Parent and Teacher Actions: 1. Ask children what their role models would do. Children feel free to take initiative when they look at problems through the eyes of originals. Ask children what they would like to improve in their family or school. Then have them identify a real person or fictional character they admire for being unusually creative and inventive. What would that person do in this situation? 2. Link good behaviors to moral character. Many parents and teachers praise helpful actions, but children are more generous when they’re commended for being helpful people—it becomes part of their identity. If you see a child do something good, try saying, “You’re a good person because you ___.” Children are also more ethical when they’re asked to be moral people—they want to earn the identity. If you want a child to share a toy, instead of asking, “Will you share?” ask, “Will you be a sharer?” 3. Explain how bad behaviors have consequences for others. When children misbehave, help them see how their actions hurt other people. “How do you think this made her feel?” As they consider the negative impact on others, children begin to feel empathy and guilt, which strengthens their motivation to right the wrong—and to avoid the action in the future. 4. Emphasize values over rules. Rules set limits that teach children to adopt a fixed view of the world. Values encourage children to internalize principles for themselves. When you talk about standards, like the parents of the Holocaust rescuers, describe why certain ideals matter to you and ask children why they’re important. 5. Create novel niches for children to pursue. Just as laterborns sought out more original niches when conventional ones were closed to them, there are ways to help children carve out niches. One of my favorite techniques is the Jigsaw Classroom: bring students together for a group project, and assign each of them a unique part. For example, when writing a book report on Eleanor Roosevelt’s life, one student worked on her childhood, another on her teenage years, and a third on her role in the women’s movement. Research shows that this reduces prejudice—children learn to value each other’s distinctive strengths. It can also give them the space to consider original ideas instead of falling victim to groupthink. To further enhance the opportunity for novel thinking, ask children to consider a different frame of reference. How would Roosevelt’s childhood have been different if she grew up in China? What battles would she have chosen to fight there?

To be loved by a pure young girl, to be the first to reveal to her the strange mystery of love, is indeed a great happiness, but it is the simplest thing in the world. To take captive a heart which has had no experience of attack, is to enter an unfortified and ungarrisoned city. Education, family feeling, the sense of duty, the family, are strong sentinels, but there are no sentinels so vigilant as not to be deceived by a girl of sixteen to whom nature, by the voice of the man she loves, gives the first counsels of love, all the more ardent because they seem so pure. The more a girl believes in goodness, the more easily will she give way, if not to her lover, at least to love, for being without mistrust she is without force, and to win her love is a triumph that can be gained by any young man of five-and-twenty. See how young girls are watched and guarded! The walls of convents are not high enough, mothers have no locks strong enough, religion has no duties constant enough, to shut these charming birds in their cages, cages not even strewn with flowers. Then how surely must they desire the world which is hidden from them, how surely must they find it tempting, how surely must they listen to the first voice which comes to tell its secrets through their bars, and bless the hand which is the first to raise a corner of the mysterious veil! But to be really loved by a courtesan: that is a victory of infinitely greater difficulty. With them the body has worn out the soul, the senses have burned up the heart, dissipation has blunted the feelings. They have long known the words that we say to them, the means we use; they have sold the love that they inspire. They love by profession, and not by instinct. They are guarded better by their calculations than a virgin by her mother and her convent; and they have invented the word caprice for that unbartered love which they allow themselves from time to time, for a rest, for an excuse, for a consolation, like usurers, who cheat a thousand, and think they have bought their own redemption by once lending a sovereign to a poor devil who is dying of hunger without asking for interest or a receipt. Then, when God allows love to a courtesan, that love, which at first seems like a pardon, becomes for her almost without penitence. When a creature who has all her past to reproach herself with is taken all at once by a profound, sincere, irresistible love, of which she had never felt herself capable; when she has confessed her love, how absolutely the man whom she loves dominates her! How strong he feels with his cruel right to say: You do no more for love than you have done for money. They know not what proof to give. A child, says the fable, having often amused himself by crying "Help! a wolf!" in order to disturb the labourers in the field, was one day devoured by a Wolf, because those whom he had so often deceived no longer believed in his cries for help. It is the same with these unhappy women when they love seriously. They have lied so often that no one will believe them, and in the midst of their remorse they are devoured by their love.

The father's gaze on his child constitutes a potential revolution. For instance, it can show a daughter that she exists in her own right, outside the sexual marketplace, that she is capable of physical strength, has an enterprising mind, is independent; it can help her value these strengths without fear of imminent punishment. It can show a son that chauvinistic conventions are a trap, a brutal restriction of emotions in service of army and state. Traditional masculinity is just as crippling a venture as the summons of femininity.

Social prejudices are in the process of disappearing. More and more, nature is reclaiming her rights. We're moving in the proper direction. I've much more respect for the woman who has an illegitimate child than for an old maid. I've often been told of unmarried women who had children and brought these children up in a truly touching manner. It often happens amongst women servants, notably. The women who have no children finally go off their heads. It's somewhat striking to observe that in the majority of peoples the number of women exceeds that of men. What harm is there, then, in every woman's fulfilling her destiny? I love to see this display of health around me. The opposite thing would make me misanthropic. And I'd become really so, if all I had to look at were the spectacle of the ten thousand so-called élite. Luckily for me, I've always retained contacts with the people. Amongst the people, moral health is obligatory. It goes so far that in the country one never reproaches a priest for having a liaison with his servant. People even regard it as a kind of guarantee : the women and girls of the village need not protect themselves. In any case, women of the people are full of understanding; they admit that a young priest can't sweat his sperm out through his brain. The hypocrites are to be found amongst the ten-thousandstrong élite. That's where one meets the Puritan who can reproach his neighbour for his adventures, forgetting that he has himself married a divorcée. Everybody should draw from his own experience the reasons to show himself indulgent towards others. Marriage, as it is practised in bourgeoise society, is generally a thing against nature. But a meeting between two beings who complete one another, who are made for one another, borders already, in my conception, upon a miracle. I often think of those women who people the convents—because they haven't met the man with whom they would have wished to share their lives. With the exception of those who were promised to God by their parents, most of them, in fact, are women cheated by life. Human beings are made to suffer passively. Rare are the beings capable of coming to grips with existence.

Parents who can feel, who are conscious of their feelings and realize that uncontrolled anger, though it may be triggered by the child, usually has little to do with it, are less in danger of acting out their rage in the guise of pedagogy. I use the words "guilt" and "victim," rather than "causes" and "effects," as I am often politely urged to do, advisedly. Children are turned into victims by people, by their parents, not by some kind of automaton. These people have no right to behave as though they were merely destructive automatons and adhere to their ignorance, even though conventional wisdom and even moral and religious teachings confirm them in their actions by preaching forgiveness to their victims. One day the effects of such opinions will be seen in all their destructiveness.

He wondered if all this happiness really belonged to him, if it was not made up of someone else's happiness--this child's happiness which he in his old age was confiscating and appropriating--and if this was not robbery. He told himself, this child had a right to experience life before renouncing it, that to deprive her in advance of all the joys of life, and to some extent without consulting her, under the pretext of sparing her from all its tribulations, to take advantage of her ignorance and her isolation in order to foster in her a spurious vocation, was to pervert the nature of a human being and to lie to God. And who knows if Cosette, understanding all this some day and wishing she had not become a nun, would not come to hate him? A last thought, this; almost selfish and less heroic than the others, but one that was intolerable to him. He decided to leave the convent.

The people we find truly anathema are the ones who reduce the past to caricature and distort it to fit their own bigoted stereotypes. We’ve gone to events that claimed to be historic fashion shows but turned out to be gaudy polyester parades with no shadow of reality behind them. As we heard our ancestors mocked and bigoted stereotypes presented as facts, we felt like we had gone to an event advertised as an NAACP convention only to discover it was actually a minstrel show featuring actors in blackface. Some so-called “living history” events really are that bigoted. When we object to history being degraded this way, the guilty parties shout that they are “just having fun.” What they are really doing is attacking a past that cannot defend itself. Perhaps they are having fun, but it is the sort of fun a schoolyard brute has at the expense of a child who goes home bruised and weeping. It’s time someone stood up for the past. I have always hated bullies. The instinct to attack difference can be seen in every social species, but if humans truly desire to rise above barbarism, then we must cease acting like beasts. The human race may have been born in mud and ignorance, but we are blessed with minds sufficiently powerful to shape our behavior. Personal choices form the lives of individuals; the sum of all interactions determine the nature of societies. At present, it is politically fashionable in America to tolerate limited diversity based around race, religion, and sexual orientation, yet following a trend does not equate with being truly open-minded. There are people who proudly proclaim they support women’s rights, yet have an appallingly limited definition of what those rights entail. (Currently, fashionable privileges are voting, working outside the home, and easy divorce; some people would be dumbfounded at the idea that creating beautiful things, working inside the home, and marriage are equally desirable rights for many women.) In the eighteenth century, Voltaire declared, “I disagree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.”3 Many modern Americans seem to have perverted this to, “I will fight to the death for your right to agree with what I say.” When we stand up for history, we are in our way standing up for all true diversity. When we question stereotypes and fight ignorance about the past, we force people to question ignorance in general.

It’s been said that the personal is political, and there’s no doubt that parenting is intensely personal. To argue against traditional ways of raising children, or to suggest that we can help children stand up for what they think is right, doesn’t introduce politics into parenting. It’s always been there. If we’ve failed to notice the political implications of child rearing, it may be because most advice on the subject has the effect of perpetuating the status quo. Hence the need to keep asking, “Cui bono?” When, for example, a researcher such as Diana Baumrind defends the idea of “moral internalization,” which she defines as “the process by which children come to espouse and conform to society’s rules, even when they are free of external surveillance or the expectation of external inducement,” that’s intensely political.3 The cornerstone of her notion of “authoritative” discipline is the creation of built-in supervisors to ensure conformity. But too many people respond by asking, “What’s the most efficient way to achieve such internalization?” and skirting the question of the value of those rules they’re being asked to internalize. In fact, we should invite our children to join us in asking which rules are worth following, and why.

Like the incredulous inspector, many people are not ready to reduce morality to convention or taste. When we say “The Holocaust is bad,” do our powers of reason leave us no way to differentiate that conviction from “I don’t like the Holocaust” or “My culture disapproves of the Holocaust”? Is keeping slaves no more or less rational than wearing a turban or a yarmulke or a veil? If a child is deathly ill and we know of a drug that could save her, is administering the drug no more rational than withholding it? Faced with this intolerable implication, some people hope to vest morality in a higher power. That’s what religion is for, they say—even many scientists, like Stephen Jay Gould. But Plato made short work of this argument 2,400 years ago in Euthyphro. Is something moral because God commands it, or does God command some things because they are moral? If the former is true, and God had no reason for his commandments, why should we take his whims seriously? If God commanded you to torture and kill a child, would that make it right? “He would never do that!” you might object. But that flicks us onto the second horn of the dilemma. If God does have good reasons for his commandments, why don’t we appeal to those reasons directly and skip the middleman? (As it happens, the God of the Old Testament did command people to slaughter children quite often.)

Variations on a tired, old theme Here’s another example of addict manipulation that plagues parents. The phone rings. It’s the addict. He says he has a job. You’re thrilled. But you’re also apprehensive. Because you know he hasn’t simply called to tell you good news. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen. Then comes the zinger you knew would be coming. The request. He says everybody at this company wears business suits and ties, none of which he has. He says if you can’t wire him $1800 right away, he won’t be able to take the job. The implications are clear. Suddenly, you’ve become the deciding factor as to whether or not the addict will be able to take the job. Have a future. Have a life. You’ve got that old, familiar sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. This is not the child you gladly would have financed in any way possible to get him started in life. This is the child who has been strung out on drugs for years and has shown absolutely no interest in such things as having a conventional job. He has also, if you remember correctly, come to you quite a few times with variations on this same tired, old story. One variation called for a car so he could get to work. (Why is it that addicts are always being offered jobs in the middle of nowhere that can’t be reached by public transportation?) Another variation called for the money to purchase a round-trip airline ticket to interview for a job three thousand miles away. Being presented with what amounts to a no-choice request, the question is: Are you going to contribute in what you know is probably another scam, or are you going to say sorry and hang up? To step out of the role of banker/victim/rescuer, you have to quit the job of banker/victim/rescuer. You have to change the coda. You have to forget all the stipulations there are to being a parent. You have to harden your heart and tell yourself parenthood no longer applies to you—not while your child is addicted. Not an easy thing to do. P.S. You know in your heart there is no job starting on Monday. But even if there is, it’s hardly your responsibility if the addict goes well dressed, badly dressed, or undressed. Facing the unfaceable: The situation may never change In summary, you had a child and that child became an addict. Your love for the child didn’t vanish. But you’ve had to wean yourself away from the person your child has become through his or her drugs and/ or alcohol abuse. Your journey with the addicted child has led you through various stages of pain, grief, and despair and into new phases of strength, acceptance, and healing. There’s a good chance that you might not be as healthy-minded as you are today had it not been for the tribulations with the addict. But you’ll never know. The one thing you do know is that you wouldn’t volunteer to go through it again, even with all the awareness you’ve gained. You would never have sacrificed your child just so that you could become a better, stronger person. But this is the way it has turned out. You’re doing okay with it, almost twenty-four hours a day. It’s just the odd few minutes that are hard to get through, like the ones in the middle of the night when you awaken to find that the grief hasn’t really gone away—it’s just under smart, new management. Or when you’re walking along a street or in a mall and you see someone who reminds you of your addicted child, but isn’t a substance abuser, and you feel that void in your heart. You ache for what might have been with your child, the happy life, the fulfilled career. And you ache for the events that never took place—the high school graduation, the engagement party, the wedding, the grandkids. These are the celebrations of life that you’ll probably never get to enjoy. Although you never know. DON’T LET    YOUR KIDS  KILL  YOU  A Guide for Parents of Drug and Alcohol Addicted Children PART 2

The persistence of superannuated institutions in striving to perpetuate themselves is like the obstinacy of a rancid odour clinging to the hair; the pretension of spoiled fish that insists on being eaten, the tenacious folly of a child's garment trying to clothe a man, or the tenderness of a corpse returning to embrace the living. "Ingrates!" exclaims the garment. "I shielded you in weakness. Why do you reject me now?" "I come from the depths of the sea," says the fish; "I was once a rose," cries the odour; "I loved you," murmurs the corpse; "I civilized you," says the convent. To this there is but one reply; "In the past." To dream of the indefinite prolongation of things dead and the government of mankind by embalming; to restore dilapidated dogmas, regild the shrines, replaster the cloisters, reconsecrate the reliquaries, revamp old superstitions, replenish fading fanaticism, put new handles in worn-out sprinkling brushes, reconstitute monasticism; to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication of parasites; to foist the past upon the present, all this seems strange. There are, however, advocates for such theories as these. These theorists, men of mind too, in other things, have a very simple process; they apply to the past a coating of what they term divine right, respect for our forefathers, time-honored authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy; and they go about, shouting, "Here! take this, good people!" This logic was familiar to the ancients; their soothsayers practised it. Rubbing over a black heifer with chalk, they would exclaim, "She is white" Bos cretatus. As for ourselves, we distribute our respect, here and there, and spare the past entirely, provided it will but consent to be dead. But, if it insists upon being alive, we attack it and endeavor to kill it. Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them, body to body, and make war upon them and that, too, without cessation; for it is one of the fatalities of humanity to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms. A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash upon the ground.

Danone is the second biggest (after Nestlé) artificial milk and baby food manufacturer in the world. This was not stated on the GAIN website. Danone owns baby food company Blédina and Numico (which owns Nutricia, Cow & Gate and Milupa). They all violate the WHO Code, thus undermining infant nutrition and the Convention on the Rights of Child.

Almost half a century ago, conservatives blamed a surge in college campus unrest on permissive parenting. My first response (in Chapter 1) was to question the accuracy of that causal link. Another response to their claim, however, might be: “Blamed?!” If there really were a connection, it would constitute a powerful argument in favor of such parenting.4 The political and cultural activism of the 1960s, after all, was defined by efforts to challenge oppressive institutions and restrictive assumptions, to demand equal rights for women and people of color, to oppose war and promote awareness about the environmental costs of economic growth. If a certain approach to parenting really could produce people who devoted themselves to those democratizing struggles, we should be sharing the good news with parents today.

When scientific proposals are brought forward, they are not judged by hunches or gut feelings. Only one standard is relevant: a proposal's ability to explain or predict experimental data and astronomical observations. Therein lies the singular beauty of science. As we struggle toward deeper understanding, we must give our creative imagination ample room to explore. We must be willing to step outside conventional ideas and established frameworks. But unlike the wealth of other human activities through which the creative impulse is channeled, science supplies a final reckoning, a built-in assessment of what's right and what's not. A complication of scientific life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is that some of our theoretical ideas have soared past our ability to test or observe. String theory has for some time been the poster child for this situation; the possibility that we're part of a multiverse provides an even more sprawling example. I've laid out a general prescription for how a multiverse proposal might be testable, but at our current level of understanding none of the multiverse theories we've encountered yet meet the criteria. With ongoing research, this situation could greatly improve.

It’s perhaps telling that the United States for years was, embarrassingly, the only country in the world besides Somalia and South Sudan that had not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. That has now changed: the United States is the only nation that hasn’t bothered

If the festivities at Christmas and the New Year take the form of an in creasingly conventional hullabaloo - since we no longer have the winter solstice as our excuse in the electronic age, nor, in the age of Jesus Christ Superstar, that of the Nativity, nor even that of the snow and ice isolating each person in their own inner space and numbing the blood in the veins - if the end-of-year revels make people so anxious, it is because they are taking the measure of the twelve months that are to come, which they will slowly have to plough through one by one. It is the same with time today as it is with having a child: it is too long in the carrying, too long agrowing. We would like to have the chance to enjoy it right away, to have the fast-forwarded projection of the next century. Think how impatient we are for the year 2000, this whole millennium to get through, while we are already madly curious about the year 2020 and, no doubt, perfectly disenchanted as to what awaits us in '86. The celebrations of the millennium really are going to have to be brilliant to overcome the boredom we feel when we think of the next century. If only we could at least know that there were merely one or two hundred years to go, that would make things more interesting. There is nothing like a catastrophe to usher in a millennium. They regenerate time in the same way as a cloudburst regenerates low water reserves. Yet it is time, real time, we are going to be short of. If the year 2000 does not happen, it will be because time will simply have disappeared, as winter has in some latitudes. But this is a dream. I fear that we won't have sufficient reserves to get to this point, and that the year 2000 will disappoint us as the year 1000 did by not bringing with it the end of the world.

More broadly speaking, the milieus in which children spend their early years exert a very strong impact on the standards by which they subsequently judge the world around them. Whether in relation to fashion, food, geographical environment, or manner of speaking, models initially encountered by children continue to affect their tastes and preferences indefinitely, and these preferences prove very difficult to change. Closely related to standards of taste are an emerging set of beliefs about which behaviors are good and which values are the be cherished. In most cases, these standards initially reflect quite faithfully the value system encountered at home, at church, and at preschool or elementary school. Values with respect to behavior (you should not steal, you should salute the flag) and sets of beliefs (my country, right or wrong, all mommies are perfect, God is monitoring all of your actions) often exert a very powerful effect on children's actions and reactions. In some cultures, a line is drawn early between the moral sphere, where violations merit severe sanctions, and the conventional sphere, where practices are evaluated along a single dimension of morality. Even—and perhaps especially—when children are not conscious of the source and of the controversy surrounding these beliefs and values, unfortunate clashes may occur when they meet others raised with a contrasting set of values. It is assuredly no accident that Lenin and the Jesuits agreed on one precept: Let me have a child until the age of seven, and I will have that child for life.

I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them. Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one’s acceptance of the supernatural—of God, of a Beyond—but now I’m not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think. Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.” Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child’s-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face. I don’t know. But if those dried-up little scraps of fungus taught me anything, it is that there are other, stranger forms of consciousness available to us, and, whatever they mean, their very existence, to quote William James again, “forbid[s] a premature closing of our accounts with reality.” Open-minded. And bemushroomed. That was me, now, ready to reopen my own accounts with reality.

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, recognized the essential connection between education and freedom, writing in 1816, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”12 Still, the institution of the family prevailed over the interests of the state. Jefferson advocated for a highly decentralized system of education, locally controlled by parents in small districts, or “wards” as he called them, with little government involvement. He also believed that parental rights and individual liberty outweighed mandatory compliance. In 1817, Jefferson wrote, “It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.

I also learned more about the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which says that the imprisonment of children must be used only “as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time,” as Gaby cited in my trial. Despite ratifying that convention in 1991 as well, Israel routinely arrests and detains Palestinian children. In fact, each year, between five hundred and seven hundred Palestinian children are tried in Israel’s military courts. The most common charge brought against them is stone throwing, which is punishable by up to twenty years in prison.

The second assumption is that childhood is—and should be—mostly about preparation for what comes later. It doesn’t matter if you’re miserable now because what you experience as a child isn’t important in its own right. Everything is about the payoff, which doesn’t come until some (unspecified) period during adulthood. School, for example, may be awful for you—it may squelch your excitement about learning—but that’s okay because the purpose of education is to acclimate you to gratuitous unpleasantness.

And in the same way, in the palaces of privilege many generations of babies will be born who will eat what is fed to them and believe what is told to them, and grow up to be perfectly conventional members of fashionable society, wearing exactly the right clothes, thinking exactly the right thoughts, and doing exactly what all the other members of their set consider proper. But once in a blue moon will appear a freak, a black sheep, a crackpot—there will be many names for him—a child who will insist upon asking questions, and trying to make sure the answers are right; who will think for himself, and not as all the others think; who will not be sure that God in His Infinite Wisdom has entrusted to him the care of the property interests of the country.

partnership with UNICEF, IKEA requires all its suppliers to recognize the Convention on the Rights of the Child and makes regular spot-checks to ensure that no children are working. The UNICEF-IKEA project also helps set up women’s self-help groups in the communities in which they operate, and works to ensure that every child is immunized and in school.

Madre Carmela brought the covered bowl over to Rosalia. A subtle, sweet aroma reached Rosalia's nose. Her mouth watered in anticipation of whatever culinary surprise Madre Carmela had for her today. Instead of waiting for the sister to unfold the napkin, Rosalia pulled it back herself and almost gasped when she saw what delights were in store for her. Puffy clusters of dough in vanilla and chocolate were piled one on top of the other to form a misshapen pyramid. Chocolate and vanilla cream oozed from a few of the pastries. "Ha-ha! I see you couldn't wait," Madre Carmela gently teased Rosalia, who quickly looked up, her cheeks turning the same hot pink hue as the sugar roses the nuns had painstakingly created this morning for a wedding cake. "That's all right, my child. I'm happy to see you are feeling more comfortable here. Go ahead. Have as many as you like." Rosalia wondered which one she should try first- the chocolate or the vanilla. She'd always loved anything vanilla, so she opted for one of those first. Instead of taking a small, tentative bite out of the pastry, as she would have done her first few weeks at the convent, she popped the whole sweet at once into her mouth, eliciting another hearty laugh from Madre Carmela. But this time, Rosalia wasn't embarrassed. She closed her eyes, savoring the pastry's airy, flaky crust and the rich sweetness of the vanilla cream.

Perceptual motor therapy provides integrated movement experiences that remediate gross-motor, fine-motor, and visual discrimination problems. Activities, including sensory-input techniques, stimulate left/right brain communication to help the child interpret incoming information to the nervous system. Goals are to develop more mature patterns of response to specific stimuli, improve motor skills and balance, and stimulate alternate routes to memory and sequencing for those children who do not respond to the methods taught in the conventional classroom.