Issues in Education: The Whole Child
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Let's Talk About the Whole
Child
Commentary by Nancy DeFord, ASCD president, July, 2007
I'm always seeking equilibrium—that elusive balance between work and family, quiet time and social functions, domestic projects I've rescheduled more than once and professional adventures that entice me away from home.
My teaching career and my work as an educational consultant and administrator follow a similar pattern. I've had a lifelong interest in creativity and the arts. I taught art and history and conducted outdoor adventures and seminars for gifted youth. I have always tried to lead along a path of balance.
Over the past few years, as education in the United States has focused increasingly on high-stakes testing in reading and mathematics, the areas that were once so important in my own education, personal life, and professional career seem to have become marginalized. When they haven't been overtly suppressed, they have simply been left out of the conversation.
It seems to me the
increased focus on how to help students gain a command of literacy and
mathematics has overwhelmed us so much that conversations about how children
become leaders, or ethical citizens, or creative thinkers, are pushed toward the
back of the room or even outside of it, where they cannot be heard.
The nation, not schools,
takes lousy care of our children
Commentary by Julia Steiny, Providence (RI)
Journal, June 3, 2007
From the beginning of the educational “accountability” movement in the mid-1990s, the demand that schools “close the achievement gap” has set educators’ teeth on edge. The “gap” refers to the wide discrepancy between the test scores of middle-class white children and those who are low-income and non-white.
Educators know first hand that less-privileged students — an ever-growing number, seemingly — enter school at a significant disadvantage compared to their more privileged peers. That gap opened up long before the school bell tolled. Even in schools where the low-income children have made strong gains, the gap persists. Schools have little impact on poverty or the lack of good health care, decent jobs for parents, affordable housing and other social factors that contribute to a child’s readiness to learn.
The Whole Child: An International PerspectiveIf children are indeed our future—and who could dispute that premise?—then it follows that investing in children on the national level makes a whole lot of sense. But do national agendas reflect this priority? And are some countries doing a better job investing in their children than others?
In a recent report, Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries, UNICEF's Innocenti Research Centre looks at the well-being of children and young people in 21 nations of the industrialized world. The report measures child well-being in six categories: material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviors and risks, and subjective sense of well-being. Findings are based on internationally comparable data, such as that generated by national indices of child well-being (available, for example, in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland) and by such international surveys as Health Behavior in School-aged Children (HBSC) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
