Australia – Brough happier fighting childhood obesity

Former federal government minister Mal Brough says he’s happier fighting childhood obesity than dealing with the current turmoil of Coalition politics in Canberra.

Last week instead of mind games of political intrigue and disloyalty, he dodged year four students at Burpengary State Primary School, north of Brisbane in games of Tail Tag and Jedi Warriors.

Looking fit, happy and healthy he expounded the virtues of the Bluearth Foundation, a national children’s charity of which he is CEO.

He said Bluearth programs took an “activity-based approach” to education to fight obesity, build confidence and cooperation and improve concentration.

Mr Brough was federal Minister for Families, Community services and Indigenous Affairs in the Howard government but lost the seat of Longman in 2007. He moved to Melbourne this year to take up the Bluearth position after dropping out of politics following the merger of the Liberal and National parties in Queensland.

He said he would return to live in his home state early next year and continue his work with Bluearth.

“Bluearth is really important work, something I enjoy doing and I can continue to do this from Queensland next year,” he said. “What I’m doing at the moment is useful. You could suggest I wouldn’t be doing something quite as useful if I was in another place [Canberra] this week.”

The foundation hires coaches to improve mainly primary school students’ physical and mental well-being through exercise as well as breathing, concentration and cooperative programs.

The course has been developed by teachers, psychologists, human movement experts and physiologists to “deliver long lasting behavioural, social and physical well being”.

Burpengary’s school principal Paula Passi said the course was an “overwhelming success” for its 145 year four students. The school is hoping to include year five students next year with the help of sponsorship from the Caboolture Rotary Club and Jadin Chemist group.

She said the children had learned skills including how to focus, persistence and self-regulation that they took from the playground into the classroom. She said the children improved academically and there were fewer problems such as bullying.

“The teachers have also learned a different way of tackling things from the coaches,” she said.

Mr Brough said more than 50,000 students participate in sessions around Australia with 1500 in 20 South-East Queensland schools.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/brough-happier-fighting-childhood-obesity-20091130-jzad.html

UK – Kids are on the mend

CHILDREN as young as five are being targeted in Swindon as part of a campaign to tackle childhood obesity.

NHS Swindon, in conjunction with Swindon Borough Council, will be launching three free courses in the town in January aimed at encouraging children to adopt healthier lifestyles.

The MEND programme – Mind, Exercise, Nutrition…Do it! – was successfully rolled out in Swindon earlier this year.

“We learnt so many things on the programme,” said mum, Kate Butler.

“My child is so much more active and as a family we have changed what we eat and how we prepare meals, which means that we all have lots more energy.”

Cherry Jones, assistant director of public health at NHS Swindon, revealed in September that child obesity figures in Swindon had levelled off after increasing during the previous decade.

She said with the schemes being introduced, there should be a decrease in those figures.

A British Heart Foundation poll recently revealed that nearly one in three children does less than an hour of exercise a week, and that one in five sees exercise as a chore that is only necessary for people who are overweight.

The survey also found that 55 per cent of the children polled were spending more than an hour a day chatting on websites or texting friends.

The MEND programme will be addressing these issues with its after-school courses which will take place twice a week for 10 weeks running from January at the Link Centre, Dorcan Recreation Complex and Greendown Community School.

The programme includes a series of sessions to get the whole family involved in helping children to change their eating and exercise habits, while also learning about nutrition. During the sessions, the youngsters will have the chance to prepare and eat healthier food.

Emma Creighton, the MEND programme manager, said: “Previous families on the course have had a great deal of success and it changes family’s lives.

“Children become healthier and fitter, and we have seen their self-esteem and confidence increase greatly.

“We are committed to offering families in Swindon the chance to improve their health with this fantastic free course.”

Places on MEND 5-7 and 7-13 are being offered free on a first come, first served basis.

Although there is no cost to attend the programme organisers will assess whether a child qualifies for the programme based on their age, weight and health. A parent or carer must accompany each child to the sessions, which must be booked in advance.

Parents wishing to check whether their child is a healthy weight of whether they might benefit from the MEND programme can visit www.mendcentral.org, which has a Body Mass Index calculator.

http://www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/news/4766624.Kids_are_on_the_mend/

US – Kids Needs Diet And Exercise To Avoid Obesity

It has been estimated that more than nine million kids are overweight, causing them to face potentially scary futures that could cause health care costs to spiral beyond control, according to a recent Reuters report.

If children don’t slim down by age 20, their life expectancy will drop by up to 20 years. An obese child is more susceptible than his peers to diabetes, heart disease and asthma. It could lead to sheer misery.

For this study, Dr. Ulf Ekelund of the MRC Epidemiology Unit in Cambridge, UK and his team looked at 1,862 children 9 to 10 years old, 23 percent of whom were overweight or obese. Their aim was to figure out the role of time spent in different activities and how this related to obesity.

Researchers used a “wristwatch-like device” which measured the amount and intensity of activity children got throughout the day. They were looking for associations between this activity and children’s waist size, amount of body fat, and body mass index (BMI). The children were also asked to report how much time they spent in sedentary activities, such as watching TV or using a computer.

According to Reuters, “Sixty-nine percent of the children were getting at least an hour of moderate physical activity a day, while 58 percent reported having less than two hours of screen time daily.”

The results of the study showed that even though children who were inactive had bigger waists and more body fat, much of this could be attributed to less physical activity.

However the strongest ties to waist size and fat mass could be attributed to the time children spent engaging in vigorous activity, and their combined moderate activity-vigorous activity time.

One factor in the rise of childhood obesity is the super-sizing of the American diet. The portion size of french fries, hamburgers and soda served in restaurants has grown by two to five times since 1977.

Approximately one-third of children are consuming this food on a daily basis. Another alarming statistic is that the average teenager is 13 percent less physically active today than in 1980, according to Dr. Lisa Sutherland, a researcher at the University of North Carolina. That’s a lot more calories going in and a lot less being burned.

The effects are clear. Pediatrics magazine estimates this trend is adding six pounds to each child every year.

Kids are not getting enough activity. In the past decade, the number of children participating in daily physical education classes at school has dropped from 42 percent to 29.

We cannot expect traditional physical education to be the only way to get kids in shape. The old adage, “It takes a village to raise a child” still rings true. Community groups, businesses, families and individuals can make a difference by creating better choices that are fun and exciting outside of the classroom for kids.

Getting kids involved in local races is one way to help them stay active. Whether they are 3 or 18 years of age, children become more aware of the positive effect fitness can have on their lives when they become involved at an early age.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1791820/kids_needs_diet_and_exercise_to_avoid_obesity/

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Australia – Children’s program does fat lot of good

A NATIONAL children’s activity program that has already snared more than $200 million of public money is proving an expensive flop, according to experts who say children who take part are doing barely more exercise overall than non-participants.

The Active After-School Communities program, run by the Australian Sports Commission, is intended to combat rising childhood obesity rates by encouraging school children to take part in exercise classes.

But obesity experts have rounded on the program, claiming it is doing little or nothing to help children lose weight and the money the project consumes would be better off poured into treatment programs.

The program was set up by the Howard government at a cost of $90m over four years, and was expanded by the Rudd government, which allocated it a further $120m in the 2007 budget. A federal parliamentary inquiry in May backed the scheme and recommended it be expanded.

But speaking at a seminar on obesity yesterday, University of Melbourne obesity expert Joe Proietto said it appeared children involved in the AASC were compensating for their increased activity by being more sedentary than other children for the other parts of the day.

There was also minimal difference in the children’s body mass indexes, a rough measure of overweight and obesity status.

By contrast, patients had to wait two years to see him in one of the few public hospital obesity clinics, and a further two years to see a surgeon if he decided obesity surgery was their best option.

Even after patients made it to the surgeon’s rooms, they faced a further three years’ wait until they could have their operation in the public system, Professor Proietto said.

“There’s now evidence that the Active After-School Communities Program . . . has done absolutely nothing to stop obesity in children,” he told the seminar, organised by the Australasian Society of Clinical and Experimental Pharmacologists and Toxicologists.

“We must always check out what we do in terms of prevention. Getting kids to do school exercise doesn’t work. If we are going to keep on ignoring the science we will be going down dead-ends continuously.”

He referred to research by experts at Deakin University, published earlier this month in the journal Obesity, which found the program was not cost-effective and that fewer than 70,000 participants had previously not been doing enough exercise.

A spokeswoman for the federal Health Department said the Australian Sports Commission did not agree that the AASC program was not cost-effective.

“The AASC program is not intended to exclusively reduce obesity or overweight in children,” she said. “(It) not only seeks to encourage traditionally inactive primary-school-aged children to participate in structured physical activity and sport, but also has a strong focus on local community involvement, and is intended to enhance community capacity to deliver high-quality, structured physical activity and sport programs for children.”

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26418740-421,00.html

US – President takes the lead in encouraging physical fitness Hey, kids, go play

President Obama is sending a message to the millions of American young people who sit on the couch and watch football on TV: Go outside and play.

The president appears in a new public-service announcement throwing a football around the South Lawn of the White House with three National Football League players and some local children. The PSA is slated to run during football games this holiday weekend and the rest of the season.

Obama is drawing attention to the NFL’s PLAY 60 campaign, a project to fight childhood obesity by encouraging kids to get active for 60 minutes a day. Adults can participate through the United We Serve volunteer program.

The idea seems absurd that the president needs to tell kids play is good, but it’s nothing new. Presidents since Dwight Eisenhower have been trying to get Americans off the couch.

In 1953, with American families settling into cozy, car-centered suburbs, a study found that American children lagged far behind those in Austria, Italy and Switzerland in physical fitness. Eisenhower was also concerned that many draftees were too physically unfit to serve in the military. Surely the former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in World War II could nip that troublesome trend.

Alas, he put his vice president, Richard Nixon, in charge of developing a plan to encourage fitness.

In December 1960, president-elect John Kennedy took the unprecedented step of announcing a new policy even before he was inaugurated. The crucial issue? Physical fitness.

In an article titled “The Soft American” in Sports Illustrated, Kennedy warned that Americans were neglecting their bodies and getting soft, and that was a menace to national security. He outlined a four-point plan to get people active. The ambitious effort would include a new White House office, the nation’s governors and federal departments.

“We do not want our children to be a generation of spectators,” JFK wrote. “Rather we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life.”

Check out www.fitness.gov for more history, a fitness test and guidelines for getting fit.

Every president takes a swing at improving fitness. And yet, we sink farther into the couch. Sixty-six million Americans are overweight or obese.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that obesity among children has doubled since 1980 and has tripled for those 12 to 19. One in three children in the United States is overweight or obese, first lady Michelle Obama tells audiences.

Childhood obesity is important as Congress struggles to reform the nation’s health system. Overweight teens are more at risk for Type 2 diabetes, heart trouble and other adult diseases.

The Obamas have made fighting childhood obesity a priority, starting with the White House vegetable garden. They promote fitness and visit schools to shine the media spotlight on healthy food choices. Change, however, will take more than a nudge from the White House.

Many school systems have gone in the wrong direction, cutting recess and physical education. School cafeterias have improved meals but they need to do more. The 30.5 million lunches and 10.1 million breakfasts served daily are balanced but contain too much salt and fat and too many calories, the Institute of Medicine cautioned. Its study recommended serving only low-fat or fat-free milk, requiring more orange and dark green vegetables and setting an upper limit on calories per meal. Still, school meals are a better choice than the fare at a la carte food lines, vending machines, snack bars and school stores with which meals compete.

Congress is holding hearings in preparation for reauthorizing the Child Nutrition Act. Some senators want the government to regulate all foods sold in schools. But food is big business.

Even milk is a battleground. Dairy trade groups are spending upwards of $1 million dollars in a media campaign to defend chocolate milk, the Los Angeles Times reported recently. Three fifth-graders in Barrington, Ill., joined the battle after their school system banned flavored milk from elementary and middle-school menus.

The children persuaded the schools to serve the treat on Fridays because children weren’t drinking the white milk. The kids were bringing sugary drinks from home. Officials say they’ll decide after January if the benefits of calcium and Vitamin D are worth the extra three teaspoons of sugar per half pint, the Times reported.

Maybe the kids could keep drinking the chocolate milk if they run outside and play.

http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2009/nov/29/president-takes-the-lead-in-encouraging-physical-f/

NZ – Webcams may keep eye on childcare

Parents worried about their children at childcare centres may soon be able to keep an eye on them from home or work.

A company is advertising a “parents’ eye” security camera that allows them to monitor their children via a cellphone or computer.

The company, which has just started marketing the technology in New Zealand, says the webcams will make pupils and teachers more accountable for their actions.

“A lot of vulnerable children can really be exposed, especially if a teacher or another kid does something to harm them. This will stop that from happening,” said Tyrone Voigt of Australian technology firm Syron.

But the assistant privacy commissioner has warned childcare centres that they need to be careful about using the technology.

“Camera technology is being used more and more – for good reasons in many instances – but there are risks with it, especially where material is being transmitted over the internet,” Katrine Evans said.

“Childcare centres should work closely with their employees and with all families … before installing any webcam system. After all, webcams allow parents and caregivers to view not only their own children but other people’s children too, and the employees in the centre. So they need to get everyone’s consent before using cameras.”

She also warned there would need to be protections in place to prevent people from copying footage and uploading it on to social networking sites.

The camera was advertised in the Early Childhood Council’s magazine, which is sent to about 2000 centres in New Zealand, but none has decided to use the technology yet.

The advertisement said being able to monitor a child in the classroom would give parents “peace of mind”.

“By using a unique password that allows parents to watch classroom activity … through a cellphone, [or] computer … parents can be reassured that the classroom is a secure environment.

“A quality school will have one or more ways for a parent, grandparent or guardian to observe classroom activity.”

Early Childhood Council chief executive Sarah Farquhar said there had long been concerns about having cameras in centres, but they were being overcome.

“There was fear the only purpose was to protect children against abuse. But now we have got through that and it’s now about enabling parents to keep in touch with their child’s activities during the day.

“It’s the way of the future. Otherwise it’s hard for parents to get access to their child’s world while they are working.”

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/3107666/Webcams-may-keep-eye-on-childcare

Playdough in the preschool classroom

Playdough can be found in almost any preschool classroom. It can be homemade or store bought, and it comes in just about any color or can be made into just about any color you like.

What is the benefit?
Playdough can and probably will make a mess on the table and floor but you can set a ball of playdough in front of just about any preschooler and he or she will find it enjoyable. Add a few cookie cutters, a rolling pin, or other toys and a new dimension of fun is created.

The benefit of playdough is the word “play”. When teachers introduce playdough, they usually do not have an ultimate agenda or ending outcome – the children are simply given opportunity to play. Play produces some of the best learning in young children.

Playdough increases fine motor strength and skills

In the photo above, the child has spent time pulling the playdough a part, putting it back together, and rolling the dough into a ball, and is now trying to pat the ball flat. All of these actions are a workout on small hands with out the frustration of having to cut on a line and with the ability to be creative or have fun.

Playdough offers opportunities to increase vocabulary as well
The teacher in this class set out only the color orange because it happen to be the week of Halloween. The teacher hoped to reinforce the color orange simply by setting out the playdough. This gives opportunity for conversations about the color word – orange. What other words can be emphasized through casual conversations with the child? How about words like soft, hard, small, big, slice, cut, mold, cold, warm.

Playdough naturally leads into scientific discovery
Does cold play dough feel different than warm play dough? What happens to the playdough if it is left out all night? What happens if the playdough gets wet? How does it taste? What ingredients are in the playdough? Letting children help make their own playdough also presents greater opportunities to learn.

Take time to observe the learning taking place at the playdough table

Preschoolers love to show you what they are creating. Some preschoolers will naturally work and socialize with one another while playing with the dough. Other preschoolers may rather work in silence. The beauty of playdough is that there really is no right or wrong – it is simply all about discovery, exploration, sensory, creativity, and play.

For recipes on how to make your own playdough – follow the links below!

10 Homemade playdough Recipes
Family Education Recipes for Playdough
Create-Kids-Crafts.com playdough recipes
Gluten Free Playdough recipe

http://preschoolprofessional.blogspot.com/2009/11/playdough-in-preschool-classroom.html

US – Pricey preschools: Nobody’s, everybody’s fault

It costs $12,000 to $20,000 to send one child to a preschool in San Francisco, a little less if you join a co-op. That’s insane.

I’m sure it’s not the schools’ fault. Schools have to pay San Francisco prices, rent San Francisco space and follow San Francisco regulations. And why shouldn’t they reap the benefits of the intense competition that keeps prices high?

I’m sure it’s not the regulators’ fault. They need to set and enforce the rules that keep our kids safe.

I’m sure it’s not the parents’ fault. They – we – just want the best for our kids, and we’re willing to pay for it if possible.

It’s nobody’s fault. Which makes it everybody’s fault.

Paying these prices is criminal. It’s criminal for those for whom it’s no big deal, because they bid up the price for everyone else. It’s criminal for those we know who are taking out second mortgages to get their kids into a “good” preschool. And it’s criminal for the regular and poor folks whose children probably need preschool more than the children of the wealthy but can’t even begin to pay for it.

Their kids pay the cost by being discriminated against when it comes time to compete for the private and public elementary schools these preschools feed into. The top private schools prefer “experienced” kids – part of the advantage parents are trying to buy through exorbitant tuition.

A moderate-size preschool with 50 kids, at $15,000 a year, raises about $750,000 to cover its costs. That should be plenty for four or five teachers, lunch and administrative help and even a San Francisco-size mortgage or rent. In fact, by my frugal calculations, half a million dollars would be generous compared with what our public schools have to live on.

Red state parents tell me they pay around $5,000 a year for quality preschools.

I’m not demanding that preschools lower their fees. But come on – for a city that claims to care for diversity and equality, this should not be allowed to continue.

We need more preschools in San Francisco with fees of $10,000 or less that offer safety, warmth, love and a smart curriculum for children from all kinds of families. Not through subsidies but through well-designed programs and regulations that enable and encourage affordable preschool and child care, and give parents a choice.

It’s not a right. It’s our individual and collective responsibility. We have to do it for ourselves.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/29/INSS1AGHA0.DTL#ixzz0YIvCh2CO

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/29/INSS1AGHA0.DTL

Shows promise – rating the revolution

Every school, tertiary institution and preschool in Australia is about to be hit by radical change. This year’s federal budget and the economic stimulus packages have cranked the Government’s education reform agenda into life.

The Education Revolution may be a snappy marketing phrase but it is apt in one respect: audacity. No federal government in recent times has grabbed control of education reform from the states and territories like this one has. No other recent administration has tried to simultaneously, in its first term of office, overhaul all the nation’s early childhood services, the schooling system and universities.

Schools

THE Government’s decision to introduce Australia’s first national curriculum for schools is the boldest step of all. After a few public squabbles between experts about what should be left in or out, the process of devising the prep-to-year-12 curriculum has been relatively smooth. Much of that success is due to a comprehensive series of consultations and the eminence of those academics in charge of refining each curriculum document.

English, maths, history and science will be phased in from 2011, with other subjects to follow. But the big test of the reform’s effectiveness will be how its implementation is managed in almost 10,000 primary and secondary schools. If it is underfunded and poorly evaluated, with education authorities scrimping on professional development for teachers, the results will be patchy at best.

From this year to 2012, the Federal Government will spend a record $62 billion on schools — almost double the amount spent in the previous four years — in its drive to improve literacy and numeracy, teacher quality and outcomes in low-socio-economic schools.

One of its flagship initiatives, the biggest school-building program in the nation’s history, has been criticised for its haste and some bureaucratic bungling. But overall, the response to the construction or upgrading of buildings in every primary and secondary school has been positive.

A survey by the Australian Primary Principals Association, which represents government and non-government schools, found 85 per cent of principals strongly endorsed the building project, with most of the others expressing minor concerns about its implementation. “It’s been an overwhelming success,” association president Leonie Trimper says.

“For the Government’s overall reforms so far I’d have to give them a score of eight out of 10. They’ve fixed the funding anomaly between primary and secondary schools that we’ve been trying to get governments to deal with for years. This is the first time a federal government has talked up the importance of primary schools and they’ve rejuvenated primary education.”

But Ms Trimper’s organisation is less enthusiastic about the Government’s decision to launch a schools website next year. My School will compare test results, student characteristics and the financial resources of all schools.

Many principals and teachers fear schools will be disadvantaged by an unfavourable comparison of their national literacy and numeracy test results. But other educators support Education Minister Julia Gillard’s argument that the new transparency will improve accountability and be used to help struggling schools.

Critics of the website point to Britain, where successive governments since 1992 have published school league tables, based on ranking national exam results in multiple subjects. That system is now in disarray, with teachers and principals calling for the league tables to be scrapped because they promote a narrow culture of “teaching to the test”.

Australian schools could find themselves under similar pressure. The Government hopes its decision to publish data in a different way — where schools will be compared with groups of statistically similar schools, whose students have similar socio-economic backgrounds — will make it difficult for the media to create league tables from the information.

Ms Gillard has repeatedly referred to the overwhelming research evidence that shows teacher quality is the most important predictor of student achievement. Many of the Government’s initiatives in curriculum and school improvement are likely to falter if it can’t find enough highly skilled professionals to deliver them.

The nation’s teacher shortage is already dire. Principals are expecting it to worsen as a large chunk of the profession nears retirement age. More than half of Victorian secondary and one-third of primary schools already have staff teaching subjects they are not qualified to teach, according to an Australian Education Union survey of public schools.

Initiatives to make teaching more attractive include $550 million of federal money to improve training and encourage education authorities to give higher rewards to the best teachers.

Given the scale of the teacher shortage and the difficulty in attracting the best students to the profession, it seems odd that the Government has eschewed a nationally consistent approach to restructuring teacher salaries. Instead it’s relying on each state and territory to come up with its own version of merit-based pay. Even the AEU, once a staunch opponent of such schemes, is developing its own proposal for performance pay.

The unavoidable truth is that the brightest students tend to flock to professions where six-figure salaries are perceived as the norm rather than the exception. For teaching to vault into that league, the Government would have to navigate an industrial and jurisdictional minefield to reach a deal on a merit-based salary structure, as well as providing unprecedented wage increases for one of the nation’s largest workforces. So far it’s shown little appetite for adding that task to an already crowded reform schedule.

Higher education

UNIVERSITIES are bracing for the biggest structural shake-up since the Dawkins reforms in the late 1980s.

More than $5 billion of federal money will be poured into the tertiary sector over the next six years to fund a big expansion in student numbers and research.

The current university funding model, where the Government caps student numbers by allocating Commonwealth-supported places, will be scrapped. It will be replaced by a system that links the funding of places to student demand. The move is in line with the Government’s target of increasing the number of those aged 25 to 34 with a university degree from 32 per cent of the Australian population to 40 per cent by 2025.

Tertiary leaders have applauded the funding change and the extra money to cover the indirect cost of research and better indexation of recurrent funding for teaching. But most of these changes won’t kick in until 2012.

University coffers have been depleted by the global financial crisis. Vice-chancellors are worried about how their institutions will fare over the next two years when they have to rely on existing recurrent funding and the prospect of fewer fee-paying international students due to the lag affect of the strong Australian dollar.

There is also disquiet about how universities are going to achieve the Government’s new national goal of lifting the proportion of university students from disadvantaged families from 16 per cent to 20 per cent of enrolments by 2020. Some vice-chancellors, including Melbourne University’s Glyn Davis, are concerned universities will struggle to reach the target because too many poor students are underperforming at school.

Professor Peter Coaldrake, the chair of Universities Australia, says the sector is pleased the Government has adopted many of the key recommendations of the Bradley review of higher education and the Cutler review of innovation.

“There are very big aspirations in the Government’s program,” he says. “We would not want to be churlish about the significant investment in student support issues and the Education Revolution generally. People are very pleased with the focus on education but we are also waiting to see the delivery of the package in its entirety.”

Early childhood

AUSTRALIA’S preschool sector is accustomed to being education’s poor cousin.

The nation’s record on early childhood education has been woeful. We have the second-lowest government investment among industrialised nations, wildly uneven standards in service quality and provision between states and territories, an undertrained, poorly paid workforce, chronic staff shortages and, most recently, the collapse of the country’s biggest childcare corporation, ABC Learning. All this in an era of surging demand for childcare.

No wonder the Federal Government’s $970 million pledge to give all four-year-olds access to kindergarten has excited early-childhood educators.

The play-oriented education programs, to be based on Australia’s first national early-years curriculum framework, will be delivered in childcare centres and kindergartens by 2013. Every child in the year before they start school will be taught by a university-trained, early-childhood teacher for 15 hours a week, for 40 weeks in the year.

The federal and state governments have alsoagreed to improve child staff ratios and staff qualifications in childcare centres.

Childcare workers without formal qualifications will be banned and centres must employ one carer for every four infants younger than two. Centres with more than 25 children will have to employ at least one university-qualified teacher.

The changes are expected to be signed off at a Council of Australian Governments meeting next month.

A massive increase in new buildings and trained staff will be needed to implement these reforms. The Government says it will spend $126 million to fund an extra 1500 university places nationwide to train early childhood teachers. It’s unlikely to be enough.

Victoria has the nation’s most developed early-childhood system. About 94 per cent of its four-year-olds are in preschool and the State Government subsidises 10 hours a week of their tuition by a kindergarten teacher.

Yet even Australia’s best childcare system faces enormous challenges to meet the new wave of initiatives. The 15-hour preschool target set by the Federal Government represents a 50 per cent increase in Victoria’s program delivery.

In Victoria alone, it is estimated that about 700 extra early childhood teachers will be needed to meet population growth, the new staffing ratios and the extra preschool hours.

Progress will be harder for such states as Queensland, where only 29 per cent of eligible children are in preschool.

Across Australia, commercial operators of long-day-care centres are already warning of big fee hikes to parents if they have to hire more staff.

Stay tuned for a fierce debate next year between parents, centre operators, local, state and federal governments about how much extra money each group is willing to pay to ensure that the early childhood reforms actually work.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/shows-promise–rating-the-revolution-20091127-jvun.html

Book Review – Evolutionary Psychology: Alternative Approaches

The human brain is the result of a long and complex evolutionary trajectory. Evolutionary psychology attempts to use this fact to understand the human brain’s particular capacities and limitations. Evolutionary psychology has provided many key insights into human behavior. First, since the human brain is extremely costly to nurture and maintain, its general contribution to human fitness must be high, and hence the brain must be an adaptation to the particular conditions under which our species evolved. Therefore, understanding these conditions may shed strong light on human psychology. Second, the human brain’s information processing capacities are likely to be closely associated with the particular adaptive needs of our species, rather than being a simple, general purpose information processor. Thus, rather than being infinitely malleable, humans are predisposed to behave in certain ways in the sense that under a very broad range of environmental conditions some behaviors will be virtually universally exhibited and others will be extremely rare, while behaviors to which we are not predisposed will be exhibited either not at all, or only in a very restricted set of environmental circumstances. In short, evolutionary psychology holds that a consideration of our evolutionary history is extremely powerful in generating plausible hypotheses concerning human psychology that can be tested using the standard tools of experimental research.

Those who reject evolutionary psychology in the general form stated above are generally either ill-informed or have a political or religious agenda that clouds their scientific judgment. Creationists, for instance, cannot accept evolutionary psychology. Nor can Marxists or extreme cultural determinists, for whom human nature either does not exist, or takes the form of infinite cultural malleability.

Evolutionary psychology, then, is simply one more tool (albeit an unusually powerful tool) in the behavioral scientist’s repertoire. However, a small but highly creative and extremely influential group of evolutionary psychologists, including D. Buss, J. Tooby, L. Cosmides, D. Symons, S. Pinker have constructed a version of evolutionary psychology that includes key assertions that are highly contentious and many believe are incorrect. These thinkers appear to many scientists (myself included) to form a sort of scientific cult: they always agree with each other, they reject any outside criticism, their message never changes, and they recruit by directly training new members rather than having their ideas accepted by the general scientific community. To distinguish this group from evolutionary psychology in general, I will call their doctrine EvPsych (the book under review calls them “narrow” evolutionary psychologists, a particularly poor choice of words, since they are anything but narrow, and Kluwer, the bureaucratic and infinitely stuffy publisher, true to form, insists on an identically worded disclaimer at the head of each chapter of book, saying that by “narrow” they do not mean “narrow.”)

EvPsychers believe that (a) human culture is an effect of human genetics, and culture explains nothing important concerning human behavior; (b) human behavior in general is an adaptation to the specific conditions of the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA) in which our species emerged from other hominid species; (c) the human brain is a highly modular organ, each module having emerged to solve a particular evolutionary problem; (d) for this reason, the human brain lacks all the characteristics of a general information processor, and cannot solve any problems other than those that challenged our existence in our dim evolutionary past. In particular, we are doomed to apply old, generally ineffective, methods to the solution of new problems. This is the tragedy of the human condition.

EvPsych is wrong in each of the above assertions, and everyone knows this except the EvPsychers themselves. Moreover, they have hindered the general integration of evolutionary psychology into the repertoire of behavioral science with their tendentious and outlandish claims. The book under review is an important contribution towards restoring evolutionary psychology to its rightful place in the behavioral sciences. It’s main attraction is that the editors, Steven Scher and Fredrick Rauscher, recognize that the best critique is a cogent alternative, and this is exactly what the various chapter of the book provide for us. I do not have the space to comment on each of the thirteen chapters, but a few prominent themes emerge.

First, several authors challenge the coarse-grained modularity assumption of EvPsych, using our contemporary neuroscientific and developmental knowledge of the structure of the brain. This includes especially stunning contributions of Steven Quarts, William Bechtel, and Jennifer Mundale. These authors present the state of the art understanding of the neurological development of the human brain from embryo to adult form, and argue for a “developmental evolutionary psychology” in which the brain has a fine-grained modularity that results from the dynamic interaction between organism and environment during growth and maturation of the individual.

Second, several authors challenge the “gene-centered” view of evolution, which the EvPsychers borrowed from Dawkins, Hamilton, Wilson and other biologists who dominated evolutionary theory in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Thus Linnda Caporeal argues for “repeated assembly,” which is a form of what is commonly known as gene-culture coevolution, and David Sloan Wilson points out the errors in reasoning that lead gene-centered theorists to reject truly altruistic (other-regarding) behavior in humans. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy exposes the sexual stereotypes of the gene-centered approach by reviewing the evidence on female mate choice.

Several chapters are philosophically-motivated critiques of EvPsych. I do not believe that philosophers ever contribute by criticizing scientific theories, and I think my view is confirmed by this book.

I quite recommend this book to those who are new to the field. There is some excellent material here. A major drawback is the publisher, Kluwer. The book is grossly overpriced, there is no index or general bibliography, and the typeface is cramped and low resolution.

Overview
Evolutionary psychology has been dominated by one particular method for studying the mind and behavior. This is the first book to both question that monopoly and suggest a broad range of particular alternatives. Psychologists, philosophers, biologists, anthropologists, and others offer different methods for combining psychology and evolution. They recommend specific changes to evolutionary psychology using a wide variety of theoretical assumptions. In addition, some essays analyze the underpinnings of the dominant method, relate it to the context of evolutionary and psychological theory and to general philosophy of science, and discuss how to test approaches to evolutionary psychology. The aim of this collection is not to reject evolutionary psychology but to open up new vistas which students and researchers can use to ensure that evolutionary psychology continues to thrive.

http://childpsychology.ergows.com/uncategorized/evolutionary-psychology-alternative-approaches/