A number of curious communities sprang up across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: simulated cities, states, and nations in which children played the roles of legislators, police officers, bankers, journalists, shopkeepers, and other adults. They performed real work—passing laws, growing food, and constructing buildings, among other tasks—inside virtual worlds. In this book, Jennifer Light examines the phenomena of “junior republics” and argues that they marked the transition to a new kind of “sheltered” childhood for American youth. Banished from the labor force and public life, children inhabited worlds that mirrored the one they had left. Light describes the invention of junior republics as independent institutions and how they were later established at schools, on playgrounds, in housing projects, and on city streets, as public officials discovered children's role playing helped their bottom line. The junior republic movement aligned with cutting-edge developmental psychology and educational philosophy, and complemented the era's fascination with models and miniatures, shaping educational and recreational programs across the nation. Light's account of how earlier generations distinguished "real life" from role playing reveals a hidden history of child labor in America and offers insights into the deep roots of such contemporary concepts as gamification, play labor, and virtuality.

Today nearly half of all people in the Middle East are under the age of fifteen. Yet little is known about the new generation of boys and girls who are growing up in a world vastly different from that of their parents, a generation who will be the leaders of tomorrow. This groundbreaking anthology is an attempt to look at the current situation of children by presenting materials by both Middle Eastern and Western scholars. Many of the works have been translated from Arabic, Persian, and French. The forty-one pieces are organized into sections on the history of childhood, growing up, health, work, education, politics and war, and play and the arts. They are presented in many forms: essays in history and social science, poems, proverbs, lullabies, games, and short stories. Countries represented are Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Israel/West Bank, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Lebanon, Turkey, Yemen, and Afghanistan. This book complements Elizabeth Fernea's earlier works, Women and the Family in the Middle East and Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak (coedited with Basima Bezirgan). Like them, it will be important reading for everyone interested in the Middle East and in women's and children's issues.

Undernutrition contributes to the deaths of about 5.6 million children under five in the developing world each year. It can lead to poor school performance and dropout, it threatens girls' future ability to bear healthy children and it perpetuates a generational cycle of poverty. This volume of Progress for Children reports on the world's performance in improving nutrition in young children, a crucial step towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals.

This series of country reports focuses on quality issues in early childhood education and care.

There once was a time when teachers and communities were able to exercise democratic control over their schools. Now that power has been taken away, both centralised and privatised, under the guise of “reform.” There is a forgotten history of the time before reform, and within it a bright horizon is visible, reachable only if educators and society at large can learn the lessons of the past. Robb Johnson entered the classroom as a new teacher in the 1980s and has spent a lifetime alongside his pupils encouraging both creativity and a healthy distrust of authority. This book is both memoir and polemic, a celebration of children’s innate desire to learn, share, cooperate, and play, as well as a critique of bureaucratic interference. Johnson details how we ended up with the contemporary mass education systems and why they continually fail to give children what they need. Combining practical experience as a teacher with detailed pedagogical knowledge, and a characteristic playful style, Johnson is both court chronicler and jester, imparting information and creatively admonishing the self-important figureheads of the reform agenda. This book considers how schools and education relate to the wider society in which they are located and how they relate to the particular needs and abilities of the people who experience them. It shows that schools and education are contested spaces that need to be reclaimed from the state, and turned into places where people can grow, not up, not old, but as individuals. It offers alternative ways of running classrooms, schools, and perhaps even society.

The 2005 edition of UNICEFs annual report examines the key issues which threaten the welfare of children around the world, using the concept of childhood as the state and condition of a childs life. The Convention of the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, offers a new definition of childhood based on human rights; yet for hundred of millions of children the promise of childhood is threatened by poverty, armed conflict and HIV/AIDS threaten their survival and development. The report examines these three major threats in detail, and offers a comprehensive agenda of action to combat them. It concludes by calling on all stakeholders, including governments, donors, international agencies and communities to reaffirm and recommit to their moral and legal responsibilities to children.

Provides an innovative reinterpretation of the cultural revolution through the medium of the poster -- a major component of popular print culture in China.

The Stoic Idea of the City examines the political thought of the early Greek Stoics. It provides new interpretations of Zeno's Republic and of the later doctrine of the cosmic city, and an original analysis of the associated transition from republicanism to natural law theory. It offers students of classics and the history of political thought the clear and accessible introduction to the subject which has long been needed.