Humanizing Pedagogy in the Age of War and the Science of Reading

“I’m honestly shocked by our results,” Brinkley said. “Caregivers are … literally feeling better. They’re reporting spending more time with their children, more outings, taking them to the library, spending more time reading — all of these pieces that are so crucial to parent-child bonding, mental health, wellness.”

(Cathie Anderson, canderson@sacbee.com, Sacramento Bee, October 23, 2023)

Young children love recess. They know instinctively what’s good for their humanness. The opportunity to climb on the monkey bars, to shoot baskets even when the hoop has no net, to talk to teachers like real people, to play catch or dodge those hard soft red balls that can sting like crazy for two seconds, to dizzy themselves on merry-go-rounds, to chant and twirl and jump rope when the equipment is available—such opportunities motivate unconvinced second graders to get out of bed and catch the bus on those mornings they don’t want to go. Even young kids who attend high-poverty glass box schools, weeds growing through asphalt cracks, bare dirt turning to mud in spring and fall rain, love recess, though they may stand in many more and longer lines.

Climbing on tires

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have a standing commitment to promoting playgrounds as a crucial part of schooling primarily because of the positive effects of physical activity on the physical and mental health of learners. Amholt et el. (2022) drilled down on the need for conscious planning on the part of school leaders not just regarding physical space and equipment, but regarding a playground science and philosophy to accommodate developmental changes in children.

Recent data from WHO suggest that as many as 80% of elementary school students globally do not meet standards of physical activity with significant negative implications for adult life. One problem Amholt et al. (2022) highlighted cuts through all socioeconomic layers of the SES truth cake: diminished physical activity (PA) among ‘tweens, kids from 9-12 years old:

“The rate of decline in PA is especially high during the tween years (9–12 years) (Rauner et al., 2015). …[C]hildren’s social emotional world changes and their focus on social status and relationships with peers increases…resulting in a shift of priorities lowering PA (Frost et al., 2012; Lightfoot et al., 2009). …[T]heir behaviour changes from intuitive [instinctive?] to more self-conscious, [l]ead[ing] to an ongoing evaluation of their own appearance to others (Lightfoot et al., 2009). These changes call for a specific need to understand how to motivate tweens [emphasis added] to be more physically active.”

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There are, of course, a myriad of moving parts, what Latour calls “actants,” in a young child’s life far more consequential than a school playground. Cathie Anderson working for the Bee interviewed Catherine Brinkley, a UC Davis researcher, who studied the effects of a guaranteed minimum income experiment in Yolo County. According to Anderson, Yolo County began a pilot project like several other projects across California to look at durable consequences of the expenditure as a way to show downstream savings of tax dollars. It used to be that funding followed scientific evidence of efficacy and durability of governmental expenditures—or am I guilty of looking backwards through rose colored glasses to the good old days?

As you recall, during the 2020 Presidential campaign Andrew Yang, representing yesterday, was the complete opposite of GOP candidate Vivak Ramaswami, on the right, now representing tomorrow, on the left. Yang insisted throughout the breathtakingly reasonable Democratic debates all thinks considered (think: DeSantis, Pence, the guy from Minnesota? Nebraska?)—Andrew insisted that he would go to work on Day One on a guaranteed basic income for all Americans, enough to live with dignity and security, a home, a much stronger medicine than Yolo had access to. That was then. This is now.

“Ramaswamy, 38, is the youngest candidate in the GOP field. He found[ed]…Roivant Sciences, a biotechnology firm, … [and then] Strive Asset Management, an investment management firm that specialized in “anti-woke” asset management, refusing to consider environmental, social and corporate governance, or ESG, factors when investing. He is the author of “Woke Inc.” and “Nation of Victims.”

Yolo County had skin in the game. These were single mothers with children, 67 of them, many living in cars, living among the people. If Vivak had his way, if forced to fund such studies, the only indicators worth looking at would be whether these mothers managed to get or keep jobs, stay out of jail, spend the money on food not booze or drugs, and the like. But some of the California projects are using different indicators to measure different outcomes bound up in mental health. For example, Brinkley documented a 30% reduction in measures of depression among the mothers who benefited from the first year of the Yolo experiment. Sarah Marikos, who leads ACE Resource Network, [Note: This website is inspired and inspiring] an organization with the mission of preventing toxic stress in children, was quoted in the Bee as follows:

“If these results hold and can hold over the longer term, what we could potentially see is a reduction … in the mental health challenges that mothers and parents are experiencing, which could reduce the number of ACEs that children experience at a really young age”

In the language of pediatrics they’re called “ACEs” for Adverse Childhood Experiences. The Bay Area Research Consortium on Toxic Stress and Health, made up of the Center for Youth Wellness, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland and University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), was formed to foster research and to promote development of scientific tools to comprehensively address negative health outcomes associated with exposure to ACEs.

A casual visit to this consortium’s website reveals a longstanding, deeply rooted network of researchers producing valuable scientific knowledge that, when combined with some version of Andrew Yang’s idea to guarantee a basic income with dignity and security, could break down the glass barriers between degrees of inequality in terms of capacity to profit from schooling on day one. It is heartening to know that it’s not a failure of the American imagination driving us toward a harsher world, but frustrating to know it’s a failure of will and funding helped along by a Constitutionally determined glass box badly regulating a democratic society with no easy fixes at the moment.

It would be a tragedy to work hard for a higher quality of life for young children only to forklift them to a factory model school where SoR ©️ begins to chip away at the joys of reading and writing…