A Child Of The New Millennium

The contributors and editors of this volume begin from the assumption that the changes wrought by globalization compel us to reflect upon the status of the child and childhood at the end of the 20th century. Their essays consider what techniques and technologies are used to govern the child, what role the family plays, what is global and what is culturally specific in the changes, and how the subject is constructed and construed.

Contributed articles on development, abuse, and health of children in India.

The most ambitious work of fiction by a writer widely considered the most important novelist working in China today In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flowerbeds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee—whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can only be reached underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by buried secrets and transcendent delusions. Can Xue's masterful love stories for the new millennium trace love's many guises—satirical, tragic, transient, lasting, nebulous, and fulfilling—against a kaleidoscopic backdrop drawn from East and West of commerce and industry, fraud and exploitation, sex and romance.

In recent years human rights have assumed a central position in the discourse surrounding international development, while human rights agencies have begun to more systematically address economic and social rights. This edited volume brings together distinguished scholars to explore the merging of human rights and development agendas at local, national and international levels. They examine how this merging affects organisational change, operational change and the role of relevant actors in bringing about change. With a focus on practice and policy rather than pure theory, the volume also addresses broader questions such as what human rights and development can learn from one another, and whether the connections between the two fields are increasing or declining. The book is structured in three sections: Part I looks at approaches that combine human rights and development, including chapters on drivers of change; indicators; donor; and legal empowerment of the poor. Part II focuses on organisational contexts and includes chapters on the UN at the country level; EU development cooperation; PLAN's children's rights-based approach; and ActionAid's human rights-based approach. Part III examines country contexts, including chapters on the ILO in various settings; the Congo; Ethiopia; and South Africa. Human Rights and Development in the new Millennium: Towards a Theory of Change will be of strong interest to students and scholars of human rights, development studies, political science and economics.

Contributed articles on development, abuse, and health of children in India.

Robert L. Humphrey was an Iwo Jima veteran, Harvard graduate, and cross cultural conflict resolution specialist during the Cold War. He proposed the "Dual Life Value Theory" of Human Nature. From the experiences of childhood in the Great Depression, trips as a teenager in the Panamanian Merchant Marines, national-class boxing, the awe-inspiring sights of selfless sacrifice on Iwo Jima, and finally, fifteen years in overseas ideological warfare, Humphrey observed that universal values exist and, ultimately control human behavior. Humphrey is a graduate of Wisconsin University, Harvard Law School, and the Fletcher School of Diplomacy. At the beginning of the Cold War, he left a teaching position at MIT to help lead the struggle against Communism. Finding that U.S. education was contributing to, rather than reducing, American overseas problems, he developed a new leadership approach that overcame Ugly American syndrome among hundreds of thousands in crucial Third World areas. More recently, his methodology won commendations for educating the alleged uneducable: Mexican-American street-gang youths in southern California, and Canadian Native teenage dropouts. Until Communism's fall, Humphrey kept his new methods confidential. Those methods are significant: (1) From his experiences with young infantrymen in heavy combat, and with the peasants in many villages of the world, he perceived humankind's basic goodness that philosophers have missed or under-rated. (2) In place of compartmentalized, primarily mental education, Humphrey has developed a human-nature-guided (moral, physical, artistic, mental) approach.

Although Montessori's name is almost universally known in education circles today, and there are countless nursery schools throughout the world using the "Montessori Method," the real core of her thinking has remained largely misunderstood. Most people regard the method as a system for the education of very young children. And most who have some direct experience of it, either as parent or teacher, would regard it as involving a certain set of procedures and specialized educational materials with clear and elaborate instructions for their use. However, the essence of Montessori's philosophy of education is in reality far broader than this, and contains a powerful message for educators everywhere. What is less well-known about Montessori's work is that she began by establishing the effectiveness of her approach at the pre-elementary level, but also strongly encouraged the extension of her method to the higher levels of education. Wentworth's purpose in writing this book is to elucidate this vital aspect of Maria Montessori's life's work and to show how it applies to real-life teaching situations. She believed that by transforming the process of children's education she could help to transform the attitudes of the adults they will later become, and so those of society and the world at large--a message she promoted as vitally relevant to the future of humankind as a whole.