Early childhood education

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Test written by four-year-old child in 1972, former Soviet Union. The lines are not ideal but the teacher (all red writing) gave the best grade (5) anyway.

Early childhood education (ECE; also nursery education) is a branch of education theory which relates to the teaching of little children (formally and informally) up through the age of eight (birth through Grade 3). Infant/toddler education, a subset of early childhood education, denotes the education of children from birth to age two. It emerged as a field of study during the Enlightenment, particularly in European countries with high literacy rates. It continued to grow through the nineteenth century as universal primary education became a norm in the Western world. In recent years, early childhood education has become a prevalent public policy issue, as municipal, state, and federal lawmakers consider funding for preschool and pre-K. It is described as an important period in a child's development. It refers to the development of a child's personality. ECE is also a professional designation earned through a post secondary education program. For example, in Ontario, Canada, the designations ECE (Early Childhood Educator) and RECE (Registered Early Childhood Educator) may only be used by registered members of the College of Early Childhood Educators, which is made up of accredited child care professionals who are held accountable to the College's standards of practice.

History

The history of early childhood care and education (ECCE) refers to the development of care and education of children from birth through eight years old throughout history^[1]. ECCE has a global scope, and caring for and educating young children has always been an integral part of human societies. Arrangements for fulfilling these societal roles have evolved over time and remain varied across cultures, often reflecting family and community structures as well as the social and economic roles of women and men.^[8] Historically, such arrangements have largely been informal, involving family, household and community members. The formalization of these arrangements emerged in the nineteenth century with the establishment of kindergartens for educational purposes and day nurseries for care in much of Europe and North America, Brazil, China, India, Jamaica and Mexico.^{[9][10][11][12]}

Context

Children remember and repeat actions they observe.

While the first two years of a child's life are spent in the creation of a child's first "sense of self", most children are able to differentiate between themselves and others by their second year. This differentiation is crucial to the child's ability to determine how they should function in relation to other people.^[13] Parents can be seen as a child's first teacher and therefore an integral part of the early learning process.^[14]

Early childhood attachment processes that occurs during early childhood years 0–2 years of age, can be influential to future education. With proper guidance and exploration children begin to become more comfortable with their environment, if they have that steady relationship to guide them. Parents who are consistent with response times, and emotions will properly make this attachment early on. If this attachment is not made, there can be detrimental effects on the child in their future relationships and independence. There are proper techniques that parents and caregivers can use to establish these relationships, which will in turn allow children to be more comfortable exploring their environment.  Academic Journal Reference This provides experimental research on the emphasis on caregiving effecting attachment. Education for young students can help them excel academically and socially. With exposure and organized lesson plans children can learn anything they want to. The tools they learn to use during these beginning years will provide lifelong benefits to their success. Developmentally, having structure and freedom, children are able to reach their full potential.

Learning through play

A child exploring comfortably due to having a secure attachment with caregiver.

Early childhood education often focuses on learning through play, based on the research and philosophy of Jean Piaget, which posits that play meets the physical, intellectual, language, emotional and social needs (PILES) of children. Children's curiosity and imagination naturally evoke learning when unfettered. Learning through play will allow a child to develop cognitively.^[15] This is the earliest form of collaboration among children. In this, children learn through their interactions with others. Thus, children learn more efficiently and gain more knowledge through activities such as dramatic play, art, and social games.^[16]

Tassoni suggests that "some play opportunities will develop specific individual areas of development, but many will develop several areas."^[17] Thus, It is important that practitioners promote children’s development through play by using various types of play on a daily basis. Allowing children to help get snacks ready helps develop math skills (one-to-one ratio, patterns, etc.), leadership, and communication.^[18] Key guidelines for creating a play-based learning environment include providing a safe space, correct supervision, and culturally aware, trained teachers who are knowledgeable about the Early Years Foundation.

Davy states that the British Children's Act of 1989 links to play-work as the act works with play workers and sets the standards for the setting such as security, quality and staff ratios.^[19] Learning through play has been seen regularly in practice as the most versatile way a child can learn. Margaret McMillan (1860-1931) suggested that children should be given free school meals, fruit and milk, and plenty of exercise to keep them physically and emotionally healthy. Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) believed that play time allows children to talk, socially interact, use their imagination and intellectual skills. Maria Montessori (1870-1952) believed that children learn through movement and their senses and after doing an activity using their senses. When young students have group play time it also helps them to be more empathetic towards each other.^[20]

In a more contemporary approach, organizations such as the National Association of the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) promote child-guided learning experiences, individualized learning, and developmentally appropriate learning as tenets of early childhood education.^[21]

Piaget provides an explanation for why learning through play is such a crucial aspect of learning as a child. However, due to the advancement of technology, the art of play has started to dissolve and has transformed into "playing" through technology. Greenfield, quoted by the author, Stuart Wolpert, in the article, "Is Technology Producing a Decline in Critical Thinking and Analysis?", states, "No media is good for everything. If we want to develop a variety of skills, we need a balanced media diet. Each medium has costs and benefits in terms of what skills each develops." Technology is beginning to invade the art of play and a balance needs to be found.^[22]

Many oppose the theory of learning through play because they think children are not gaining new knowledge. In reality, play is the first way children learn to make sense of the world at a young age. As children watch adults interact around them, they pick up on their slight nuances, from facial expressions to their tone of voice. They are exploring different roles, learning how things work, and learning to communicate and work with others. These things cannot be taught by a standard curriculum, but have to be developed through the method of play. Many preschools understand the importance of play and have designed their curriculum around that to allow children to have more freedom. Once these basics are learned at a young age, it sets children up for success throughout their schooling and their life. Many Early Childhood programs provide real life props and activities to enrich the children's play, enabling them to learn various skills through play.^{[citation needed]}

Theories of child development

The Developmental Interaction Approach is based on the theories of Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, John Dewey and Lucy Sprague Mitchell. The approach focuses on learning through discovery.^[23] > Jean Jacques Rousseau recommended that teachers should exploit individual children's interests in order to make sure each child obtains the information most essential to his personal and individual development.^[24] The five developmental domains of childhood development include:^[25]
 

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

• Physical: the way in which a child develops biological and physical functions, including eyesight and motor skills
• Social: the way in which a child interacts with others^[26] Children develop an understanding of their responsibilities and rights as members of families and communities, as well as an ability to relate to and work with others.^[27]
• Emotional: the way in which a child creates emotional connections and develops self-confidence. Emotional connections develop when children relate to other people and share feelings.
• Language: the way in which a child communicates, including how they present their feelings and emotions, both to other people and to themselves. At 3 months, children employ different cries for different needs. At 6 months they can recognize and imitate the basic sounds of spoken language. In the first 3 years, children need to be exposed to communication with others in order to pick up language. "Normal" language development is measured by the rate of vocabulary acquisition.^[28]
• Cognitive skills: the way in which a child organizes information. Cognitive skills include problem solving, creativity, imagination and memory.^[29] They embody the way in which children make sense of the world. Piaget believed that children exhibit prominent differences in their thought patterns as they move through the stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor period, the pre-operational period, and the operational period.^[30]

Vygotsky’s socio-cultural learning theory

Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed a "socio-cultural learning theory" that emphasized the impact of social and cultural experiences on individual thinking and the development of mental processes.^[31] Vygotsky's theory emerged in the 1930s and is still discussed today as a means of improving and reforming educational practices.

Vygotsky argued that since cognition occurs within a social context, our social experiences shape our ways of thinking about and interpreting the world.^[32] Although Vygotsky predated social constructivists, he is commonly classified as one. Social constructivists believe that an individual's cognitive system is a resditional learning time. Vygotsky advocated that teachers facilitate rather than direct student learning.^[33] His approach calls for teachers to incorporate students’ needs and interests.

Piaget’s constructivist theory

Jean Piaget's constructivist theory gained influence in the 1970s and '80s. Although Piaget himself was primarily interested in a descriptive psychology of cognitive development, he also laid the groundwork for a constructivist theory of learning.^[34] Piaget believed that learning comes from within: children construct their own knowledge of the world through experience and subsequent reflection. He said that "if logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning." Within Piaget's framework, teachers should guide children in acquiring their own knowledge rather than simply transferring knowledge.^[35]

According to Piaget’s theory, when young children encounter new information, they attempt to accommodate and assimilate it into their existing understanding of the world. Accommodation involves adapting mental schemas and representations in order to make them consistent with reality. Assimilation involves fitting new information into their pre-existing schemas. Through these two processes, young children learn by equilibrating their mental representations with reality. They also learn from mistakes.^[36]

A Piagetian approach emphasizes experiential education; in school, experiences become more hands-on and concrete as students explore through trial and error.^[37] Thus, crucial components of early childhood education include exploration, manipulating objects, and experiencing new environments. Subsequent reflection on these experiences is equally important.^[38]

Piaget’s concept of reflective abstraction was particularly influential in mathematical education.^[39] Through reflective abstraction, children construct more advanced cognitive structures out of the simpler ones they already possess. This allows children to develop mathematical constructs that cannot be learned through equilibration — making sense of experiences through assimilation and accommodation — alone.^[40]

According to Piagetian theory, language and symbolic representation is preceded by the development of corresponding mental representations. Research shows that the level of reflective abstraction achieved by young children was found to limit the degree to which they could represent physical quantities with written numerals. Piaget held that children can invent their own procedures for the four arithmetical operations, without being taught any conventional rules.^[41]

Piaget’s theory implies that computers can be a great educational tool for young children when used to support the design and construction of their projects. McCarrick and Xiaoming found that computer play is consistent with this theory.^[42] However, Plowman and Stephen found that the effectiveness of computers is limited in the preschool environment; their results indicate that computers are only effective when directed by the teacher.^[43] This suggests, according to the constructivist theory, that the role of preschool teachers is critical in successfully adopting computers.^[44]

Kolb's experiential learning theory

David Kolb's experiential learning theory, which was influenced by John Dewey, Kurt Lewin and Jean Piaget, argues that children need to experience things in order to learn: "The process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. Knowledge results from the combinations of grasping and transforming experience." The experimental learning theory is distinctive in that children are seen and taught as individuals. As a child explores and observes, teachers ask the child probing questions. The child can then adapt prior knowledge to learning new information.
Kolb breaks down this learning cycle into four stages: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation, and active experimentation. Children observe new situations, think about the situation, make meaning of the situation, then test that meaning in the world around them.^[45]

The practical implications of early childhood education

In recent decades, studies have shown that early childhood education is critical in preparing children to enter and succeed in the (grade school) classroom, diminishing their risk of social-emotional mental health problems and increasing their self-sufficiency later in their lives.^[46] In other words, the child needs to be taught to rationalize everything and to be open to interpretations and critical thinking. There is no subject to be considered taboo, starting with the most basic knowledge of the world he lives in, and ending with deeper areas, such as morality, religion and science. Visual stimulus and response time as early as 3 months can be an indicator of verbal and performance IQ at age 4 years.^[47]

By providing education in a child's most formative years, ECE also has the capacity to pre-emptively begin closing the educational achievement gap between low and high-income students before formal schooling begins.^[48] Children of low socioeconomic status (SES) often begin school already behind their higher SES peers; on average, by the time they are three, children with high SES have three times the number of words in their vocabularies as children with low SES.^[49] Participation in ECE, however, has been proven to increase high school graduation rates, improve performance on standardized tests, and reduce both grade repetition and the number of children placed in special education.^[50]

Especially since the first wave of results from the Perry Preschool Project were published, there has been widespread consensus that the quality of early childhood education programs correlate with gains in low-income children’s IQs and test scores, decreased grade retention, and lower special education rates.

Several studies have reported that children enrolled in ECE increase their IQ scores by 4-11 points by age five, while a Milwaukee study reported a 25-point gain.^[51] In addition, students who had been enrolled in the Abecedarian Project, an often-cited ECE study, scored significantly higher on reading and math tests by age fifteen than comparable students who had not participated in early childhood programs.^[52] In addition, 36% of students in the Abecedarian Preschool Study treatment group would later enroll in four-year colleges compared to 14% of those in the control group.^[52]

Beyond benefitting societal good, ECE also significantly impacts the socioeconomic outcomes of individuals. For example, by age 26, students who had been enrolled in Chicago Child-Parent Centers were less likely to be arrested, abuse drugs, and receive food stamps; they were more likely to have high school diplomas, health insurance and full-time employment.^[53]

The Perry Preschool Project

In Ypsilanti, Michigan, 3 and 4 year-olds from low-income families were randomly assigned to participate in the Perry Preschool. By age 18, they were five times less likely to have become chronic law-breakers than those who were not selected to participate in the Preschool.^[54]

The Perry Preschool Study also found that low-income individuals who were enrolled in a quality preschool program earned on average, by age 40, $5500 per year more than those who were not.^[55] The Perry Preschool Study produced a total benefit/cost ratio of 17:1 (4:1 for participants, 13:1 for the public), with participants on average earning higher incomes, more likely to own their own homes, and less likely to be on welfare. ^[56]

The authors of the Perry Preschool Project also propose that the return on investment in education declines with the student's age. This study is noteworthy because it advocates for public spending on early childhood programs as an economic investment in a society's future, rather than in the interest of social justice.^[57]

In 2008, Michael L. Anderson re-examined the data from Perry and similar projects and found "... girls garnered substantial short- and long-term benefits from the interventions. However, there were no significant long-term benefits for boys."^[58]

Early childhood education policy in the United States

In the past decade, there has been a national push for state and federal policy to address the early years as a key component of public education. At the federal level, the Obama administration made the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge a key tenet of their education reform initiative, awarding $500 million to states with comprehensive early childhood education plans.^[59] In addition, a largely Democratic contingent sponsored the Strong Start for America’s Children Act in 2013, which provides free early childhood education for low-income families.^[60] Specifically, the Act would generate the impetus and support for states to expand ECE; provide funding through formula grants and Title II (Learning Quality Partnerships), III (Child Care) and IV (Maternal, Infant and Home Visiting) funds; and hold participating states accountable for Head Start early learning standards.^[61]

Head Start grants are awarded directly to public or private non-profit organizations, including community-based and faith-based organizations, or for-profit agencies within a community that wish to compete for funds. The same categories of organizations are eligible to apply for Early Head Start, except that applicants need not be from the community they will be serving.^[62]

Many states have created new early childhood education agencies. Massachusetts was the first state to create a consolidated department focused on early childhood learning and care. Just in the past fiscal year, state funding for public In Minnesota, the state government created an Early Learning scholarship program, where families with young children meeting free and reduced price lunch requirements for kindergarten can receive scholarships to attend ECE programs.^[63] In California, Senator Darrell Steinberg led a coalition to pass the Kindergarten Readiness Act, which creates a state early childhood system supporting children from birth to age five and provides access to ECE for all 4-year-olds in the state. It also created an Early Childhood Office charged with creating an ECE curriculum that would be aligned with the K-12 continuum.^[64]

State funding for pre-K increased by $363.6 million to a total of $5.6 billion, a 6.9% increase from 2012 to 2013. 40 states fund pre-K programs.^[65]

Currently, one of America's larger challenges regarding ECE is a dearth in workforce, partly due to low compensation for rigorous work. The average early childhood teaching assistant earns an annual salary of $10,500 while the highest paid early childhood educators earn an average $18,000 per year. The turnover of ECE staff averages 31% per year.^[66] Another challenge is to ensure the quality of ECE programs. Because ECE is a relatively new field, there is little research and consensus into what makes a good program. However, the National Association of the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) is a national organization that has identified evidence-based ECE standards and accredits quality programs.^[67] Continuing the leadership role it established with the Common Core, the federal government could play a key role in establishing ECE standards for states.

The American legal system has also played a hand in public ECE. State adequacy cases can also create a powerful legal impetus for states to provide universal access to ECE, drawing upon the rich research illustrating that by the time they enter school, students from low-income backgrounds are already far behind other students. The New Jersey case Abbott County School District v. Burke and South Carolina case Abbeville County School District v. State have established early but incomplete precedents in looking at "adequate education" as education that addresses needs best identified in early childhood, including immediate and continuous literacy interventions.

In the 1998 case of Abbott v. Burke (Abbott V), the New Jersey Supreme Court required New Jersey’s poorest school districts to implement high-quality ECE programs and full day kindergarten for all three and four-year-olds. Beyond ruling that New Jersey needed to allocate more funds to preschools in low-income communities in order to reach "educational adequacy," the Supreme court also authorized the state department of education to cooperate "with… existing early childhood and daycare programs in the community" to implement universal access.^[68]

In the 2005 case of Abbeville v. State, the South Carolina Supreme Court decided that ECE programs were necessary to break the "debilitating and destructive cycle of poverty for low-income students and poor academic achievement." Besides mandating that all low-income children have access to ECE by age three, the court also held that early childhood interventions—such as counseling, special needs identification, and socio-emotional supports—continue through grade three (Abbeville, 2005). The court furthermore argued that ECE was not only imperative for educational adequacy but also that "the dollars spent in early childhood intervention are the most effective expenditures in the educational process."^[69]

Early childhood care and education as a holistic and multisectoral service

Unlike other areas of education, early childhood care and education (ECCE) places strong emphasis on developing the whole child – attending to his or her social, emotional, cognitive and physical needs – in order to establish a solid and broad foundation for lifelong learning and well-being. ‘Care’ includes health, nutrition and hygiene in a warm, secure and nurturing environment; and ‘education’ includes stimulation, socialization, guidance, participation, learning and developmental activities. ECCE begins at birth and can be organized in a variety of non-formal, formal and informal modalities, such as parenting education, health-based mother and child intervention, care institutions, child-to-child programmes, home-based or centre-based childcare, kindergartens and pre-schools. Different terms to describe ECCE are used by different countries, institutions and stakeholders, such as early childhood development (ECD), early childhood education and care (ECEC), early childhood care and development (ECCD), with Early Childhood Care and Education as the UNESCO nomenclature.^[70]

As research shows, children’s care and educational needs are intertwined. Poor care, health, nutrition, and physical and emotional security can affect educational potentials in the form of mental retardation, impaired cognitive and behavioural capacities, motor development delay, depression, difficulties with concentration and attention. Inversely, early health and nutrition interventions, such as iron supplementation, deworming treatment and school feeding, have been shown to directly contribute to increased pre-school attendance.^[71] Studies have demonstrated better child outcomes through the combined intervention of cognitive stimulation and nutritional supplementation than through either cognitive stimulation or nutritional supplementation alone. Quality ECCE is one that integrates educational activities, nutrition, health care and social services.^[70]

Economic benefits of early childhood care and education

Decades of research provide unequivocal evidence that public investment in early childhood care and education can produce economic returns equal to roughly 10 times its costs.^[72][73] The sources of these gains are (1) child care that enables mothers to work and (2) education and other supports for child development that increase subsequent school success, labour force productivity, prosocial behaviour, and health. The benefits from enhanced child development are the largest part of the economic return, but both are important considerations in policy and programme design.The economic consequences include reductions in public and private expenditures associated with school failure, crime, and health problems as well as increases in earnings.^[74]

International agreements

The first World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education took place in Moscow from 27 to 29 September 2010, jointly organized by UNESCO and the city of Moscow. The overarching goals of the conference are to:

• Reaffirm ECCE as a right of all children and as the basis for development
• Take stock of the progress of Member States towards achieving the EFA Goal 1
• Identify binding constraints toward making the intended equitable expansion of access to quality ECCE services
• Establish, more concretely, benchmarks and targets for the EFA Goal 1 toward 2015 and beyond
• Identify key enablers that should facilitate Member States to reach the established targets
• Promote global exchange of good practices^[75]

According to UNESCO a preschool curriculum is one that delivers educational content through daily activities, and furthers a child's physical, cognitive and social development. Generally, preschool curricula are only recognized by governments if they are based on academic research and reviewed by peers.^[76]

Preschool for Child Rights have pioneered into preschool curricular areas and is contributing into child rights through their preschool curriculum.^[77]

Curricula in early childhood care and education

Curricula in early childhood care and education (ECCE) is the driving force behind any ECCE programme. It is ‘an integral part of the engine that, together with the energy and motivation of staff, provides the momentum that makes programmes live’.^[78] It follows therefore that the quality of a programme is greatly influenced by the quality of its curriculum. In early childhood, these may be programmes for children or parents, including health and nutrition interventions and prenatal programmes, as well as centre-based programmes for children.^[79]

Barriers and challenges

Children’s learning potential and outcomes are negatively affected by exposure to violence, abuse and child labour. Thus, protecting young children from violence and exploitation is part of broad educational concerns. Due to difficulties and sensitivities around the issue of measuring and monitoring child protection violations and gaps in defining, collecting and analysing appropriate indicators,^[80] data coverage in this area is scant. However, proxy indicators can be used to assess the situation. For example, ratification of relevant international conventions indicates countries’ commitment to child protection. By April 2014, 194 countries had ratified the CRC3; and 179 had ratified the 1999 International Labour Organization’s Convention (No. 182) concerning the elimination of the worst forms of child labour. But, many of these ratifications are yet to be given full effect through actual implementation of concrete measures. Globally, 150 million children aged 5–14 are estimated to be engaged in child labour.^[80] In conflict-affected poor countries, children are twice as likely to die before their fifth birthday compared to those in other poor countries.^[81] In industrialized countries, 4 per cent of children are physically abused each year and 10 per cent are neglected or psychologically abused.^[80][82]

In both developed and developing countries, children of the poor and the disadvantaged remain the least served. This exclusion persists against the evidence that the added value of early childhood care and education services are higher for them than for their more affluent counterparts, even when such services are of modest quality. While the problem is more intractable in developing countries, the developed world still does not equitably provide quality early childhood care and education services for all its children. In many European countries, children, mostly from low-income and immigrant families, do not have access to good quality early childhood care and education.^[83][82]

Early Education under Trump Administration

The 2019 budget approved by President Donald Trump included a 21 percent cut in Department of Health and Human Services funding^[84]. This is where most early education and care programs like Head Start^[85] are included. The department’s budget highlights doing away with the pre-school development grant program which aided 18 states in spreading out access to pre-K for 4-year old children during the last few years. It helped said states in improving overall quality of pre-K programs. This program was initiated during the Obama administration because of Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA under the DHHS^[86].

The federal government called for a minimal increase in Head Start funding with approximately $9.3 billion for said program. This subsidy is estimated to serve around 861,000 kids. However, the administration withdrew the requirement that such program started serving children for a longer day and school year due to insufficient funding^[87]. The Center for American Progress said President Trump and the House of Representatives advocated deep cuts in programs that were supposed to help impoverished families rather than attend to the needs of low and middle-income households through paid leave and child care as well as increasing minimum wage.

What’s behind the dream of colonizing Mars?

By Elizabeth Kolbert

Original link:  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/01/project-exodus-critic-at-large-kolbert

Earthlings are fragile, demanding, and germy, not obviously suited to life elsewhere.

Illustration by Script & Seal

(DJS)  Colonizing Mars or any other world, or living in space poses immense challenges.  Yet despite the negative press Elon Musk's plans have received recently, I hold that developments in AI, nanotechnology, genetics and other medical technologies, robotics, and other technologies over the coming 10-30 years will allow us to meet these challenges.

On March 27th, an American astronaut named Scott Kelly blasted off from Earth and, six hours later, clambered onto the International Space Station. He’s been there ever since. Each day, the I.S.S. orbits the planet fifteen and a half times, which means that after a month Kelly had completed more than four hundred and fifty circuits. By now, he’s made nearly a thousand.

Kelly, who is fifty-one, is short—five feet seven—and stocky, with a round face and a thin smile. If all goes well, he will not return to sea level until March, 2016. At that point, he will have set an endurance record for an American in space.

Even in brief bursts, space is tough on the human body. Changes in intracranial pressure can lead to eye problems. Weightlessness induces vertigo. Fluids collect in places they shouldn’t. Muscles atrophy and bones grow brittle. Astronauts’ internal organs drift upward and their spines extend. It is expected that by the time Kelly finally descends he will have stretched to five feet nine.

NASA has dubbed Kelly’s circular odyssey the One-Year Mission. As he spins around the Earth, scientists at the agency are tracking his physical and emotional deterioration, monitoring, among other things, his sleep patterns, his heart rate, his immune response, his fine motor skills, his metabolism, and his gut bacteria. Kelly has an identical twin, Mark, who was also an astronaut. (Mark Kelly is perhaps best known as the husband of Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman.) In the course of the year, Mark will submit to many of the same cognitive and physiological tests as Scott, though without leaving Earth. This will provide a glimpse into the effects of space travel down to the molecular level.

Kelly’s One-Year Mission represents a kind of dress rehearsal for a longer, straighter, and even more punishing voyage. In NASA’s Buzz Lightyear-esque formulation, it’s “a stepping stone” to “Mars and beyond.” At its closest, Mars is thirty-five million miles from Earth, and, under the most plausible scenario, getting there takes nine months. Owing to the relative motion of the planets, any astronauts who make it to Mars will have to cool their heels on the red planet for three more months before rocketing back home. What NASA learns about Kelly—at least, so the theory goes—will help it anticipate and overcome the challenges of interplanetary travel.

But even as NASA rehearses for “Mars and beyond” its actual reach has been shrinking. The last time an American made it as far as the moon was in 1972. In fact, since the Nixon Administration, no American has got past what’s known as low Earth orbit, or LEO. (The International Space Station, which circles the globe in LEO, maintains an average altitude of two hundred and twenty miles.) And nowadays even this is farther than NASA can manage.

Since the retirement of the Space Shuttle, in 2011, the agency has lacked the wherewithal to get astronauts into LEO. And so, before Kelly could embark on the One-Year Mission, he first had to fly to Baikonur, on the steppes of central Kazakhstan. There he spent a few nights at the Cosmonaut Hotel before hitching a ride with two Russians on a Soyuz rocket.

It’s true that even a journey of thirty-five million miles has to start somewhere. Still, a reasonable person might ask: Where are we headed? Is it really to Mars? Or is it just to Kazakhstan?

Several recent books take up these questions, some head on, others more elliptically. Chris Impey is an astronomer at the University of Arizona who studies the structure and the evolution of the universe. In “Beyond: Our Future in Space” (Norton), he foresees a bright “off-Earth” future. Within twenty years, he predicts, there will be a vibrant space-tourism industry, complete with “zero-gravity sex motels.” In thirty years, he expects “small but viable colonies” on both Mars and the moon. And within a century these colonies will have produced a generation of space-bred babies. In 2115, he writes, a cohort will come of age “who were born off-Earth and who have never been home.”

Impey acknowledges NASA’s current difficulties. Prominently featured in “Beyond” is a graph showing how the agency’s budget has changed over time. From the late nineteen-fifties through the late sixties, it shot up, until, a year or two before the first moon landing, in 1969, it represented almost five per cent of all federal spending. Then, like a piece of space debris hurtling toward Earth, it plummeted. Today, NASA appropriations make up less than 0.5 per cent of federal spending.

“No bucks, no Buck Rogers,” Impey observes. And he’s frank about the failures of the Space Shuttle program, which resulted in two disasters—the loss of the Challenger and the Columbia orbiters and, with these, the lives of fourteen astronauts. Even when its vehicles weren’t blowing up, the shuttle, Impey notes, never functioned as advertised: “the launch rate ended up ten times lower than originally planned and the cost per launch twenty times higher.”

But NASA is no longer the only game in town. Impey is excited by the rash of privately owned firms that are getting into the space business. He cites the “audacious” plans of a Dutch entrepreneur named Bas Lansdorp, who’s been marketing one-way trips to Mars on the Web. Lansdorp, he says, “plans to finance his venture by turning it into a reality TV epic—think Survivor meets The Truman Show meets The Martian Chronicles.” Other commercial ventures include Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and Eric Anderson’s Space Adventures. Space Adventures has already carved a niche for itself by negotiating visits to the I.S.S. for well-heeled amateurs. (Most recently, the company “arranged” a visit for the British soprano Sarah Brightman, at a cost of fifty-two million dollars; the singer has now postponed her trip, however, and it seems that a Japanese entrepreneur, Satoshi Takamatsu, will go in her stead.) “After years in the doldrums, space is heating up,” Impey writes.

Stephen L. Petranek, the author of the forthcoming “How We’ll Live on Mars” (Simon & Schuster/TED), is, if anything, even more boosterish. By his timetable, the first people should be showing up on Mars just a little more than a decade from now. Petranek is a journalist who served as the editor-in-chief of the magazine This Old House before moving to Discover, a career path that perhaps explains his book’s focus on issues like bringing the right tools to Martian construction projects. “Someone drilling for water cannot discover halfway through the process that they have failed to anticipate a specific problem—a mineral deposit that requires a special drill bit, for instance,” he points out.

Petranek envisions a multistage settlement program. The first pioneers on Mars, not unlike the American frontiersmen, will have to struggle to survive. Just to have drinking water, they’ll need to plow up the planet’s soil—known as regolith—melt down its ice, and distill the results. To breathe, they’ll have to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen, then mix the oxygen with an inert gas—argon, perhaps—which they’ll get from, well, somewhere. Eventually, Petranek imagines a shift in the balance. Instead of adjusting to life on Mars, humans will adjust Mars to their needs. They will reëngineer the atmosphere and warm the planet. As the regolith thaws, ancient streams will flow again and life will flourish along their ruddy banks. More and more people will be drawn to Mars, until there will be whole cities of them.

Mars, he writes, “will become the new frontier, the new hope, and the new destiny for millions of earthlings who will do almost anything to seize the opportunities waiting on the Red Planet.”

For another take on man’s future in space, there’s “Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars” (Johns Hopkins), by Erik M. Conway. Conway is a historian of science at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech, and he writes in a style that’s as dry as the lunar landscape. Exactly the sort of technical issues Impey and Petranek rush past Conway obsesses over. (Much of “Exploration and Engineering” is devoted to valve types and navigational software.)

NASA has, of course, already completed several one-way missions to Mars. It’s also bungled several. Because no people were on board, the successes and the flops tend to blur in the public’s imagination. Conway wants to understand what mistakes were made and what lessons learned from them. The results of this analysis suggest that one might not want to sign up for that first manned voyage.

Consider the case of the Mars Climate Orbiter. This was a craft that looked like an oversized TV set. It was intended to gather data on Mars’s atmosphere and to serve as a communications link for other probes. The hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar orbiter was launched from Cape Canaveral on December 11, 1998. It spent the next nine and a half months travelling through the solar system, until, on September 23, 1999, it was time for what’s known in spaceflight circles as “orbit insertion.” Everything seemed to be going according to plan when the craft slipped behind Mars and communication was interrupted. It was supposed to swing back into the clear twenty minutes later, but never did. Instead, it burned up in the Martian atmosphere. Subsequent investigation traced the crash to Lockheed Martin, a NASA contractor. A software engineer at the company had neglected to convert English units into metric ones. As a consequence, estimates of the force of the orbiter’s thruster were off by a factor of 4.5. There had been several chances to catch the slipup, but all of them, according to Conway, had been missed, owing to a combination of “errors, oversights, and understaffing.”

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where Conway works, handles Mars missions for NASA. This means that he had access to officials involved in the Climate Orbiter debacle, as well as to those involved in more triumphant projects, like the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, or MER-1, which, in January, 2004, landed at a site near the planet’s equator that probably once held liquid water. (Opportunity’s operational life has already lasted more than forty times longer than expected, and the rover continues to send back data to this day.) Conway is sympathetic to the agency’s problems and, like Impey, traces them, at least in part, to a shrinking budget. But, as much as Impey and Petranek are eager to push men into the beyond, Conway hopes they’ll stay put.

According to Conway, there is a “disconnect” between the desire to travel into space and the desire to understand it. This “disconnect” is a more fundamental difficulty for NASA than decades’ worth of budget cuts. It’s a contradiction that’s built into the agency’s structure, which includes a human exploration program on the one hand and a scientific program on the other. The planning for Mars missions so far has been left largely to the science types, but sometimes the human-mission types have insisted on getting involved. Whenever they’ve done so, Conway writes, the result has been “chaos.”

Conway puts himself on the side of science, and, as far as he’s concerned, humans are the wrong stuff. They shouldn’t even be trying to get to another planet. Not only are they fragile, demanding, and expensive to ship; they’re a mess.

“Humans carry biomes with us, outside and inside,” he writes. NASA insists that Mars landers be sterilized, but “we can’t sterilize ourselves.” If people ever do get to the red planet—an event that Conway, now forty-nine, says he considers “unlikely” in his lifetime—they’ll immediately wreck the place, just by showing up: “Scientists want a pristine Mars, uncontaminated by Earth.” If people start rejiggering the atmosphere and thawing the regolith, so much the worse.

“The Mars scientists want to study won’t exist anymore,” Conway writes. “Some other Mars will.”

A couple of weeks after Scott Kelly reached the I.S.S., a privately owned aerospace company, SpaceX, launched a rocket loaded with supplies for the station. In the payload were electronic equipment and food for the crew, as well as twenty live mice slated for dissection. For the benefit of an Italian astronaut named Samantha Cristoforetti, there was also a microgravity espresso maker. (“Consider it one small slurp for man, and one giant slurp for mankind,” the Web site Daily Coffee News observed.)

The rocket carrying the payload had been engineered so that it could be reused. After firing, its first-stage booster was supposed to return to Earth and gently land on a ship parked in the Atlantic. This part of the launch did not go as planned; instead of gracefully descending, the booster tipped over and blew up. SpaceX’s founder, Elon Musk, in a tweet to his two million followers, attributed the accident to a “slower than expected throttle valve response.”

Despite several well-publicized mishaps, SpaceX has probably done more than any other company to prove that private space ventures can, as it were, take off. This has made Musk, whose other business endeavors include PayPal and Tesla, the darling of Mars enthusiasts. (“How We’ll Live on Mars” is basically an extended Musk mash note.) Though SpaceX has yet to get a single person as far as low Earth orbit—it’s supposed to carry its first astronauts in 2017—Musk has said that he’s hard at work on a plan for a “Mars Colonial Transporter.” Recently, he announced that he hoped to reveal details about the transporter’s design by the end of this year.

For Musk, going to Mars is way more than just cool. “Are we on a path to becoming a multiplanet species or not?” he has asked. “If we’re not, well, that’s not a very bright future. We’ll simply be hanging out on Earth until some eventual calamity claims us.”

Impey makes much the same point. “Humankind evolved over millions of years,” he observes. “But over the last 60 years, atomic weaponry created the potential to extinguish ourselves. Sooner or later we must expand beyond this blue and green ball, or go extinct.” So does Petranek. “There are real threats to the continuation of the human race on Earth, including our failure to save the home planet from ecological destruction and the possibility of nuclear war,” he writes. “The first humans who emigrate to Mars are our best hope for the survival of our species.”

Why is it that the same people who believe we can live off-Earth tend to believe we can’t live on it? In a roundabout sort of way, the connection between these two ideas can be traced back to Enrico Fermi. In 1950, Fermi, one of the fathers of the atom bomb, turned to Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, and asked, “Where is everybody?” Further discussion of this question yielded the so-called Fermi paradox, which runs as follows:

The Earth is an unexceptional planet revolving around an unexceptional star. Given the age of the universe and the speed of our own technological advancement, you’d expect that some intelligent life-form from another part of the galaxy would already have shown up on Earth. But no such being has been spotted, nor have any signs of one. So where are they?

A decade later, a Harvard-trained astronomer named Frank Drake, pondering a related question, came up with a way to formulate the problem in numerical terms. A key variable in what’s become known as the Drake equation is how long a civilization capable of building rockets and microgravity espresso machines persists. If there are lots of planets out there that are suitable for life, and if life eventually produces intelligence, and if intelligent beings on one planet are capable of figuring out how to communicate with intelligent beings on another, then the fact that we haven’t heard from any suggests that such civilizations don’t last.

“If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way,” Musk recently told the online magazine Aeon. “And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.” Of course, a galaxy that contains “a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations” may also contain a lot of dead, two-planet ones.

In 1965, as NASA was preparing to put a man on the moon, it funded a study of man’s best friend. The agency was curious what would happen to dogs plunged into the vacuum of space. In groups of three, subject animals were sealed in a chamber and the air was pumped out.

Dogs are adapted to (more or less) the air pressure at sea level. This means that the gases dissolved inside their bodies are in equilibrium with the pressure outside. Put Spot in a vacuum and this healthful balance breaks down. Cameras trained on the vacuum chamber showed the dogs swelling up like balloons or, as a paper summarizing the study’s findings phrased it, “an inflated goat-skin bag.” (Interestingly enough, the dogs’ eyeballs “did not seem to show the effects of this phenomenon,” though the soft tissue around them “was often grossly distended, as was the tongue.”)

The pressure differential also had unhappy gastric consequences. The ballooning dogs expelled air from their bowels; this led frequently—and simultaneously—to defecation, urination, and projectile vomiting. The animals suffered what looked like grand-mal seizures, and their tongues froze. (This last effect was a result of heat loss through rapid evaporation.) All told, a hundred and twenty-six dogs were tested in the chamber, for varying lengths of time. Of those which spent two minutes in simulated space, a third died. The rest deflated and, eventually, recovered. Among those which remained in a vacuum for three minutes, the mortality figure climbed to two-thirds.

I came across “Experimental Animal Decompressions to a Near-Vacuum Environment” while reading up on the One-Year Mission. Maybe it’s just a sign of my geocentric bias, but I was struck by the correspondences. For all his training and his courage, Kelly is basically just another test mammal. Like the dogs, he’s been sealed in an airtight chamber to see how much his body can take. And in both experiments the results, at least in their broad outline, are totally predictable.

Every sensate being we’ve encountered in the universe so far—from dogs and humans and mice to turtles and spiders and seahorses—has evolved to suit the cosmic accident that is Earth. The notion that we could take these forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and hurl them into space, and that this would, to use Petranek’s formulation, constitute “our best hope,” is either fantastically far-fetched or deeply depressing.

As Impey points out, for six decades we’ve had the capacity to blow ourselves to smithereens. One of these days, we may well do ourselves in; certainly we’re already killing off a whole lot of other species. But the problem with thinking of Mars as a fallback planet (besides the lack of oxygen and air pressure and food and liquid water) is that it overlooks the obvious. Wherever we go, we’ll take ourselves with us. Either we’re capable of dealing with the challenges posed by our own intelligence or we’re not. Perhaps the reason we haven’t met any alien beings is that those which survive aren’t the type to go zipping around the galaxy. Maybe they’ve stayed quietly at home, tending their own gardens.

• Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”
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Nuclear Fusion Power Could Be Here by 2030, One Company Says

By Tom Metcalfe, Live Science Contributor | June 28, 2018 07:33 am ET
Original link:  https://www.livescience.com/62929-plasma-fusion-reactor-tokamak.html

Credit: Shutterstock

A private nuclear-fusion company has heated a plasma of hydrogen to 27 million degrees Fahrenheit  (15 million degrees Celsius)  in a new reactor for the first time — hotter than the core of the sun.
UK-based Tokamak Energy says the plasma test is a milestone on its quest to be the first in the world to produce commercial electricity from fusion power, possibly by 2030.

The company, which is named after the vacuum chamber that contains the fusion reaction inside powerful magnetic fields, announced the creation of the superhot plasma inside its experimental ST40 fusion reactor in early June.

The successful test – the highest plasma temperature achieved so far by Tokamak Energy – means the reactor will now be prepared next year for a test of an even hotter plasma, of more than 180 million degrees F (100 million degrees C).

That will put the ST40 reactor within the operating temperatures needed for controlled nuclear fusion; the company plans to build a further reactor by 2025 that will produce several megawatts of fusion power.

"It's been really exciting," Tokamak Energy co-founder David Kingham told Live Science. "It was very good to see the data coming through and being able to get the high-temperature plasmas — probably beyond what we were hoping for." [Science Fact or Fiction? The Plausibility of 10 Sci-Fi Concepts]

Tokamak Energy is one of several privately funded companies racing to create a working fusion reactor that can supply electricity to the grid, perhaps years before the mid-2040s, when the ITER fusion reactor project in France is expected to even achieve its "first plasma."

It could be another decade after that before the experimental ITER reactor is ready to create sustained nuclear fusion — and even then, the reaction will not be used to generate any electricity.

Star in a jar

The nuclear fusion of hydrogen into the heavier element helium is the main nuclear reaction that keeps our sun and other stars burning for billions of years — which is why a fusion reactor is sometimes likened to a "star in a jar."

Nuclear fusion also takes place inside powerful thermonuclear weapons, also known as hydrogen bombs, where hydrogen is heated to fusion temperatures by plutonium fission devices, resulting in an explosion hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than a fission bomb.

Earthbound controlled fusion projects like ITER and the Tokamak Energy reactors will also fuse hydrogen fuel, but at much higher temperatures and lower pressures than exist inside the sun.

Proponents of nuclear fusion say it could make many other types of electricity generation obsolete, by producing large amounts of electricity from relatively small amounts of the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, which are relatively abundant in ordinary seawater.

"Fifty kilograms [110 lbs.] of tritium and 33 kilograms [73 lbs.] of deuterium would produce a gigawatt of electricity for a year," while the amount of heavy hydrogen fuel in the reactor at any one time would be only a few grams, Kingham said.

That’s enough energy to power more than 700,000 average American homes, according to figures from the US Energy Information Administration.

Existing nuclear-fission plants generate electricity without producing greenhouse gas emissions, but they are fueled by radioactive heavy elements like uranium and plutonium, and create highly radioactive waste that must be carefully handled and stored. [5 Everyday Things That Are Radioactive]

In theory, fusion reactors could produce far less radioactive waste than fission reactors, while their relatively small fuel needs mean that nuclear meltdowns like the Chernobyl disaster or Fukushima accident would be impossible, according to the ITER project.

However, veteran fusion researcher Daniel Jassby, who was once a physicist at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, has warned that ITER and other proposed fusion reactors will still create significant amounts of radioactive waste.

Road to nuclear fusion

The ST40 reactor and future reactors planned by Tokamak Energy use a compact spherical tokamak design, with an almost round vacuum chamber instead of the wider donut shape being used in the ITER reactor, Kingham said.

A critical advance was the use of high-temperature superconducting magnets to create the powerful magnetic fields needed to keep the superhot plasma from damaging the reactor walls, he said.

The 7-foot-tall (2.1 meters) electromagnets around the Tokamak Energy reactor were cooled by liquid helium to operate at minus 423.67 degrees F (minus 253.15 degrees C).

The use of advanced magnetic materials gave the Tokamak Energy reactor a significant advantage over the ITER reactor design, which would use power-hungry electromagnets cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, Kingham said.

Other investment-funded fusion projects include reactors being developed General Fusion, based in British Colombia and TAE Technologies, based in California.

A Washington-based company, Agni Energy, has also reported early experimental success with yet a different approach to controlled nuclear fusion, called "beam-target fusion," Live Science reported earlier this week.

One of the most advanced privately funded fusion projects is the compact fusion reactor being developed by U.S.-based defense and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin at its Skunk Works engineering division in California.

The company says a 100-megawatt fusion reactor, capable of powering 100,000 homes, could be small enough to put on a truck trailer and be driven to wherever it is needed.
 
Original article on Live Science.

This advance could finally make graphene-based semiconductor chips feasible

March 31, 2017
Original link:  http://www.kurzweilai.net/this-advance-could-finally-make-graphene-based-semiconductor-chips-feasible

Atomic force microscopy images of as-deposited (left) and laser-annealed (right) reduced graphene oxide (rGO) thin films. The entire “pulsed laser annealing” process is done at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, using high-power laser pulses to convert p-type rGO material into n-type and completed in about one fifth of a microsecond. (credit: Anagh Bhaumik and Jagdish Narayan/Journal of Applied Physics)

Researchers at North Carolina State University (NC State) have developed a layered material that can be used to develop transistors based on graphene — a long-sought goal in the electronics industry.

Graphene has attractive properties, such as extremely high conductivity, meaning it conducts the flow of electrical current really well (compared to copper, for example), but it’s not a semiconductor, so it can’t work in a transistor (aside from providing great connections). A form of graphene called “graphene oxide” is a semiconductor, but it does not conduct well.

However, a form of graphene oxide called “reduced graphene oxide” (rGO) does conduct well*. Despite that, rGO still can’t function in a transistor. That’s because the design of a transistor is based on creating a junction between two materials: one that is positively charged (p-type) and one that is negatively charged (n-type), and native rGO is only a p-type.

The NC State researchers’ solution was to use high-powered laser pulses to disrupt chemical groups on an rGO thin film. This disruption moved electrons from one group to another, effectively converting p-type rGO to n-type rGO. They then used the two forms of rGO as two layers (a layer of n-type rGO on the surface and a layer of p-type rGO underneath) — creating a layered thin-film material that could be used to develop rGO-based transistors for use in future semiconductor chips.

The researchers were also able to integrate the rGO-based transistors onto sapphire and silicon wafers across the entire wafer.

The paper was published in the Journal of Applied Physics. The work was done with support from the National Science Foundation.

* Reduction is a chemical reaction that involves the gaining of electrons. 

---

Abstract of Conversion of p to n-type reduced graphene oxide by laser annealing at room temperature and pressure

Physical properties of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) are strongly dependent on the ratio of sp2 to sp3hybridized carbon atoms and the presence of different functional groups in its structural framework. This research for the very first time illustrates successful wafer scale integration of graphene-related materials by a pulsed laser deposition technique, and controlled conversion of p to n-type 2D rGO by pulsed laser annealing using a nanosecond ArF excimer laser. Reduced graphene oxide is grown onto c-sapphire by employing pulsed laser deposition in a laser MBE chamber and is intrinsically p-type in nature. Subsequent laser annealing converts p into n-type rGO. The XRD, SEM, and Raman spectroscopy indicate the presence of large-area rGO onto c-sapphire having Raman-active vibrational modes: D, G, and 2D. High-resolution SEM and AFM reveal the morphology due to interfacial instability and formation of n-type rGO. Temperature-dependent resistance data of rGO thin films follow the Efros-Shklovskii variable-range-hopping model in the low-temperature region and Arrhenius conduction in the high-temperature regime. The photoluminescence spectra also reveal less intense and broader blue fluorescence spectra, indicating the presence of miniature sized sp2 domains in the vicinity of π* electronic states, which favor the VRH transport phenomena. The XPS results reveal a reduction of the rGO network after laser annealing with the C/O ratio measuring as high as 23% after laser-assisted reduction. The p to n-type conversion is due to the reduction of the rGO framework which also decreases the ratio of the intensity of the D peak to that of the G peak as it is evident from the Raman spectra. This wafer scale integration of rGO with c-sapphire and p to n-type conversion employing a laser annealing technique at room temperature and pressure will be useful for large-area electronic devices and will open a new frontier for further extensive research in graphene-based functionalized 2D materials.

References:

• Anagh Bhaumik and Jagdish Narayan. Conversion of p to n-type Reduced Graphene Oxide by Laser Annealing at Room Temperature and Pressure. March 29, Journal of Applied Physics; DOI: 10.1063/1.4979211 (open access)

Child development of the indigenous peoples of the Americas

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

E. Irving Couse, "The Historian", 1902. Quote: "The Indian Artist is painting in sign language, on buckskin, the story of a battle with American Soldiers. When exhibited at the National Academy this picture was considered one of the most important paintings of the year. The dots he is making are bullets."^[1]

Styles of children’s learning across various Indigenous communities in the Americas have been practiced for centuries prior to European colonization and persist today. Despite extensive anthropological research, efforts made towards studying children’s learning and development in Indigenous communities of the Americas as its own discipline within Developmental Psychology, has remained rudimentary. However, studies that have been conducted reveal several larger thematic commonalities, which create a paradigm of children’s learning that is fundamentally consistent across differing cultural communities.

Ways of learning

A common learning process in Indigenous American communities is characterized as Learning by Observing and Pitching In to everyday family and community activities (LOPI).^[5] Learning through observation and pitching in integrate children into their community activities and encourage their participation, so that they become eager to take initiative to collaborate with their community among different tasks. independently.^[6] The overarching concept of learning by observing and pitching-in can be broken down into smaller theoretical subdivisions which interact and are not mutually exclusive: For one, these communities encourage incorporation of children into ongoing familial and community endeavors. Treating children as legitimate participants who are expected to contribute based on their individual skills and interests, aids their integration as active contributors towards mature processes and activities within their respective communities.

Children of the Central Plains Region (Kansas City) hold arts and crafts class projects in 1941

Community endeavors are approached collaboratively as a group.^[7] This allows for flexible leadership and fluid coordination with one another to successfully facilitate such activities. With a relatively neutral platform for everyone to be actively engaged, an environment is promoted where learning to blend differing ideas, agendas and pace is necessary and thus, encouraged. This flexible organization also promotes mixed-age socialization while working, such as storytelling and jokes, from which these children build morals and connections. In this way, tasks become anticipated social endeavors, rather than chores.^[8]

In most Indigenous American communities, communication and learning occurs when all participants view a shared reference to encourage familiarity with the task. Moreover, it incorporates usage of both verbal and nonverbal communication. When explanations are provided, it is coupled with the activity so that it can be a means of further understanding or easier execution of the ongoing/anticipated activity at hand. In addition, narratives and dramatizations are often used as a tool to guide learning and development because it helps contextualize information and ideas in the form of remembered or hypothetical scenarios.^[9] Furthermore, narratives in Indigenous American communities serve as a non-confrontational method of guiding children's development. Due to the fact that it is considered impolite and embarrassing to directly single out a child for improper behavior, narratives and dramatizations serve as a subtle way to inform and direct children's learning.^[10]

Goal of Learning

The goal of learning is about the transformation of participation in which other important skills and information are acquired in the process (i.e. responsibility, consideration, observation, etc.). Learning fosters integration within the community and activates the development of socialization skills. Learning also promotes the aggregation of knowledge of cultural practices and spirituality. For example, the Mazahua fifth and sixth grade students shifted their role within the class by making a transformation between being a bystander and actually being considerate enough to contribute without being told to do so. The students would take on the responsibility to continue their school work even when the teacher was not present for a few days.^[11]

Motivation to participate and learn

Another crucial component of child development deals with the initiative and self-induced motivation of the learners (or children) themselves.Their eagerness to contribute, ability to execute roles, and search for a sense of belonging helps mold them into valued members of both their families and communities alike.^[12] The value placed on “shared work” or help emphasizes how learning and even motivation is related to the way the children participate and contribute to their family and community. One of the motivational factors that contribute to Indigenous children’s learning stems from “inherent motivation” where the child feels a sense of accomplishment or contentment in helping their family or community because the contribution emphasizes their roles and value in their community.^[12] Indigenous children take pride in their contributions to the community. When they contribute to their household, children are able to see the value and importance of their work as it helps maintain their family’s well being. The children are motivated to observe and learn because they are aware that they are making an important contribution to the family or community; they feel pride and a sense of self-worth as they help provide for their younger siblings, family and community.^[8] Through such “inherent motivation,” children are expected to learn community practices in order to become valuable contributors in the community. In addition, an authentic or natural setting could be considered just as important in children’s learning as a teacher. This is because Indigenous children learn many of their skills from observing their surroundings and participating in activities with their peers and other members of the community.^[13]

Keen Attention and Guidance

In some indigenous communities in the Americas, children learn by a means of observing and contributing in everyday life with careful attention. These processes of learning are part of a larger system of Indigenous learning studied by Rogoff and colleagues called Learning through Observing and Pitching In (LOPI). These observations and contributions are guided through community expectations the child learns from a young age.^[14][15][16]The children are a part of the community and are respected in their attempts to contribute and subsequently learn that their participation is valued. Children are included in everyday life and work in the community and their education may not be a central focus. Zinacantec infants spend approximately 70% of their first eight months strapped to their caregivers backs. These children observe everyday life from the perspective of their caregiver. They are fully integrated into society because of their close physical proximity to their mothers.^[17] Motivation to learn is a product of the learner’s inclusion into the major activities and prioritized goals of the community.^[16] The child feels that they are part of the community and actively try to contribute and learn without structured formal instruction.^[18]

Guidance from community-wide expectations is an important facet of learning through keen attention for Indigenous children. During interactions where children are integrated into family and community contexts, role-switching, a practice in which roles and responsibilities in completing a task are alternated, is common for the less-experienced to learn from the more-experienced.^[19] Requiring keen attention and guidance from those involved, role-switching challenges the observing participant to pay close attention to the actively-contributing participant. When these roles are reversed, the formerly observing-participant will have the opportunity to apply what they just observed.^[19] For example, in Nocutzepo communities of Mexico, children learn by observing, listening, and paying close attention to others’ tasks in the kitchen. Mothers indirectly show their child how to shape tortillas with subtle gestures while the child carefully watches and imitates their movements. The mother encourages the child by allowing them to mess up, learn, and continue until she serves the tortillas with the child’s best at the top of the pile.^[14] With the understanding that each member of the community has a responsibility to contribute, more experienced members support learners by providing suggestions for how to fulfill the task at hand while the learner's responsibility is to pay close attention.^[16]

Keen attention and subtle guidance are present in child development in Indigenous American communities with guidance that focuses on the task and the child’s participation. Guidance that supports child-centered initiatives include allowing children to take initiative in managing their own attention, using subtle nonverbal cues, and giving children feedback without praise.^[20] These forms of guidance have a focus on collaboration and synchronicity within the community and between individuals. They were observed in the interactions of children with their Mexican-American teachers in a classroom setting. Mexican-American teachers with indigenous-influenced backgrounds facilitate smooth, back-and-forth coordination when working with students and in these interactions, guidance of children’s attention is not forced. A teacher will focus more on their own understanding of the task they are teaching, use natural intonation, flow of conversation, and non-rhetorical questions with the children to guide, but not control their learning.^[18] Different learning cues through guidance from the teacher and keen attention from the child are employed to identify when someone is more able to contribute to the larger group or the community.^[18]

Storytelling

The development of children’s understanding of the world and their community is reflected in the numerous storytelling practices within Indigenous communities. Stories are often employed in order to pass on moral and cultural lessons throughout generations of Indigenous peoples, and are rarely used as a unidirectional transference of knowledge. Rather, narratives and dramatizations contextualize information and children are encouraged to participate and observe storytelling rituals in order to take part in the knowledge exchange between elder and child.^[21]

Parenting

An illustration of "Morning Star" from the book "Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children", by Mabel Powers 1917.^[22]

In such cultures, community members have nearly as much agency as the child's parents in the child’s learning. Parents (and other community members) instill indirect support to activities, encouraging autonomy and self-responsibility. Learning and everyday endeavors are not mutually exclusive. Because the children are incrementally eased into taking a bigger part in the community, processes, tasks, and activities are adequately completed with no compromise to quality. Hence, the community is not weary of task risks simply due to the presence and involvement of children. Contrasted with patterns of parent-child engagement in Western communities, it is evident that child learning participation and interaction styles are relative socio-cultural constructs. Factors such as historical context, values, beliefs, and practices must be incorporated in the interpretation of a cultural community and children’s acquisition of knowledge should not be considered universal.^[23] Some Indigenous communities pass on knowledge through nonverbal communication, storytelling, teasing and monitoring. All these tools lend to the learning necessary to develop by immersion into the productive activities of the community.

Parents are not the only source that children learn from. Siblings tells us that although both first born and later born children learn from a single parent, usually their mother, both children's’ speech patterns differ because the older sibling is now more like a caregiver.^[24] In the Chillihuani community, a young boy did not learn the flute from his mother or father but by observing his brother, who learned by observing his father. These traditions continuously are being passed down through generations.^[25]

Assessment of learning

The process of assessment includes appraisal of both the learner’s progress towards mastery, and the success of support being given to the learner. Assessment occurs during a task so that it can strengthen the overall contribution being made. Then, feedback is given of the final product or effort to contribute, where it is either accepted and appreciated by others, or corrected to make future endeavors more productive. Thus, the evaluation process is ongoing and coexists with the task itself, rather than occurring after the task is completed.^[26] Assessment can also be non-verbal through hands-on correction or by performing visual cues to the learner to guide them.

Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now Is Mostly Right

By Christian Alejandro Gonzalez 

July 14, 2018 5:30 AM

Original link:  https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/book-review-steven-pinker-enlightenment-now-mostly-correct/ 

(Portrait: Rebecca Goldstein/Wikimedia)

Capitalism has created great advances, but the consequences of secularization are yet to be seen.
 

Steven Pinker is a rare type of public intellectual, capable of writing prolifically without sacrificing an iota of scholarly rigor. Meticulously researched, closely argued, and elegantly written, his books are always exemplary pieces of scholarship. Most recently he committed his pen to making the case for Enlightenment values in his boldly titled Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

As in much of his writing, in Enlightenment Now Pinker takes great delight in denouncing both leftist and rightist pieties. He affects a certain distance from systematized political theories, preferring instead to remain above what he perceives to be petty and often irrational ideological squabbles.

Against the Marxist revulsion to the free-enterprise system, for instance, Pinker unabashedly embraces capitalist globalization — and his empirical arguments in favor of it are devastating. With a deluge of charts he shows that 200 years of property protections and international trade have helped create a world that is healthier, wealthier, happier, smarter, safer, more peaceful, and more democratic. Far from bequeathing to us a hellishly unequal dystopia, capitalism over the centuries has diminished life’s brutalities and broadened access to its contentments.

The improvements in global living standards enabled by modernity are breathtaking. In 1800, Pinker writes, “almost 85 percent of the world lived in . . . extreme poverty (less than $1.90 a day).” That figure today is below 10 percent. Scientific developments such as the chlorination of water, the discovery of blood groups, the measles vaccine, and the eradication of smallpox have saved billions of lives. And famines, which in the past century killed millions, pretty much no longer happen.

The progress of recent centuries, however, has not been confined to material advancement. Attitudes are changing too, and often for the better. People worldwide are abandoning their prejudices against women and ethnic minorities; most countries have banned discrimination and decriminalized homosexuality.

Writers on the left were unimpressed by what they believed to be Pinker’s unwarranted triumphalism. Backed into a corner by the onslaught of Pinker’s data but determined to sustain certain anti-capitalist commitments, several left-leaning commentators attempted to refute Enlightenment Now by attributing to Pinker beliefs he does not hold and proceeding to wage war against these straw men. John Gray of the New Statesman, for example, lambasts Pinker for being “an ardent enthusiast for free-market capitalism” and for subscribing to rationalist prescriptions that say “nothing about human kindness or fairness.” In fact Pinker eschews libertarianism, endorses pragmatic interventions in the economy (especially in the form of social spending), and spills much ink elucidating how science can help us better care for our fellow creatures. Jennifer Szalai of the New York Times deplores Pinker’s “crude utilitarianism” and accuses Pinker of being “sympathetic to humanity in the abstract but impervious to the suffering of actual human beings.” This is a curious accusation to launch against a book that resoundingly celebrates all the ways individual humans have come to endure less suffering, poverty, discrimination, and oppression.

I could list more examples, but you get my drift. Left-leaning reviewers did make insightful contributions — they were right to say that Pinker is too dismissive of concerns about income inequality — but too often they swung wildly and failed to land many punches.

Conservative critiques of Pinker focused their ire elsewhere, taking him to task for mocking — or rather loathing — most forms of religious sentiment. Indeed, Pinker displays nothing less than contempt for faith; he never misses an opportunity to take cheap shots at God, and after a while the relentless jabs start to feel rather gratuitous. Against Pinker’s sneering, conservatives such as Rod Dreher, Kevin Williamson, and Andrew Sullivan have argued that without faith people will be unable to find a higher purpose in life, or that at the very least they will find it much more difficult to do so. Science alone, the argument goes, cannot help us find meaning or provide guidance on leading lead virtuous lives.

His point about how awful life sometimes was prior to modernity seems to me irrefutable — particularly so in the case of women

I knew a confrontation between a traditional conservative religiosity and a ferocious Pinkerian secularism was coming from the moment I read the first page of Enlightenment Now; in it, Pinker chastises declinist intellectuals for their “pessimism about the way the world is heading, cynicism about the institutions of modernity, and inability to conceive of a higher purpose in anything other than religion.” Pinker, it is clear, can easily conceive of higher purposes in the absence of religion. Many of his conservative critics cannot. Before reading the book I was more sympathetic to the latter view than to the former, but as it turns out Pinker (unsurprisingly) defends his positions very compellingly. His arguments are powerful and often convincing, and for that reason they deserve to be carefully addressed.

First, Pinker implicitly responds to conservatives who worry that the death of God will destroy meaning in modern society with the following challenge: At what point in human history — and kindly be precise — would it have been better to live? Was life better or more meaningful when we were hunter-gatherers, struggling for daily sustenance, fighting off predators and other environmental dangers, ignorant of the world around us? (Recall that the hunter-gatherer phase encompasses most of the history of homo sapiens.) Was life more meaningful in the Middle Ages, when most people lived as destitute peasants and succumbed frequently to famines and plagues? What about the period right before the Industrial Revolution — say, 1812 or thereabouts — when 85 percent of the world was illiterate and much of it was enslaved? Or was life better in the early 1950s, when blacks in America lived under the threat of lynching, Russians languished under Stalin, Chinese braced themselves for the rule of Mao, and Indians recovered from a bloody partition that killed a million people? Clearly not, Pinker would argue — and convincingly, in my view. The historically unprecedented combination of prosperity, freedom, peace, and stability that we are currently experiencing suggests that the best time ever to have lived is now.

“Those who are nostalgic for traditional folkways,” writes Pinker, “have forgotten how hard our forebears fought to escape them. Though no one gave happiness questionnaires to the people who lived in the close-knit communities that were loosened by modernity, much of the great art composed during the transition brought to life their dark side: the provincialism, conformity, tribalism, and Taliban-like restrictions on women’s autonomy.” One might quibble with Pinker’s characterization of our forefathers’ activities, but his point about how awful life sometimes was prior to modernity seems to me irrefutable — particularly so in the case of women, given that they were prevented from fully pursuing their ambitions for much of history but are now able to use their talents in far more diverse ways.

The newly created wealth and technological advancement of modernity, Pinker also points out, have made it easier for everyone to access what George Steiner calls “the excuses for life” — namely, literature, art (including film), music, and philosophy. The entire repository of human knowledge has been made available by the efforts of Google and the expansion of public libraries. We can read great books and listen to the best composers on our iPhones; with the same devices we can learn about the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Furthermore: Because logistical barriers to international travel have been overcome, more and more people can visit the natural and architectural wonders of the world — a luxury unimaginable a few decades ago. Pinker argues that we can find meaning in such pursuits and that they can satisfy the human yearning for fulfillment. “The claim that people should seek deeper meaning in supernatural beliefs,” he concludes, “has little to recommend it.”

Contrary to caricature, then, Pinker is not guilty of “scientism” — that is, he does not believe that science alone can fully explain the human condition. Instead he argues that science enhances the understanding of the human condition. It isn’t reductionist to explain the chemical processes behind our emotions, the evolutionary origins of our behaviors, and so on. Scientific understandings of our predicament complement the insights we gain about the human experience from literature, philosophy, music, and art. And here I believe he is right.

But is Pinker’s secular path to meaning in life fully persuasive?

I . . . hesitate to say so. Pinker is too optimistic about the fate of a world bereft of faith. He hopes that as religion withers away, people will adopt humanist values (i.e., values oriented toward maximizing human flourishing) and apply them to the pursuit of meaningful lives without the help of religious injunctions. For Pinker, religious charities and associations can be replaced with NGOs and service organizations devoted to improving the lives of others.

The high priest of secular humanism has much to teach us.

Yet we cannot be entirely certain that people won’t supplant the void left by religion with nihilism or with the totalizing political ideologies of the far Right and/or the radical Left. Already we see indications of such an occurrence taking place. John McWhorter, for instance, correctly notes that much of today’s social-justice activism has morphed into a sort of religion: It speaks of Judgment Day (or of a “confrontation with America’s historic racism”), preaches a form of original sin that one must strive to overcome (“white privilege” and “unconscious bias”), and endeavors vigorously to excommunicate heretics (examples are too numerous to list).

McWhorter’s insight reminds me of George Orwell’s observation that just as it is possible for “patriotism [to be] an inoculation against nationalism,” so too can organized religion serve as “a guard against superstition.” Similarly, a strong case could be made that religion can function as a bulwark against nihilism and political extremism. Pinkerian secularism assures us that people in a post-faith world will seek meaning in humanism rather in ideological fanaticism. One hopes for him to be right, but he can offer us no guarantee.

 

At the same time, one should also resist a full-throated, pessimist fear of secularization: Some religious societies, after all, are awful places to live — Saudi Arabia, for instance; meanwhile, some secular societies (think of the Nordic countries) are doing wonderfully. Religion, then, is not an assurance of public virtue. Nor does secularism necessarily lead to nihilism, even though that danger certainly exists.

Apart from his answer to the question of secularism and meaning, with which some conservatives might differ, Pinker is nevertheless right about many things — about most things, I would argue. Generally his intellectual project is commendable. Pinker is a defender of liberal democracy, a fearless advocate of science, an opponent of all obscurantism, and an annihilator of reactionaries and revolutionaries. Everyone would do well to read him. The high priest of secular humanism has much to teach us.

Christian Alejandro Gonzalez — Christian Gonzalez is an editorial intern at National Review. @xchrisgonz

The next agricultural revolution: a ‘bionic leaf’ that could help feed the world

April 3, 2017
Original link:  http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-next-agricultural-revolution-a-bionic-leaf-that-could-help-feed-the-world

The radishes on the right were grown with the help of a bionic leaf that produces fertilizer with bacteria, sunlight, water, and air. (credit: Nocera lab, Harvard University)

Harvard University chemists have invented a new kind of “bionic” leaf that uses bacteria, sunlight, water, and air to make fertilizer right in the soil where crops are grown. It could make possible a future low-cost commercial fertilizer for poorer countries in the emerging world.

The invention deals with the renewed challenge of feeding the world as the population continues to balloon.* “When you have a large centralized process and a massive infrastructure, you can easily make and deliver fertilizer,” Daniel Nocera, Ph.D., says. “But if I said that now you’ve got to do it in a village in India onsite with dirty water — forget it. Poorer countries in the emerging world don’t always have the resources to do this. We should be thinking of a distributed system because that’s where it’s really needed.”

The research was presented at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) today (April 3, 2017). The new bionic leaf builds on a previous Nocera-team invention: the “artificial leaf” — a device that mimics photosynthesis: When exposed to sunlight, it mimics a natural leaf by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. These two gases would be stored in a fuel cell, which can use those two materials to produce electricity from inexpensive materials.

That was followed by “bionic leaf 2.0,” a water-splitting system that carbon dioxide out of the air and uses solar energy plus hydrogen-eating Ralstonia eutropha bacteria to produce liquid fuel with 10 percent efficiency, compared to the 1 percent seen in the fastest-growing plants. It provided biomass and liquid fuel yields that greatly exceeded those from natural photosynthesis.

Fertilizer created from sunlight + water + carbon dioxide and nitrogen from the air

For the new “bionic leaf,” Nocera’s team has designed a system in which bacteria use hydrogen from the water split by the artificial leaf plus carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make a bioplastic that the bacteria store inside themselves as fuel. “I can then put the bug [bacteria] in the soil because it has already used the sunlight to make the bioplastic,” Nocera says. “Then the bug pulls nitrogen from the air and uses the bioplastic, which is basically stored hydrogen, to drive the fixation cycle to make ammonia for fertilizing crops.”

The researchers have used their approach to grow five crop cycles of radishes. The vegetables receiving the bionic-leaf-derived fertilizer weigh 150 percent more than the control crops. The next step, Nocera says, is to boost throughput so that one day, farmers in India or sub-Saharan Africa can produce their own fertilizer with this method.

Nocera said a paper describing the new system will be submitted for publication in about six weeks.

* The first “green revolution” in the 1960s saw the increased use of fertilizer on new varieties of rice and wheat, which helped double agricultural production. Although the transformation resulted in some serious environmental damage, it potentially saved millions of lives, particularly in Asia, according to the United Nations (U.N.) Food and Agriculture Organization. But the world’s population continues to grow and is expected to swell by more than 2 billion people by 2050, with much of this growth occurring in some of the poorest countries, according to the U.N. Providing food for everyone will require a multi-pronged approach, but experts generally agree that one of the tactics will have to involve boosting crop yields to avoid clearing even more land for farming.