Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat, comments on “…bookshops that use their space for more than just selling, and the bookshop therefore becomes a destination for customers, not just a means to an end. Anyone can sell books, and anyone can buy books online: good bookselling is all about making the buying of books an experience.”
Ref: p.125 Jen Campbell The Bookshop Book. Constable, London. 2014
Also thought-provoking:
“What’s important is that they [bookshops] survive, along with libraries, as brick-and-mortar entities. It’s crucial that they’re part of the visible fabric of our lives, as much for this generation as future ones. We learn by what we see around us, and that’s what arouses our curiosity. Otherwise books will just become part of the general noise of games, downloaded films, Twitter, Facebook (or whatever comes after them), and films on the internet of people falling over. All those things, because they essentially involve skimming and moving quickly along to the next shiny bauble, are the antithesis of reading, which requires immersion. It worries me that we assume the same piece of technology – a tablet for now – can offer both skimming and immersive experiences, because eventually skimming will win out.” ~ John Connolly (author of The Book of Lost Things)
Ref: p.108-109 Jen Campbell The Bookshop Book. Constable, London. 2014
I found this thought-provoking and convincing:
Children’s writer, Jacqueline Wilson, observed: “I think bookshops and libraries are vital. It seems so sad that so many libraries have been closed down and so many bookshops have disappeared. If children can’t see books on shelves and learn to enjoy browsing before they select a book then they’ll never become keen readers.”
Ref: p.94 Jen Campbell The Bookshop Book. Constable, London. 2014
“During nearly all the history of our species man has lived in association with large, often terrifying, but always exciting animals. Models of the survivors, toy elephants, giraffes and pandas, are an integral part of contemporary childhood. If all these animals became extinct, as is quite possible, are we sure that some irreparable harm to our psychological development would not be done?” ~ G. E. Hutchinson,
quoted p.275 Paul Shepard ‘On Animal Friends’ pp.275-300 in Eds. Stephen R Kellert and Edward O Wilson (1993) The Biophilia Hypothesis. Shearwater Books. Washington, DC; Covelo, California
On a similar tangent, Aaron Katcher and Gregory Wilkins observe that “Children raised on television are exposed to vast amounts of information but fail to learn very much about their immediate environment. Too much is learned from a small two-dimensional representation of global events and too little from direct exploration of their own place in the world.” (p.192)
Aaron Katcher and Gregory Wilkins ‘Dialogue with Animals: Its Nature and Culture’ pp. 173-197 (?) in Eds. Stephen R Kellert and Edward O Wilson (1993) The Biophilia Hypothesis. Shearwater Books. Washington, DC; Covelo, California
Just a couple of interesting quotes from Jack Zipes’s book, sticks and stones:
“The more we invest in children, the more we destroy their future. There is no way out of the paradox that we have created, unless we reconsider our investment.” (P.ix)
“What is most disturbing today is that we use rational methods to cultivate the tastes and values of the young in all kinds of educational, religious, and cultural institutions that are predicated on corporate practices and goals. Everything we do to, with, and for our children is influenced by capitalist market conditions and the hegemonic interests of ruling corporate elites. In simple terms, we calculate what is best for our children by regarding them as investments and turning them into commodities. Such rationalised practices lead to irrational if not vicious behavior. Success and justice are thus based on irrational and commodified relations. Children are expected to sort out the contradictions that are inevitable and intolerable in our society….” (P.xi)
“… active children can transform the material objects of their culture to bring about greater choice and freedom in life.” (P.xii)
“The sociopsychological impact of reading materials, the spoken word, and images cannot be measured clearly or definitively by anyone, but I believe that we can analyze the framework, the institutions, families, and schools in which we interact with our children to grasp how we are “homogenizing” them. This is not to say that children are passive victims and are being turned out all the same way. They are indeed very active participants, but participants in processes and games that are rarely of their own making.” (P.xiii)
Ref: jack Zipes sticks and stones: the troublesome success of children’s literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. Rutledge: New York and London
Advocating a healthier, low-sugar diet for kids, Sarah Wilson writes:
“Kids need food every 3-4 hours. Kids need to eat regularly to maintain a blood glucose concentration high enough to support the activity of their brain and nervous system. The brain is the chief glucose consumer, and while a child’s brain is as big as an adult’s, it’s the liver – responsible for storing glucose and releasing it into the blood – that is far smaller in a child and only has the capacity to store around four hours worth of glucose at a time.” (p.16)
Sarah Wilson I quit sugar kids cookbook
Another fantastic TED talk…
“When children have agency in their play, they learn to have agency in their lives.”
~ Cas Holman
Just reading a particularly interesting article, ‘The Case For Letting Kids Design Their Own Play’ – by Cas Holman http://www.fastcodesign.com/3048508/the-case-for-letting-kids-design-their-own-play
She writes: “I’ve spent time with Penny Wilson, an influential playworker in adventure playgrounds in the U.K., observing children playing. She taught me the important difference between asking kids “What are you building?” and saying to them, “Tell me about what you’re doing.” When we ask, ‘What are you building?’ it implies that: a) You should have a goal and be working toward a finished thing, i.e., play is linear; b) you are supposed to be building something (children’s understanding of the built world is often limited to houses, so they are confronted with either having done it wrong, or they change their vision to fit their perception of your expectation); c) you should be doing something that you can explain to me.
“We want to avoid all of these rules. So by saying “tell me about this” we leave the door open to stories about what children are imagining, and they can share challenges, discoveries about putting things together, or any number of things about their experience with their peers and school.
“This simple semantic shift has influenced how I design for play. Giving children less leaves room for them to contribute more. By allowing them to direct their own play they develop habits of agency, independence, and self-determination. Armed with these skills, they jump in to figure out who they are and will be in the world, rather than waiting for someone to hand them a model to follow.”
I recommend reading the whole thing.
Just an aside – this is a good little book:
Cell Biology, by Aubrey Stimola (Rosen Publishing, New York, 2011, part of the Science Made Simple series).
It works many metaphors into the discussion, but they are all common to the field and easily shift out to more in depth explanation. Something I had forgotten is where the term ‘cell’ came from and that is an interesting metaphor to have shaped original understanding. Stimola explains:
“In 1665, scientist Robert C. Hooke was the first person to see a cell and recognize it as the basic building block of life. Looking at a thin slice of cork with a compound microscope – an instrument that uses two or more lenses to form enlarged images of very small objects – Hooke saw small, regularly spaced, boxlike structures surrounded by well-defined walls. Because these spaces reminded him of the small rooms that monks lived in, Hooke called them cellulae, from the Latin word cella, or “little room.” What he actually saw were the cell walls of the dead plant cells.” (p.29)
LiteracyNZ 