Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Children are the same

I have seen too many pictures lately of dead and wounded children in Bagdad. Why, oh, why can we not do something about this dead-end (no pun intended) war? It seems as if our administration were frozen in some Alice in Wonderland scenario--both weird and hard to escape.

Mem Fox is one of my favorite children's authors and critic of current education. She coined the term "to ache with caring" in regard to teachers in her book Radical Reflections. If we all ached with caring maybe we could stop the war.

I recently discovered one of Fox's latest books Whoever You Are in which the proposition (certainly no new discovery) that children all over the world are laughing and crying, playing and learning, eating and sleeping. While they may not look the same or speak the same language or live the same life--they are the same inside.. Kirkus Reviews said the book acknowledges in the simplest of terms our common humanity. I wish all adults could acknowledge that and quit trying to kill their young.

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