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2012-03-01

Where the wild things aren’t? Nature vanishing from kids’ books, study finds ............


Vatic Note:  Just another way to socially engineer our children into never ever wanting to explore and experience the outdoors.  Now why is that?  Because you do not let cattle go wandering off willy nilly.  No, you keep them corralled into barns,  and fenced fields so they only do what they are suppose to do as assets... produce and then die and do not have a life of any kind.  Nice new world order we have here, huh?   The best chance we have at stopping all this,  is for the states and local governments to take back control of the schools in concert with the parents.  Its how it used to be with local financing rather than the money going to the feds.  We were 2nd in the world in education when we did that.  Now under the feds we are 39th.   This is suggesting no more field trips for the children in their education process....rather more  school time spent on sex education.  Perverts.   When they legalize pedophilia, that is when you will know they have assumed complete control over our children and that the Satanists have won.  We are doggone close to that now.   How do we know?  Of all the bankers (1200) that have resigned, not a single one has been arrested or charged with anything, so there is another reason for their resigning?  Could it be a complete revamping of the banking system and thus a new role for them all or are they going underground.  I ask because these are the ones who are determining what is published in these school books since they own most of the publishing companies. 


Where the wild things aren’t? Nature vanishing from kids’ books, study finds ............
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/120223_nature.htm

Feb. 23, 2012
Courtesy of University of Nebraska-Lincoln
and World Science staff

An alarm­ing trend not­ed in past re­search—that Amer­i­cans are los­ing their con­nec­tion with na­ture—is al­so strik­ingly ev­i­dent in re­spected chil­dren’s books. So says a group of re­search­ers who ex­am­ined im­ages in nearly 300 award-winning chil­dren’s books pub­lished from 1938 through 2008.


“Nat­u­ral en­vi­ron­ments have all but dis­ap­peared,” wrote Uni­vers­ity of Nebraska-Lincoln so­ci­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus J. Al­len Wil­liams Jr., and col­leagues, re­port­ing their find­ings in the jour­nal So­ci­o­lo­g­i­cal In­quiry. The books they assessed were all win­ners or hon­or re­cip­i­ents of the pres­tig­ious Calde­cott Med­al for chil­dren’s books.

Sci­en­tists re­ported in 2008 that Amer­i­cans and pos­sibly peo­ple around the world are spend­ing less and less time on out­door ac­ti­vi­ties, a trend that some wor­ry will lead to de­clin­ing glob­al health, di­min­ish­ing in­ter­est in na­ture and fal­ter­ing com­mit­ment to en­vi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion. Wil­liams’ study does­n’t say this pre­vi­ously iden­ti­fied trend in­flu­enced what is hap­pen­ing in books, but it does note that a steady in­crease in built en­vi­ron­ments and de­cline in nat­u­ral ones are con­sist­ent with this de­vel­op­ment.

“I am con­cerned that this lack of con­tact may re­sult in car­ing less about the nat­u­ral world, less em­pa­thy for what is hap­pen­ing to oth­er spe­cies and less un­der­stand­ing of many sig­nif­i­cant en­vi­ron­men­tal prob­lems,” Wil­liams said.

Wil­liams and col­leagues looked at wheth­er book il­lus­tra­tions de­picted a nat­u­ral en­vi­ronment, such as a jun­gle or a for­est; a built en­vi­ronment, such as a house, a school or an of­fice; or some­thing in-be­tween, such as a mowed lawn. They al­so not­ed wheth­er any an­i­mals were in the pic­tures—and if so, if those crea­tures were wild, do­mes­ti­cat­ed or took on hu­man qual­i­ties.

Over­all, they found that built en­vi­ron­ments were de­picted in 58 per­cent of the im­ages and were the ma­jor en­vi­ronment 45 per­cent of the time, while nat­u­ral en­vi­ron­ments ap­peared in 46 per­cent of the im­ages and were the ma­jor en­vi­ronment 32 per­cent of the time. But while built and nat­u­ral en­vi­ron­ments were al­most equally likely to be shown from the late 1930s un­til the 1960s, ­ci­ties and towns and the in­doors started to in­crease at the ex­pense of na­ture in the mid-1970s.

While the study was lim­it­ed to Calde­cott awardees, the re­search­ers said the find­ings are im­por­tant be­cause the award leads to strong sales and the hon­orees are fea­tured in schools and li­brar­ies. Calde­cott win­ners al­so can in­flu­ence tastes for chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture more gen­er­al­ly. Calde­cott awardees are the chil­dren’s books judged by the Amer­i­can Li­brary As­socia­t­ion to have the best il­lustra­t­ions in a giv­en year.

The study “does sug­gest that the cur­rent genera­t­ion of young chil­dren lis­ten­ing to the sto­ries and look­ing at the im­ages in chil­dren’s books are not be­ing so­cial­ized, at least through this source, to­ward great­er un­der­stand­ing and ap­precia­t­ion of the nat­u­ral world and the place of hu­mans with­in it,” the au­thors wrote.



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