By examining the premises underlying conventional approaches to teaching disadvantaged students, educators can devise more challenging content and more effective instructional methods. Some important principles include maximizing time on task, establishing high expectations and a school climate supporting academic learning, and strengthening…

Despite well-publicized political gains, more than 40 percent of the nation's elderly are living precariously. About 20 percent of our children live in poverty and/or have no medical insurance. Intergenerational discord may diminish if citizens recognize and work for shared concerns, such as prevention of child/elder abuse and quality health care.…

In Europe preschools are viewed as providers of both child care and early education. Preschool programs there are optional, universally available, and designed to further children's social and cognitive development. In the advanced industrialized world, only the U.S. and Great Britain are still debating differences between care and education.…

Introduces a special section forecasting problems, delineating issues, and proferring strategies that should prove helpful as early childhood policies and programs are crafted. Today's programs are grounded in research that verifies the efficacy of early intervention, particularly for low-income children. School restructuring will play an…

Changes in services to handicapped children have served as a legislative wedge for eventually providing services to all children. This article reviews recent federal legislative provisions and principles pertaining to young children, including the Education for All Handicapped Children Act and the Education of the Handicapped Amendments of 1986.…

At a time of reduced social services funding, some children receive redundant services and others receive none. Fragmentation prevents social service professionals from seeing the cumulative impact of their interventions. Integrated children's services could be enhanced by school restructuring that provided more personal relationships between…

Studies of the effects of emotional deprivation during infancy and childhood are cited in this article about the nature and meaning of love. (MF)

An Idaho education dean recounts a moving encounter with a fatherless first-grader while visiting his grandson in Eugene, Oregon. Envisioning a deadbeat dad and a burned-out mother, he pondered the statistical odds of this child graduating from college. However, the girl's warm welcome from her teacher helped revise his hopes about the little…

To counter schools' unwitting contribution to self-centeredness in American culture, this article advises teachers to study childrearing practices of certain primitive, nonviolent societies like the Mbuti, the Tassaday, and the !Kung. Alternative disciplinary techniques designed to shape students' personal strengths are suggested. Includes 18…

Academic objectives are important, but more attention must be given youngsters' social, physical, emotional, and moral development. Schools are struggling to teach children whose home life is anxiety-ridden and learning-unfriendly. Because taxpayers resist generosity to poor families alone, we must design social programs to help all families and…

This paper declares war against the miseducation of young children, who learn best through direct encounters rather than through formalized inculcation of symbolic rules. A variety of socioeconomic forces (including the civil rights and women's movements) are forcing preschoolers into learning environments originally designed for school-age…

In poor, urban schools, so much time is spent controlling and disciplining children to obey authority (or to learn the hidden curriculum), that scant time is left for "real" teaching and learning. This article shows how school culture (conditions, norms, relationships, and structures) can be changed to educate all children adequately. Includes 10…

Shows how children are affected by homelessness, how school personnel can help alleviate major stresses (constant moving, frequent change of schools, overcrowded living conditions, and lack of access to basic resources), and how Massachusetts and other state departments of education are preparing school personnel to serve homeless kids. Educators…