Millions of children as young as ten are most worried about not having enough money for their future, the annual Good Childhood report from the Children’s Society estimates.

The report, published on Wednesday, is based largely on a survey of 2001 children (aged ten to 17) and their parent or carer, conducted by the Christian charity between May and June. Of these, more than one third (37 per cent) said that they were either “very” or “quite” worried about having enough money in the future. If that percentage is applied to the whole population, it would suggest that about 2.3 million young people share such worries.

For the first time, the survey included a question on concerns about the cost of living. This proved to be more worrying to children than the environment. Almost half (46 per cent) were either very or quite worried about rising costs, compared with 37 per cent about the environment.

Other worries listed in order of concern were: crime (33 per cent); new illnesses/pandemics, inequality, and online safety (all 30 per cent); homelessness (26 per cent); unemployment (25 per cent); and the refugee crisis (22 per cent).

Read it all.

Cost-of-living crisis adds to children’s worries, survey finds https://t.co/jfS3zQMCKO

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) September 19, 2023

From there:

I got up and turned on the TV, and there was just this big black hole in the World Trade Center. And there was just smoke billowing out of it. I called my sister Cathy I said, “You might wanna wake up, turn in your TV and take a look at what they’re showing.” The commentator’s saying that it’s an American Airlines plane. And I casually asked Cathy, I said, “Do you know where Betty is?” And she says, “Betty’s supposed to be flying out of Boston.” And I said, “Do you think Betty is on that plane?” We just didn’t know. So I left a phone call on her cellphone, just asking her when she’s landed or anywhere you’re on the ground, to just give us a call and tell us you’re okay. And there was no call from Betty. I called American Airlines, and it was only then that it was confirmed that Betty was on the flight.

I just want to add, through your passing, Betty, our family’s gotten very very close. Dad, who’s quite stoic, doesn’t really say a whole lot, man of the family, one day told us that he cries himself to sleep. Even to this day, he just keeps staying up watching TV, hoping somehow that you’ll reappear. And we’re all still waiting for that phone call from you to tell us that you’re okay. We just miss you a whole lot.

You may find the transcript of Betty Ong’s conversation reporting the hijacking from the American airlines plane here.

One World Trade Center rises through fog as the sunrises on the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in New York City, Monday morning #newyork #newyorkcity #NYC #sunrise #neverforget @agreatbigcity pic.twitter.com/rliOYFgq4D

— Gary Hershorn (@GaryHershorn) September 11, 2023

The Man Behind the Red Bandana from Drew Gallagher on Vimeo.

Yet French Muslims often feel that such rules unfairly target Islam. The new abaya ban, says Muslim Rights Action, a French anti-discrimination group that is trying to overturn the decision, risks stigmatising Muslim pupils and introducing ethnic profiling. The new rule has won approval on the right and far-right, although it has divided the left, parts of which also remain firmly attached to the defence of laïcité.

The government argues that it is trying to minimise discrimination in the classroom by keeping religious faith out. It is not a question of casual clothing choices, it says, but a response to an attempt to spread hardline political Islamism in France. Gilles Kepel, a scholar of Islamism, says the wearing of the abaya in schools is part of an Islamist strategy “to test the limits” in France. In the face of new pressures, the government says, headteachers need to have more powers to enforce secular rules. Liberals outside France will, as ever, find the rule a baffling distraction. The French consider that their country’s secular character is at stake.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

To liberal multiculturalists, France's ban on the abaya in state schools looks like an infringement of the right to religious expression. To its defenders, the safeguarding of France's secular tradition is at stake@TheEconomisthttps://t.co/Kywo2RO0LV

— Sophie Pedder (@PedderSophie) September 7, 2023

If you’re a child — or a former child — you know how hard it can be to summon the energy to leave the house each day for school. It’s early in the morning, and you are tired. Maybe you have a test or a social situation that’s making you anxious. Staying in bed often seems easier.

For as long as schools have existed, so have these morning struggles. Nonetheless, children overcame them almost every day, sometimes with a strong nudge from parents. Going to school was the normal thing to do.

Then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

The long school closures during the Covid pandemic were the biggest disruption in the history of modern American education. And those closures changed the way many students and parents think about school. Attendance, in short, has come to feel more optional than it once did, and absenteeism has soared, remaining high even as Covid has stopped dominating everyday life.

On an average day last year — the 2022-23 school year — close to 10 percent of K-12 students were not there, preliminary state data suggests. About one quarter of U.S. students qualified as chronically absent, meaning that they missed at least 10 percent of school days (or about three and a half weeks). That’s a vastly higher share than before Covid.

Read it all.

"Attendance at school has come to feel more optional than it did before the pandemic."

Where Are the Students? – The New York Times https://t.co/4CrHydaKqS

— Alexander Russo (@alexanderrusso) September 5, 2023

In California, Chloe Cole filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against her doctor and Kaiser Permanente, claiming doctors ignored her mental health issues, including the trauma of sexual assault. Instead, they prescribed her puberty blockers at 13, then began testosterone injections and performed a double mastectomy, all before she was 17. In less than a year, she began to regret the permanent loss of the ability to breastfeed. Cole’s lawsuit states that doctors hid the harms of these interventions and the lack of long-term studies. Instead of disclosing the strong possibility that gender dysphoria could resolve naturally, doctors told her parents that without this radical regimen, their daughter would be more likely to commit suicide. Cole recently testified before Congress, asking it to end “the largest medical scandal in history” to prevent other youth from becoming victims of pediatric gender transition.

Whistleblowers on both sides of the Atlantic are confirming medicine’s betrayal of young patients. In Missouri, Jamie Reed says Washington University’s gender clinic did not allow her to schedule patients for psychological care even though they had autism, ADHD, depression, and anxiety. Reed says the clinic lied to both patients and their parents. And at Tavistock, psychiatrist David Bell says leadership treated him with hostility when he raised concerns about the medical transition of children as young as eight. Bell says, “What matters is the truth. I hate the weaponisation of victimhood, the fact that the fear of being seen to be transphobic now overrides everything. . . It’s about free thinking, the kind that will result in better outcomes for all young people, whether transgender or not.”

As more stories like these surface, doctors who performed pediatric gender transition are now being held to account by former patients-turned-advocates. Since 2021, more than 20 legislatures have enacted laws to protect children from the irreversible harm these procedures can cause. Detransitioner Prisha Mosley, for example, recently filed a medical malpractice lawsuit for pediatric gender transition surgery that left her in constant pain and fearful that she is sterile. Yet the AAP and other medical organizations continue to turn a deaf ear toward stories like hers and the growing evidence against these procedures. Instead, they oppose legislative limits that protect children from irreversible harm. Some judges have sided with them and enjoined laws in Arkansas, Alabama, and Florida. But recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit issued a decision upholding Tennessee’s law protecting children from medical transition. The court rightly concluded that it is the role of the legislature—not the courts—to determine whether such procedures should be available to children.

The medical establishment’s complicity with the eugenics movement of the last century should have led to serious evidence-based inquiry before subjecting another vulnerable population to irreversible harm; however, the country’s leading doctors are embracing ideology and eminence over scientific evidence and sound ethical principles as much now as in the age of Buck v. Bell.

Read it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Awards of nearly £13 million have been made for dioceses to help churches reach more children, young people and families, from toddler groups to apprentice youth ministers, in the latest round of grants for mission from the Church of England.

The grants from the Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment Board of the Archbishops’ Council will revitalise parishes and start new congregations. The investments build on already successful projects to create new congregations and reach children and young people in areas including Bolton, Bournemouth, Guildford, Southampton and Wakefield.

In the Diocese of Guildford, £3.27 million has been awarded for the first phase of a nine-year project to reach young people of secondary school age with the good news of Jesus Christ in partnerships with schools.

Read it all.

Our latest grants for dioceses will help churches reach more children, young people and families.

Read more about the projects that will be funded at https://t.co/59728umQib.

— The Church of England (@churchofengland) July 28, 2023

Last week, Keir Starmer confirmed that a Labour Government would continue the current Government’s policy of the two-child benefit cap. This policy limits the payments that families in receipt of Universal Credit receive to only their first two children and was introduced in 2014 to ensure that ‘people on benefits face the same choices as those in work’.

The reasoning behind the policy does not stand true, as 58 percent of families affected by the limit are in fact households with at least working adult. The cap has instead had a detrimental impact on the lives of families across the country, and the Child Poverty Action Group estimates that the policy is pushing approximately one million children into poverty for prolonged periods.

Child poverty increases the likelihood of lower educational outcomes, as well as poorer mental and physical health. Those who experience it are also more likely to require support from public services later in life, negating any short-term benefits to the country’s finances that continuing to implement the cap would have. Removing the two-child limit would be the most cost-effective way of reducing the number of children living in poverty and would immediately lift an estimated 250,000 children out of poverty.

Read it all.

'My hope is that this Bill will bring an end to this cruel policy'@BishopPaulB urges the Labour and Conservative parties to back his Private Members’ Bill on abolishing the two-child benefit caphttps://t.co/H1FUnetFDb

— Politics.co.uk (@Politics_co_uk) July 24, 2023

A record number of children are living in temporary accommodation, as the level of homelessness in England soars.

The housing department revealed on Tuesday that 104,510 households were in temporary accommodation by the end of March this year — a 25-year high.

The total number of children in the same situation is at the highest level since records for that measure began in 2004, with 131,370 children living in temporary accommodation.

Read it all.

A record number of children are living in temporary accommodation, as the level of homelessness in England soarshttps://t.co/KOTwx7L29i

— The Times and The Sunday Times (@thetimes) July 25, 2023

Evangelicals have very good retention rates — even in the last decade nearly three quarters were still part of the same faith tradition as adults. The overall retention decline for evangelicals is just five percentage points. For mainline it’s much worse. They started right around the same level as evangelicals (76%), but now it’s just 58%. That means that if you found five people who were raised in the mainline, two of them would no longer be mainline today.

Black Protestants have also seen a noticeable decline. It was 87% who stayed in the tradition. Now it’s just 71% — a 16-point decline. Catholics are in a similar boat, too. They started out pretty high at 85%; now that number is 67%, which means that about one-third of folks raised Catholic are no longer part of the church.

As previously discussed, the nones are doing better at retention, though, going from a low point of 36% in the 1970s to 66% in the last decade. That is obviously a partial explanation for why the overall share of Americans who identify with no religion has continued to rise. Their boat has become less leaky, and they have to replace fewer people who leave. For most Christian groups, there are more holes forming in the hull every year.

But so far, we’ve only discussed retention rates, not where people go when they leave their childhood religion behind. Let’s take a closer look at that now….

Read it all.

Christians may be “missing” teaching children about the resurrection, a researcher into their religious development has suggested.

The Revd Joanna Stephens, a researcher in religious cognition and the development of belief at the University of Nottingham, has interviewed more than 100 children for an international study funded by the Templeton Foundation.

“What struck me more from the perspective of the Church of England . . . is I think we’ve missed teaching children about the resurrection,” she said. “Does Jesus have a shadow?” was one of the questions that she had asked. “A lot of the children have struggled with that, and even the Christian children, because they say ‘Well, Jesus is dead; so he used to have a shadow but he doesn’t now.’ And you ask, ‘Does God need to eat? Does Jesus need to eat?’ ‘Well, Jesus used to eat, but he’s dead now.’”

Read it all.

This was a really interesting interview about an international study exploring the development of children's beliefs. Are they only familiar with half the Easter story? "Jesus is dead; so he used to have a shadow but he doesn’t now." https://t.co/8FvvVIPVhF

— Madeleine Davies (@MadsDavies) July 21, 2023

“Although [Freire]’s early work was understandably rooted in an almost exclusive concern with class, many of us realized that it had theoretical shortcomings in dealing with the central issues shaping the multicultural debate,” explained Freire’s closest American collaborator, Henry Giroux. “Many of us began to expand the notion of social justice to include a discourse about racial justice. That is, justice could not be taken up solely in terms of the ownership of the means of production, or strictly around questions of labor or the division of wealth. These were very important issues, but they excluded fundamental questions about racism, colonialism, and the workings of the racial state.”

Echoing Marcuse’s redefinition of the proletariat—the white intellectuals united with the black underclass—Freire’s American disciples developed an elaborate framework for categorization and subversion of the ruling order. Their primary pedagogical strategy was to pathologize white identity, which was deemed inherently oppressive, and radicalize black identity, which was deemed inherently oppressed. In the academic literature, this technique is sometimes referred to as “revolutionary pedagogy,” “critical multiculturalism,” or “decolonization,” which entails ridding the education system of the repressive influence of “whiteness” and infusing it with the liberating influence of “blackness.”

Peter McLaren, another Freire disciple who worked in tandem with Henry Giroux, laid out the mechanics of how this new pedagogy of revolution would work in practice. American teachers and students, McLaren argued, must “[break] the imaginary power of commodified identities within capitalism” and “construct sites—provisional sites—in which new structured mobilities and tendential lines of forces can be made to suture identity to the larger problematic of social justice.”

Read it all.

Stalin once said that “the ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks,” and today we see his words have come to fruition. | @realchrisrufo https://t.co/DSM9ZfcPNx

— First Things (@firstthingsmag) July 18, 2023

Despite billions of federal dollars spent to help make up for pandemic-related learning loss, progress in reading and math stalled over the past school year for elementary and middle-school students, according to a new national study released on Tuesday.

The hope was that, by now, students would be learning at an accelerated clip, but that did not happen over the last academic year, according to NWEA, a research organization that analyzed the results of its widely used student assessment tests taken this spring by about 3.5 million public school students in third through eighth grade.

In fact, students in most grades showed slower than average growth in math and reading, when compared with students before the pandemic. That means learning gaps created during the pandemic are not closing — if anything, the gaps may be widening.

“We are actually seeing evidence of backsliding,” said Karyn Lewis, a lead researcher on the study.

Read it all.

Whoa: "Students in most grades showed slower than average growth in math and reading, when compared with students before the pandemic. That means learning gaps created during the pandemic are not closing — if anything, the gaps may be widening." @smervosh: https://t.co/0gnhZjqDuz

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) July 11, 2023

The report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Families and Households, ‘Love Matters’, was launched by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York on 26th April at Coram’s conference centre in London. This was a very appropriate venue in which to emphasise the importance of supporting children and families.

Over 120 people came to hear about the Commission’s messages and recommendations. It was a joyous occasion, rendered particularly special by the presence and contributions of pupils from four schools representing different faiths and members of the Family Justice Young People’s Board (FJYPB).  These schools and the FJYPB had previously taken part in the Commission’s evidence-gathering activities. Their personal stories and reflections demonstrated the enormous value of listening to and learning from young people. Their contributions at the launch can be heard on the Commission’s YouTube channel.

Read it all.

The concept of “Asian values”, once championed by leaders across the region, went out of vogue after the Asian financial crisis of 1997. The idea that East and South-East Asia’s disciplined governments had a unique economic edge over the decadent West suddenly seemed less compelling. Today in prosperous East Asia a different facet of those ballyhooed values is looking even more parlous. In China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, Asians’ supposed commitment to conservative family life is collapsing. As we report in our Asia and China sections this week, millions of young people are opting for looser, often lonelier and—in the East Asian context—less male-dominated arrangements. In a region that is home to over a fifth of humanity, the socioeconomic and demographic consequences will be vast, potentially destabilising and will shape millions of lives.

In Japan, where the shift first became evident, married couples with at least one child accounted for 42% of households in 1980, and single people 20%. That has flipped. In 2020 couples with children accounted for 25% of households, and singletons 38%. And the decline is continuing. Last year 17% of Japanese men and 15% of women aged 18-34 said they would not marry, up from 2% and 4% in the early 1980s, and China recorded its lowest-ever number of marriages, half as many as a decade ago.

In some ways young Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese and South Koreans are following a path charted in rich countries elsewhere.

Read it all.

Marriage rates across the region are dwindling and fertility rates are plummeting as a result. Governments’ response to this social change is only making things worse https://t.co/KTwGOdL9Ru

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 6, 2023

The Church of England has launched a new publication outlining its hopes for students, teachers and educators to flourish across the schools system.

Underpinned by the Church’s 2016 Vision for Education, the new document, entitled ‘Our Hope for a Flourishing Schools System’ makes recommendations including a once-in-a-generation re-imagination of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) funding, provision, training and development, wise and compassionate accountability systems for school inspections and performance measures and steps to ensure teaching is again regarded as a vocation in which adults can truly flourish and commit long-term.

The document sets out the importance of collaboration in different local contexts, particularly between schools in smaller rural areas, to ensure every child in every community receives an effective provision.

It concludes with recommendations for four leadership levels: Schools, School Trusts, Dioceses and Government, and invites dialogue and engagement across the sector to develop flourishing partnerships.

Read it all.

Thrilled to launch our new publication – ‘Our Hope for a Flourishing Schools System’ today 🙌

Full story and document download here 👇👇👇👇https://t.co/uq0SAbFSd9

— CofE Education (@CofE_Education) June 30, 2023

Classical education eschews pedagogical fads. It instead steeps students in the great works of literature, philosophy, history, and science—what the poet Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said.” Instead of Critical Race Theory and Marxist claptrap, children learn about Greece and Rome, Shakespeare and the Renaissance, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and the glory of the American founding.

Drawing inspiration from Greek and Roman academic traditions, classical education seeks to ground students in the good, the true, and the beautiful. Its highest aim is to form virtuous students grounded in the best of the Western canon. Classical schools instruct students through the sequence known as the “trivium,” guiding them through grammar, logic, and rhetoric. They first establish a knowledge base, then learn how to evaluate arguments, and finally how to articulately express their thoughts.

As such, classical education is interested in more than forming good students; its charge is forming students who are good.

More than two hundred new classically oriented schools have opened across the country in just the last two years. Classical learning is being adopted by charters, start-ups, and homeschooling parents. And classical education networks will only grow further as states embrace parental choice.

Read it all.

Classical education is interested in more than forming good students; its charge is forming students who are good. | @KevinRobertsTXhttps://t.co/mCyviKWRw3

— First Things (@firstthingsmag) June 21, 2023

National test results released Wednesday show reading and math scores for 13-year-olds have continued to worsen since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, setting up more roadblocks to their success in high school and beyond.