- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Beacon Press (August 1, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0807032875
- ISBN-13: 978-0807032879
- Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.6 x 8.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
- Average Customer Review: 7 customer reviews
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,502,363 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness Paperback – August 1, 2008
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Mercogliano is, in effect, a cultural therapist. . . offering fresh new ideas and creative solutions. Ultimately, he is what all good therapists are: a purveyor of hope.—Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia
"With deep insight, Mercogliano shows how our society is suppressing children's creative energies. But he also brings a positive message, showing how we can help young people break through conventional restraints and pursue their passions. This is a beautiful, searching, and inspiring book."—William Crain, author of Reclaiming Childhood: Letting Children Be Children in Our Achievement-Oriented Society
"A very strong and attractive book."—John Taylor Gatto, author of Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
"Mercogliano's book, full of insight, enthusiasm and hope, is as readable and practical as it is illuminating."—Publisher’s Weekly
"Recommended for academic libraries and large child development collections in public libraries."—Library Journal
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To be honest the overall point of this book comes across a bit radical at times, but his ideas are sound. I think it's just an odd thought to let kids have more control over their own lives because we're so used to monitoring every aspect of their lives. Which is precisely the point of this book. His approach to education was so unusual it made me shake my head at times. He works at the Albany Free School which is a school that allows children to learn whatever they want, whenever they want....and what that school does is mind boggling if you're used to the structure of an everyday public school. But after reading this book, and doing some research on the school since then I am planning on taking a trip up to New York to check this school out because what they're doing is working, and as radical as it's concept might be, it is turning out some very innovative, creative, and self reliant children into the world. I have to see it for myself.
What is so impressive about this book is it's not necessarily a "parenting" book or a research oriented book, but Mercogliano covers his theme using history, biology, psychology, sociology, education theory, philosophy, literature, and personal accounts in addition to basic parenting advice, all of which is based with solid research. He wraps it all together so well, fitting the theories of Jung with Erikson, connecting that to some of the newest brain development research. He shows where childhood has come from, how it has changed, and how our culture of industry straight through to technology has shaped those changes. The whole book is quite impressive, not to mention easy to read and concise.
I was the most impressed with the chapter on how the media has affected childhood (Ch. 7: Childhood Lost). That has been my major area of study for quite some time so I wasn't expecting to read anything I hadn't read before, but the media chapter in this book might be the best chapter I have ever read on media effects. Not only did he incorporate some well known research, but he used a lot of research I wasn't familiar with. In addition he uses media theory and philosophy to introduce and back up his points starting with Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman (the chapter of this chapter is actually a reference to Postman's book "The Disappearance of Childhood" which is also a fantastic book, although much more dense and somewhat difficult to read by comparison to this book).
The book did have it's weak points. I felt the chapter on solitude was lacking and almost pointless at times. The point of a child needing solitude to explore his inner thoughts is an important aspect of this book, but he doesn't cover the subject well. He takes a philosophical perspective, which although interesting, could have easily been tied into some research about how important it is for children to feel bored because it encourages them to seek out and explore on their own instead of having an adult cater to their entertainment needs.
I LOVED this book, and I have read countless books on just about every child development topic possible. It's an easy book to read, it's packed with good ideas, and good advice. Not to mention the author is clearly passionate about his topic, which isn't always as obvious in books so full of information. For under $1 this book is a steal, and shouldn't be missed whether you're a parent, educator, or politician. Heck, even if you have no interest in kids you should pick this book up because surely one day you'll have a child and that child will have a soul and this book will help you nurture any child's soul, their brain... and their "inner wildness" which is about the most important thing any book can hope to accomplish. This book is fantastic, don't miss it.
I agree that we are pushing structured learning environments at kids who are way too young for them.
This book is very feel-goody about letting kids be uncivilized as the way for them to develop into healthy grown-ups. I disagree. I think civilizing kids is the job of parents, and I conclude that parents need to rethink their double-career mindset.
The better book on this topic is "The Minds of Boys" by Michael Gurian (good for advocating free childhoods for boys or girls). There is a greater emphasis for parents to become advocates for protecting their children's free time and for understanding how kids needs are (and are not) being met in early classroom environments. Check it out.
My opinion: Now is the perfect time to restructure American family priorities toward having a parent at home. Taxes have become so high on second incomes, it hardly seems worthwhile to work once you add in childcare charges, after school program charges, transportation charges, drycleaning service, housekeeping service, restaurant meals, and the opportunity cost of missing down time with your children.
***updated*** Anyway, now that we are all to become slaves of the state working to pay off an enormous public debt, you may as well let your kids grow up to become mind-numbed robots. What else will there be for them?


Last week New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait reminded us that swing voters are going extinct. (“From the 1950s through the 1980s, 10 to 15 percent of voters floated between the two parties in presidential elections. Recently that rate has fallen to about 5 percent.”) Whether a cause or effect of more partisan voting, it’s also true that moderate candidates, and those who challenge their party’s orthodoxy, are becoming scarcer. The phrase “moderate Republican” has become more and more of an oxymoron with each passing year since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. In 2014, the Democrats, trying to stave off electoral disaster, ran supposedly centrist U.S. Senate candidates in red states like Georgia and Kentucky (where Alison Lundergan Grimes famously refused to say whether she had voted for Barack Obama), but all of them lost, and the party will probably end up with a more orthodox slate in 2016.
The narrowing of the political parties has been accompanied by a change in the definition of moderate or centrist political views. So-called social issues, such as abortion and gay rights, hardly matter any more. These days it seems that a “moderate” —Democratic, Republican, or independent—is someone who advocates government austerity, and in particular cutting Social Security benefits. Pro-life Democrats and pro-union Republicans, who once represented swing voters, are almost nowhere to be found.
We see this most clearly among the Republican presidential candidates, who debate for the fourth time on Tuesday night. Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, who are either blessed or cursed with a reputation for being moderate and responsible, want to raise the Social Security retirement age and cut benefits to higher-income households. John Kasich has been tagged as the truth-teller in the Republican Party, thanks to his skepticism of the power of massive tax cuts for the wealthy. (In the last GOP debate, he asked sarcastically, “Why don’t we just give a chicken in every pot, while we’re, you know, coming up—coming up with these fantasy tax schemes?”) But he is still running as a severe austerity candidate, repeatedly emphasizing in the last debate that “I spent my entire lifetime” balancing budgets, as a congressional leader and as governor of Ohio. He is also a longtime champion of a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget. This straitjacket on government spending is considered a radically conservative idea among economists; only in the red-versus-blue political arena is it considered a sign of centrism.
Forty years ago, we were beginning the first presidential campaign in which most convention delegates were chosen through competitive primaries, and 1976 featured more policy differences within the parties than has been seen ever since. Democratic candidates included the right-wing populist George Wallace and the emphatic but technocratic Jimmy Carter (who would have fit right into the GOP of that era if he had been born in Maine instead of Georgia), but Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson was the epitome of the moderate-to-conservative wing of the party. Jackson opposed abortion in almost all instances, was against school busing to achieve racial integration, and was one of the most hawkish members of Congress, saying in 1975 that “The basic decision to go into Vietnam was right.” But Sen. Jackson was also a defender of social-welfare programs and a champion of organized labor. “Labor had no stauncher friend,” said Lane Kirkland, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. upon Sen. Jackson’s death. It’s difficult to imagine anyone earning such praise from a major union leader today without being classified as left-wing, and unelectably so, on the editorial pages of the New York Times and Washington Post.
On the Republican side in 1976, the moderate wing was represented by president and former House minority leader Gerald Ford, who had an adversarial but not always hostile relationship with labor unions. At time, the party also included senators like Jacob Javits of New York and Ed Brooke of Massachusetts who usually voted with labor unions. They would be called RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) today and would surely not survive party primaries. The best-known RINO of the time, vice-president and former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, also worked with unions and signed the first state minimum-wage law in the country. The fact that he was also a leader in the “tough on crime” movement wouldn’t save him from being purged from the party for union sympathies today; indeed, he would be a better fit for the Bill Clinton administration.
President Clinton, of course, is credited with moving the Democratic Party to the center in the 1990s. But any move to the center on social issues was temporary. The more lasting effects of his administration were welfare reform, banking deregulation, and a more conciliatory tone toward Wall Street. Labor support, once something that almost every Democratic candidate outside the South boasted about, is now almost considered an embarrassment.
When Ronald Reagan won the Republican nomination in 1980, he established the party’s current strategy of wooing upper-income voters with tax cuts and working-class voters with “wedge” social issues such as abortion and gun control (as well as jingoist rhetoric in foreign policy). The Democratic Party eventually followed by going after highly educated voters (especially secular ones) on the other side of the same wedge issues, while attracting non-white voters on civil-rights issues rather than economic ones. The question of how to increase wages and reduce unemployment, once at the center of American politics, has been shoved aside. Even the most-publicized attempts to create a third force in American politics—including Ross Perot’s independent presidential campaign in 1992, the Third Way think tank, and the No Labels movement—have emphasized Social Security reforms and other austerity proposals, appealing more to the investor class than to the middle-income voters who once defined the center.
This campaign season has shown signs that the working class is tired of being neglected. In the Democratic race Bernie Sanders offers a coherent, if not entirely realistic, agenda for working-class voters. On the Republican side, Donald Trump is getting disproportionate support from those in less secure economic circumstances (especially white men without college degrees). Mr. Trump’s vows not to cut Social Security and Medicare, along with his scapegoating of immigrants and his vague assertions that certain rich people like hedge-fund managers should pay more in taxes, don’t add up to a practical blueprint for addressing the concerns of the working class, but it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s polling better than the candidates who say Too Much Social Security is the country’s biggest problem.


Religious Leaders Assess Causes, Consequences of Christian Exodus
Religious leaders met in Detroit, Lebanon and Rome in February to address the accelerating emigration of Christians from the Middle East, an exodus that seriously threatens the survival of Christianity in the region. Currently between 12 million and 15 million Christians reside in the Middle East, almost half of them in Egypt, and in most Middle Eastern countries less than 10 percent of the population is Christian. The Christian population in the Middle East has been in steady decline since the Young Turks Revolt in 1908 and the subsequent persecution of Christians. While persecution is still a contributing factor, most participants in the February meetings agreed that the causes of migration today are primarily social and political. Tarek Mitri, Lebanon’s minister of information, said Christians, who are among the better-educated classes, are “victims of their good education” in that they are able to provide a better standard of living for their families by emigrating to where there are better career opportunities. In this way, the increasing rate of migration is in part a consequence of globalization. “If a young Palestinian—Christian or Muslim—can get work in the United States or Dubai, then they will go,” said Bernard Sabella, a Catholic member of the Palestinian parliament and former professor at Bethlehem University.
Causes. Archbishop Jean Sleiman of Baghdad said that while economic and political problems are the major reasons for leaving in most areas of the Middle East, Christians in countries like Iraq and the Palestinian territories leave out of “fear of Islamic fundamentalism and being legally discriminated against” in an Islamic state. In Iraq the problem is particularly acute: at least half of all Christians in Iraq, an area inhabited by Christians since the first century, have left that country in the last five years. The crisis has become so severe that the bishops of Iraq have called on Pope Benedict to convene an extraordinary regional synod to address the problem.
Consequences. Another area of agreement that emerged from the meetings is that it is desirable for Christians to remain in the Middle East not simply because of their long history in the area or because they are lawful citizens. Archbishop Sleiman said Christians help preserve peaceful coexistence in religiously and ethnically diverse societies. Christians possess a unique culture that displays “the willingness to mediate,” and therefore they “could do so many things because reconstruction [of a war-torn nation] deals above all with souls, culture, mentalities,” the archbishop said.
Some participants in the meetings also said a strong Christian presence could help moderate Muslims to counter the rising wave of Islamic extremism sweeping the region. Mohammed Sammak, a political adviser to Lebanon’s grand mufti and a participant in the Rome meeting, said, “The fewer Christians there are, the more [Islamic] fundamentalism rises,” fills the void and gains the upper hand; “that is why as a Muslim, I am opposed” to Christians emigrating. For Christians to disappear from the Middle East would be like “pulling out the threads of a cloth so that the whole social fabric risks unraveling and dying.”
Another danger is that if Muslim-majority nations do nothing to protect and encourage their Christian minorities to stay, then Western countries will think that Islam does not accept or respect Christianity, Sammak said. If people living abroad see that Muslims are unable to live with Christians even when they share the same culture, language and citizenship, he said, “then they’ll think, ‘so how can we Europeans live with Muslims?’” Tensions and restrictions against Muslims living in or immigrating to Europe may be exacerbated as a result.
Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan Mar Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim of Aleppo appealed to Muslim nations and authorities, telling them that their role is “to safeguard Christians. It is up to you. We don’t believe our protection can come from outside.”
Doctors Defend Regulations Protecting Conscience Rights
The Catholic Medical Association has joined forces with the Christian Medical Association and the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists to combat what they see as a major threat to the conscience rights of health care professionals. The groups are joining in an effort to intervene legally against lawsuits filed by the attorneys general of eight states, Planned Parenthood of America and the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association.
The suits seek to overturn a Department of Health and Human Services regulation that prohibits discrimination against health professionals who decline to participate in abortions or other medical procedures they believe to be objectionable for moral or religious reasons. Without the regulation, pro-life health professionals would be subject to “the imminent threat of being forced...to perform abortions, assist in abortions, train for abortions and refer individuals for abortions despite their religious, moral and ethical objections to the practice of abortion,” said court papers filed with the U.S. District Court in Hartford, Conn.
“Physicians must defend their right to practice medicine in accordance with their consciences,” said John Brehany, M.D., executive director of the Catholic Medical Association. “It’s a very important principle that every physician should support. Without conscience protections, for example, physicians or other health care professionals could be subject to government conscription to participate in the executions of death-row prisoners if the state could not find volunteers to do so,” Brehany said.
The motions to intervene, which were filed by attorneys from the Alliance Defense Fund and the Center for Law & Religious Freedom on behalf of the three pro-life organizations, also argue that pro-life medical professionals could be “forced to relocate to jurisdictions that respect their rights or to leave the profession altogether” if there were no federal laws protecting their conscience rights. The motions further criticize the “plaintiffs’ baseless allegations that medical professionals exercising their conscience place women at risk of serious injury and even death by failing to render necessary services during medical emergencies.”
“I’m confident that the court will allow these doctors to intervene be-cause they are the ones who will be forced” to perform or refer or train for abortions, said Matthew S. Bow-man of the Alliance Defense Fund. “It’s a direct attack on the only existing protections” for pro-life health professionals. “When they try to strike down a regulation that implements laws in place for 30 years, it affects every pro-life health professional.”
Meanwhile, on Feb. 27 the Obama administration announced it was reviewing a proposal to rescind the regulation. After the review by the Office of Management and Budget, the proposal is to be published in the Federal Register, opening a 30-day period for public comment. In response, the Catholic Medical Association is also initiating an education campaign to raise awareness about the issue. People need to know that even if the regulation is overturned, “there are still laws that protect conscience rights,” Brehany said. “We need to continue to defend and respect and explain the reasoning behind them.”
Coalition Expresses Support for Sebelius
A group of Catholic leaders, scholars and theologians publicly expressed support on March 1 for the nomination of Governor Kathleen Sebelius, Democrat of Kansas, to be the next secretary of health and human services. In a statement organized by Catholics United, a Washington-based progressive organization, the group said: “In addition to offering our support, we also reject the tactics of those who would use Governor Sebelius’s faith to attack her. As Catholics, we find such partisan use of our religion regrettable and divisive.” The nomination of Governor Sebelius, a Catholic who is pro-choice, has engendered controversy among some conservative groups and with some bishops. The Catholic League has organized against her nomination and Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City said, “It is troubling the important influence that she will have on shaping health care policies for our nation.” Catholics in Alliance said in a statement that both the Catholic League and Archbishop Nauman are “doing a disservice to those Americans who will benefit from Governor Sebelius’s leadership as health and human services secretary.”
Snyder Responds to ‘Hate Mail’
Despite receiving what he termed “hate mail” that questioned his appointment to the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the Rev. Larry Snyder, president of Catholic Charities USA, said he welcomed the opportunity to bring the church’s views on serving the poor and marginalized to the national discussion. The letters raised doubts about his role on the council and “told me that I would probably go to hell for accepting this appointment,” Father Snyder said. The correspondence was apparently prompted by the fact that President Obama is pro-choice. “There can be no doubt that Catholic Charities is a firmly pro-life organization,” Father Snyder said. “Let me assure you the administration is well aware of where we stand on this issue. But I believe God will also not forgive us for missing any opportunity to promote the care of the poor and vulnerable in this country,” he continued. “We will be faced with opportunities to do so with the Obama administration, and Catholic Charities will take them.”
Archbishop Paulinus Costa, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Bangladesh, criticized the “barbarous killing and looting” that left more than 140 people dead or missing following the recent mutiny of the Bangladesh military. • Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said he hopes Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to Israel will be an opportunity for the pope to demonstrate to the world his deep knowledge of and respect for Judaism. • The head of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X said on Feb. 26 that his order is not ready to accept the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, which the Vatican has set as a condition for full reconciliation of the order with the church. • The latest church statistics show that the number of Catholics remains stable at 1.147 billion people worldwide and that the number of priests and seminarians worldwide has been showing a modest, yet steady increase. • The Vatican has announced that a California woman, Heidi Sierras, will be baptized by Pope Benedict during the Easter Vigil in Rome.


With the necessity of increased processing capacity with less energy consumption; power aware multiprocessor system has gained more attention in the recent future. One of the additional challenges that is to be solved in a multi-processor system when compared to uni-processor system is job allocation. This paper presents a novel task dependent job allocation algorithm: Energy centric- Allocation (Ec-A) and Rate Monotonic (RM) scheduling to minimize energy consumption in a multiprocessor system. A simulation analysis is carried out to verify the performance increase with reduction in energy consumption and required number of processors in the system.
Dr. Anju Pillai S. and T.B., I., “Ec-A: A task allocation algorithm for energy minimization in multiprocessor systems”, International Journal of Computer, Information Science and Engineering, World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, vol. 8, pp. 254-260, 2014.


Race and faith targeted bullying is bullying that is perceived by the victim or any other person to be racist or bullying that targets a person’s faith.
The relationship between racist incidents and racist bullying
All incidents of racist bullying in schools constitute a racist incident. However not all racist incidents would constitute racist bullying. To determine if racist incident/s are bullying, it is important to have a shared whole-school understanding of what bullying is. The Anti-Bullying Alliance defines bullying as:
‘the repetitive, intentional hurting of one person or group by another person or group, where the relationship involves an imbalance of power. It can happen face to face or online.’
 Based on definition of racism from Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in 1999 by MacPherson