heysomeday

(via theuppitynegras)

occupyallstreets:

Whistleblowing Wednesday: Children As Young As Six Harvest 25 Percent of U.S. Crops

Knowing the farmer who grows your food has become an important tenet of the modern food movement, but precious little attention is paid to the people who actually pick the crops or “process” the chickens or fillet the fish. U Roberto Romano’s poignant film, The Harvest/La Cosecha (2011), being screened across the country for Farmworker Awareness Week (March 24-29), informs us that nearly 500,000 children as young as six harvest up to 25 percent of all crops in the United States.

What’s illegal in most countries is permitted here. Child migrant labor has been documented in the 48 contiguous states. Seasonal work originates in the southernmost states in late winter where it is warm and migrates north as the weather changes. Every few weeks as families move, children leave school and friends behind. If you’ve had onions (Texas), cucumbers (Ohio or Michigan), peppers (Tennessee), grapes (California), mushrooms (Pennsylvania), beets (Minnesota), or cherries (Washington), you’ve probably eaten food harvested by children.

This isn’t a slavery issue, or an immigration issue per se. What’s remarkable is that most of the migrant child farmworkers are American citizens trying to help their families. This is a poverty issue and it gets to the heart of what we, as consumers, see as the “right price” to pay for food.

Children earn about $1,000 per year for working an average of 30 hours a week, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. When you consider that the average annual pay for a migrant family of four is $12,500-$14,500, it’s apparent why some families feel they have no choice but to bring their children into the fields with them. Half of these kids will not graduate from high school because they’re always moving around, perpetuating the cycle of poverty that caused them to be day laborers in the first place.

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(via southernfeminist)

siddharthasmama:

mangotea:

afternoonsnoozebutton:

Study shows watching TV boosts self esteem of White male children, decreases self esteem of Black male and all female children. (x)

Boys making the transition from elementary to middle school are probably exposed to superhero cartoons, Jordan said, adding, ” ‘Superman,’ ‘Batman,’ X-Men.’ The lead characters of these shows tend to be male.”

But Jordan added, “In recent years, creators of children’s programming have worked hard to improve diversity and include strong female characters.”

For white boys, “regardless of what show you’re watching … things in life are pretty good for you,” Martins, an assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University Bloomington, said in a statement. “(White males) tend to be in positions of power; you have prestigious occupations, high education, glamorous houses, a beautiful wife, with very little portrayals of how hard you worked to get there.”

 #study shows existing on this planet boosts self esteem of white male children/decreases self esteem of black male and all female children

In other news, water is wet.

But, children don’t see color, doe’.

(via porcelain-horse-horselain)

yodamanu:

Sautillante, Strasbourg, February 2013. I take the smile of her parents as an authorization to publish. Plus I had been freezing for so long, waiting for someone to show-up, that I couldn’t resist shooting this little girl jumping around. I for nocturne street photography, the 35mm has an edge over the 50mm because of the greater depth of field. It’s easier to have your subject in focus, even when it’s moving. This one is taken at f2, 1/30 sec and iso 1000 and I don’t think it could be “that” focused with a 50mm.

sesamestreet:

Early childhood education is critically important, and we’re here to help. Here’s an infographic with some key stats — click here to see a bigger version of it.

crookedindifference:

Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware.

The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell “neighborhood” properly and whatnot isn’t a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn’t going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.

Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever.

They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

(via lafrondeuse)