The environmental education of children is being promoted as essential to the establishment of a citizenry which is more caring toward the environment. But education will not be enough. In this essay I will argue that deep, lasting concern of the natural world must come from a genuine affection for it, and how this affection […]
Category: Roger Hart
Very instructive for this Initiative was the review of the psychological literature on Children’s developing capacities to participate, and on the benefits of participation. This work establishes that providing opportunities for young people to engage in action research and other forms of exploration and of self-expression, has positive effects for them and their communities. Benefits […]
SUMMARY NEEDED Click here to download [PDF] Title: Interpreting the Participation Articles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Author(s): Roger Hart Publication Date: 1996 Publisher:
After completing a PhD on the geography of children in the mid 1970’s I was looking for a useful way to continue this work. A quietly radical couple of fellows housed in the education unit of the Town and Country Planning Association in London pointed me in the right direction – Colin Ward, anarchist and writer with experience in architecture […]
This paper relates the history of playground provision in New York to changing conceptions of childhood, and specifically to a felt need to ’contain’ children in order to keep them off the streets, safe from traffic and unsavoury influences – a trend that children have tended to resist. Playgrounds most often substitute a narrow range […]
In 1989 the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), a set of universal standards for the protection and development of children that has been ratified by all member nations of the UN except the USA. This document has extraordinary implications for how children and youth should be perceived and […]
In this chapter Hart argues that the emphasis on children’s decision making with adults and consultation with adults in formal settings is a much too narrow view of children’s social participation for citizenship. Instead, a new vision of children’s social participation in the settings of their daily lives, from peer and family interactions and decision-making […]
This essay reaches into the complex issues of urban growth to ask how we can insert a better understanding of children’s needs and perspectives into the governance, planning and management of cities. The issue of how cities develop has distinct and serious implications for children. Children are more vulnerable to many of the hazards of […]
In this introduction to the special issue on children’s participation, Cahill and Hart address issues raised by the collected papers and identify new questions for further engagement, rather than offer a general overview of the field. These questions include What is the context for participation? What does it mean to “participate”? Why have children been excluded from […]
In a first step to construct a model of the development of an environmental concern, literature is reviewed regarding children’s understanding of environmental processes, their motivations for engagement with the physical world, and their moral development. Political socialization, which hear upon their likelihood of taking action, is also reviewed. Connections between development in these fields […]