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Making all children “ready to learn” is the first, and probably the most important, national education goal for the year 2000. What does it mean for children to be “ready to learn?”This book is about the beliefs of the people who are shaping preschool policy. McGill-Franzen tells us what key decision-makers are thinking about preschool education — what counts as school, who should pay for it, what should be taught, and especially, whether there should be reading and writing programs for four-year-olds.This book also explores the history of these beliefs. The author locates contemporary early childhood concepts about “developmental appropriateness” in the ideas of physicians and psychologists of the 1920s, 1930s, and in even earlier periods of time. She believes that these ideas no longer work within the broader framework of literacy as embedded in the interactions of cultures children know and the lives they live.Anne McGill-Franzen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Reading at the State University of New York at Albany.

Mitchell and Thompson have compiled the first interdisciplinary study of deception and its manifestations in a variety of animal species. Deception is unique in that it presents detailed explorations of the broadest array of deceptive behavior, ranging from deceptive signaling in fireflies and stomatopods, to false-alarm calling by birds and foxes, to playful manipulating between people and dogs, to deceiving within intimate human relationships. It offers a historical overview of the problem of deception in related fields of animal behavior, philosophical analyses of the meaning and significance of deception in evolutionary and psychological theories, and diverse perspectives on deception—philosophical, ecological, evolutionary, ethological, developmental, psychological, anthropological, and historical.The contributions gathered herein afford scientists the opportunity to discover something about the formal properties of deception, enabling them to explore and evaluate the belief that one set of descriptive and perhaps explanatory structures is suitable for both biological and psychological phenomena.Robert W. Mitchell is Research Fellow, Department of Psychology, Clark University. Nicholas S. Thompson is Associate Professor of Psychology, Clark University.

Evaluates the significance and usefulness of anthropomorphism for the scientific understanding of animals by presenting diverse ideas from historians, philosophers, anthropologists, primatologists, psychologists, behaviorists, and ethologists.People commonly think that animals are psychologically like themselves (anthropomorphism), and describe what animals do in narratives (anecdotes) that support these psychological interpretations. This is the first book to evaluate the significance and usefulness of the practices of anthropomorphism and anecdotalism for understanding animals. Diverse perspectives are presented in thoughtful, critical essays by historians, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, behaviorists, biologists, primatologists, and ethologists. The nature of anthropomorphism and anecdotal analysis is examined; social, cultural, and historical attitudes toward them are presented; and scientific attitudes are appraised. Authors provide fascinating in-depth descriptions and analyses of diverse species of animals, including octopi, great apes, monkeys, dogs, sea lions, and, of course, human beings. Concerns about, and proposals for, evaluations of a variety of psychological aspects of animals are discussed, including mental state attribution, intentionality, cognition, consciousness, self-consciousness, and language.Robert W. Mitchell is Associate Professor of Psychology at Eastern Kentucky University and co-edited Deception: Perspectives on Human and Nonhuman Deceit, also published by SUNY Press. Nicholas S. Thompson is Professor of Psychology and Ethology at Clark University and editor of the Perspectives in Ethology series of Plenum Press. H. Lyn Miles is UC Foundation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga and Director of Project Chantek.

Examines emerging theoretical and methodological approaches to the field of sociology of education. These perspectives draw on notions of social justice, diversity, multiculturalism, and detracking.Sociology of Education discusses emerging theoretical and methodological approaches to the field of sociology of education. These emerging perspectives focus on the scholarship of class, race, gender and the state in education, and open up new avenues for theoretical and empirical work in the field. Anyone concerned with issues of quality and equality of educational opportunities and the social context of education will find Sociology of Education not only exciting but also useful in promoting new ways of thinking about and acting upon educational reform.Carlos Alberto Torres is Director of the Latin American Center at the University of California, Los Angeles and coauthor, with Raymond Allen Morrow, of Social Theory and Education: A Critique of Theories of Social and Cultural Reproduction, also published by SUNY Press. Theodore R. Mitchell is Dean of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.