An open invite has been given to all UK workers to join in common cause with the union, as more than 40,000 RMT members at Network Rail and 13 train operating companies walked out on June 21 in the first of three 24-hour strikes over pay, conditions and job security.
So, what is nature deficit disorder? The highly contentious phrase comes from the journalist Richard Louv whose Last Child in the Woods became a rare example of a broadly ‘educational’ international bestseller on children’s relationship with the natural world. Louv argues that trapped within a society full of time constraints and technological advancements, children are losing touch with nature. Louv provocatively describes this condition as ‘nature deficit disorder’, resulting in ‘diminished use of senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses’[…]. […] We reject both the ‘disorder’ and the ‘deficit’ tag for several reasons.
The only way this can be intelligible is by conceiving that school maths competence ‘precurses’ (Gee, 2001) university maths competence, which ‘precurses’ real maths adeptness. […] After all, this idea of the interpenetration of symbolic competence is built into Bernstein's explanation of how the middle-class home code precurses its young into the school code better than does the working-class home code.
