What future generations need from us
Abstract What do future generations need from us? Various procedures, including individual and group role playing at 13 locations in nine countries, can help us answer this question. In general, future generations need equal opportunity (a legacy as beneficial as ours was), our caring about their well-being, and attention to their needs in our legislatures and parliaments. Their particular needs are for us to focus on peace and security, the environment, the worst risks of all, governance, the knowledge base, children and learning. The needs of future generations may provide the centrepiece for a new global ethic that improves our prospects for a positive future.
Prospective youth visions through imaginative education
Abstract This paper reports research which investigated the views and visions of the future of Steiner educated senior secondary students using quantitative and qualitative methods. The students demonstrated a strong sense of activism and self-confidence and felt empowered to create their own preferred futures. This capability is referred to as `prospectivity' of futures visions. In exploring the human qualities they thought they should develop to contribute to their ideal world in 2020, the students identified such factors as more activism, more awareness, attitude and values changes, future care and more spirituality. A number of features of Steiner education are identified which might contribute to feelings of empowerment in spite of realistic fears and concerns about the future. In conclusion, there is an exploration of theoretical and practical links between the findings and recent speculations of educational futurists in regard to educating young people for the 21st century.
Testosterone levels, handedness and sex ratio at birth.
Geschwind has hypothesized that levels of androgens in utero affect postnatal laterality preferences, high levels being associated with left-handedness of offspring. I have hypothesized that high parental androgen levels at the time of conception are associated with subsequent male births. However, left-handed parents seem to produce an excess of female, not male, offspring. This finding could be reconciled with the two hypotheses if individuals who were exposed to high levels of androgens in utero had low circulating levels in adulthood. Some evidence for this loophole is reviewed here. Lyster & Lloyd (1987, J. theor. Biol. 126, 125) have reported that (consistent with the hypotheses) index left-handed men have an excess of brothers; but, contrary to the hypotheses, index left-handed women have an excess of sisters. Accordingly these authors proposed that left-handedness in females is associated not with high levels of androgen in utero, but with a "sensitivity" to it. If such sensitivity were associated with low androgen levels, it might explain an excess of sisters among the sibs of left-handed women. It is shown here that evidence in agreement with this hypothesis (though not discriminating between it and Geschwind's) suggests that the sex ratios of offspring of LH male x RH female and of RH male x LH female matings, are both low.