It was in January 2001 that we commemorated the life of Meir Gottesmann, an outstanding child care worker and a most remarkable man. He had survived the Holocaust as a teenager by walking to Israel, and he had built up the largest child care organisation in the country. Despite his achievements, he remained modest and unassuming, and he played a major role in international child care circles.
The February 2001 edition had a lot of substantial articles, and we’ve picked a piece by Professor Haddon Wilmer in which he looks at the way the two boys who were involved in killing Jamie Bolger would be treated, and the impact of anonymity on them. We are now five years on, and they are living in the community. It would be interesting to know how their care and education worked out.
The March 2001 edition contained the Radisson Report. This was based on workshops funded by the Social Education Trust, which then managed the Webmag, and it was the first major report to recommend the adoption of social pedagogy (or social education) as the model for use by the children’s workforce in this country.
Since then, the thinking has been adopted more widely, partly through the influence of the study by the Thomas Coram Foundation, but it has not yet been accepted as the model of choice. The Report is still relevant, though, and contains a useful description of the ideas implicit in social pedagogy in chapter 4.
The Webmag has been going for over six years now, and we must have published over a thousand articles. Who refers to the musty piles of back numbers of hard copy magazines?
The Webmag articles are all there at the touch of the Back Issues button. Modern technology makes them available. But unless you are using a search engine, you might not think of rooting through our past issues, and if you are a new reader, you certainly won’t remember the pieces when they came out. There are some really good articles published years ago but still worth looking at, and this column is intended to draw attention to a few of them.