Kit Merriman's Curriculum for Developing Children in a Globalized World

Kit Merriman's Curriculum for Developing Children in a Globalized World (HKUP 2012) prepares children of working parents to fulfil their potential playing their own unique role in ensuring harmony between humanity's patchwork global system and the global ecosystem it resides in. Humanity itself plays a role in the development of the earth system, and each of us has a role to play in allowing the fulfilment of that potential. World history has culminated in this epoch where parents may find themselves asking, "shall I prepare my child to help foster a reconciliation between man and nature, to deepen our bond and bring humanity into alignment with who we were always meant to be? Or must I prepare my child for a time where our myopia has deepened the rift, and thrown us in? A time where we find ourselves drowning in our own chemical and psychological waste, as we drift ever further not only from mother nature, but our own nature?"

Excerpt from Safe.ly promotional pamphlet

Summary

Kit Merriman's Curriculum for Developing Children in a Globalized World is a textbook manual aimed towards professional caretakers and educators, and is the principal text assigned in the Safe.ly Certification Program.

Themes

While the text is first and foremost a manual on pedagogy and child psychology, one thing of note is the text's treatment of the theme of international relations. The text explicitly denies that sovereign entities are autonomous, and rather posits that they are merely parts constituting what Kit Merriman calls the "global system". This World-systems approach is common within the Merriman Consortium and is drawn upon consistently in their monographs Bounded Rationalism and the Bayesian Model of War and Energetics and Biogeopolitics

Impact

The textbook proved fairly controversial among the conservative audience, particularly over its treatment of traditional family structure. Its advocacy for support and recognition of nontraditional family structures (such as 3+ parent families and collective housing of children) was widely denounced by conservative critics.
The textbook has also been critiqued for its vague formulation of its concept of the "global system", with some commentators calling into question the validity of its conceptual connection between world economy and domestic economy.