Ali Alloush/Reuters

People walk on rubble at the site of the Israeli airstrike that killed Lebanon's Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut's southern suburbs, Sept. 29, 2024.

After Israel’s strike on Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah last month, President Joe Biden and other world leaders called it a measure of justice. But retribution and even justice, some analysts note, are not sufficient grounds for killing under the laws of warfare.

The dozens of targeted strikes by Israel to take out senior operatives within Hezbollah and Hamas since the latter group’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians last year come with almost dulling frequency today.

They are part of a global expansion of what have been called “signature” or “decapitation” killings that go back to the U.S. war on terror. In the past decade alone, a dozen countries, including Iraq, Iran, Egypt, and Turkey, have launched programs to carry out such hits on enemies of their own.

These strikes alarm many humanitarian law experts who urge proportionality and protection of civilians, too: Mr. Nasrallah’s death involved multiple 2,000-pound bombs and razed several apartment buildings.

In the cold calculus of military advantage, even the seasoned strategists who carry out these operations sometimes wonder aloud whether they actually work – or whether they create more terrorists than they kill.

Don’t the U.S. and other countries have laws against assassination?

Take Israel, for example, the country most recently in the news for targeted killings. Israel’s Supreme Court in 2006 ruled that targeted killings are a legitimate form of self-defense against terrorists, though it cautioned that these assassinations should be weighed against harm to innocent bystanders. Both Israel and the United States designate Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist organizations.

The U.S. government has since reached a similar conclusion in a legal journey that started in the mid-20th century. In the days when it viewed communism as an existential threat, the U.S. orchestrated coups to overthrow left-leaning governments. This included Guatemala in 1954 after its president was deemed unfriendly to American businesses like the United Fruit Company, which owned 42% of the country’s lands.

This operation and others came to light during the 1975 U.S. Senate Church Committee hearings. So, too, did the torture and killing committed by these CIA-backed regimes that seized power through military force.

Henry Griffin/AP/File

Counsels to President Gerald Ford meet with members of the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence in Washington, June 26, 1975. They brought White House files to aid the Senate panel's investigation into efforts to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

On the heels of these revelations, President Gerald Ford in 1976 signed an order banning anyone working for the U.S. government from carrying out political assassinations. Further orders from Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan removed the word “political” and added that no one working on behalf of the U.S. government could engage in assassinations, either.

The orders didn’t define assassination – no federal law does – but it’s widely understood to mean murder for political purposes. The word itself implies illegality, notes Tom Porteous, deputy program director at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group.

Up until the 9/11 attacks, U.S. officials steered clear of any intimation of it. In the 1990 run-up to America’s first Gulf War, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney fired the Air Force’s top officer for saying that the U.S. planned to target then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The general’s remarks were “potentially a violation of the standing presidential executive order” prohibiting assassination, Mr. Cheney said at the time. It was “inappropriate for U.S. officials to talk about targeting specific foreign individuals.”

How did this change?

Just before the 9/11 attacks, the American ambassador to Israel criticized its policy of picking out Palestinian militant leaders to kill.

The U.S. “is very clearly on the record as against targeted assassinations,” Ambassador Martin Indyk said in July of that year. “They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.” Israel defended it as “active self-defense” or “interception.”

Then came America’s global war on terror. Not including the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, President George W. Bush ordered some 55 targeted killings of Al Qaeda leaders in the ungoverned tribal areas of Pakistan. President Barack Obama ordered some 560 of them in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, including of Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico-born Muslim cleric accused of being an Al Qaeda leader. Critics labeled it an extrajudicial killing and a potential assassination.

The essence of the legal arguments that have been made by the U.S. officials who green-light targeted killings is that they are acts of self-defense in a war against a terrorist group. This reasoning mirrors Israeli jurisprudence decried by the U.S. prior to 9/11, some analysts note.

But it was the Trump administration’s 2020 strike on Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of the elite Quds Force unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, that prompted particular alarm among international law experts. General Soleimani was on an official state visit to Iraq, whose officials said they’d received no prior warning and decried the violation of their sovereignty.

Hussein Malla/AP/File

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah delivers a speech during the annual rally to mark Al-Quds Day, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Oct. 28, 2005.

General Soleimani’s killing “was unlawful,” according to a report by the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, prepared for the U.N. Human Rights Committee. This was in large part because the operation targeted a state official away from a battlefield. The U.S. had in other killings argued they were part of America’s war against Al Qaeda, but this was a tough legal case to make with General Soleimani, given Shiite Iran’s historic hostility to Al Qaeda, a Sunni group.

U.S. officials instead argued that it was a “defensive action” against someone “actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.”

Then-President Donald Trump, for his part, said he was trying “to stop a war.” It was reported that although Presidents Bush and Obama had contemplated a strike against General Soleimani, they ultimately decided against it. The concern was that rather than forestalling wider conflict, the strike could accelerate it.

Iran responded with missile strikes on two U.S. bases in Iraq, wounding 100 U.S. troops, including 34 who were diagnosed with traumatic brain injury.

So are targeted killings legal or not?

In the case of General Soleimani and others, that was – and remains – a matter of intense debate.

Arguing self-defense in a preemptive attack away from the battlefield, as the Trump administration did, generally requires that the attack be imminent – specifically, a threat that is, as the U.N. report put it, “instant and overwhelming.”

But U.S. officials since the Obama administration have called, as the U.S. counterterrorism adviser did in 2011, for a “more flexible understanding of imminence.” Critics call it an “expansionist” definition, and it includes preemptive strikes against not just confirmed but also “perceived” threats.

The strike against General Soleimani raised “genuine uncertainty,” the report concluded, “as to how to interpret its lawfulness.”

Vahid Salemi/AP

Iranian demonstrators chant slogans at an anti-Israeli gathering in Tehran, Iran, Oct. 8, 2024. They’re holding posters that show the late Iranian Revolutionary Guard Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in Iraq in a U.S. drone attack in 2020, kissing the forehead of slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

There is, too, international law surrounding the death of innocents. In a conflict zone, the legal rule of thumb is that the greater the military advantage conferred by a targeted killing, the greater the permissible civilian harm.

But while military advantage is relevant in determining excessiveness, proportionality still matters. In other words, it’s about more than the least amount of harm that commanders can cause in pursuing their goals.

“Ultimately, there’s still a limit,” says Tom Dannenbaum, associate professor of international law at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. “It’s a judgment call in each case. But I can’t think of an instance where the elimination of a single individual has been understood to justify the collateral killing or injuring of hundreds of civilians.”

In many cases, states have stopped bothering to make legal justifications at all, the Human Rights Committee report warned. “What is especially troubling is the absence of public discussion about ethics, legality, and effectiveness of the ‘decapitation’ strategy’ at the heart of targeted killings.”

China has a glut of tens of millions of unoccupied housing units, many unfinished and unsold. An inescapable part of the landscape, seen from roads or trains, are compounds of hulking, empty high-rise buildings. Many of these “ghost cities,” as they’re often called, have no lights and a see-through quality due to their unfinished, open windows.

The country’s three-year-old housing market collapse has dealt a devastating blow to the wealth and confidence of Chinese households, and continues to be a huge damper on growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

But that could be about to change. Beijing has recently signaled it is prepared to take bolder steps to stabilize the housing market and boost overall economic growth. Late last month, the government announced plans to cut mortgage rates and lower home down payments – leading to an early October jump in new home sales in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Shanghai.

And for the first time, China’s top leaders stressed they must “stop the decline and return stability” to the real estate market, according to a statement following the Sept. 26 meeting of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo. Last week, the finance minister pledged to shore up big banks and local governments with fresh funds, while a top economic planner projected the country will meet its growth target of around 5% this year.

Experts say it’s not clear whether Beijing will unleash the massive monetary and fiscal stimulus needed to rebuild confidence in the economy – any such plan would require approval by the legislature’s standing committee in coming weeks. But many agree that the property market holds the key to a meaningful recovery.

“[Property] is definitely the biggest drag on the economy, not just this year but over the past three years,” says Larry Hu, chief China economist and managing director at Macquarie Group in Hong Kong.

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Customers discuss an apartment purchase with employees of the Lianjia real estate company in Chengdu, China, June 11, 2024.

“The current property downturn easily could drag China’s GDP growth [down] by two percentage points,” he says. “But if we have property stabilized, then the Chinese economy could easily grow 5 or 6%. That’s a huge difference.”

Risky investments

For two decades until 2021, China’s property market surged to become a powerhouse of the country’s economy, making up a quarter of gross domestic product, and accounting for some 70% of household wealth. Construction boomed and many families bought additional properties as investments.

But Beijing’s concerns over the highly indebted property sector led it to impose a regulatory crackdown in August 2020 that restricted new borrowing by developers. This triggered a downward spiral as developers were unable to complete housing and began defaulting on their debt. First to default, in late 2021, was the massive China Evergrande Group, which had liabilities of more than $300 billion and has since been ordered to liquidate.

The bankruptcy of developers dealt a major blow to household confidence in part because of China’s unique “presale” system for financing, constructing, and delivering new housing. Some 80 to 90% of new housing in China is presold, meaning people buy a home before it’s ready to move into, and start paying the mortgage before they have physical possession of the property.

Yet buyers have no way to enforce contracts if developers fail to deliver the housing on time, or at all. “All the risk is borne by the household,” says Andrew Batson, China research director for Gavekal, a Hong Kong-based financial firm.

He says the defaulting of the China Evergrande Group taught everyone in China that the system is no longer reliable. “You could hand over your life savings to a developer and receive nothing. That is a pretty big risk.”

Huang Yuxia, a migrant worker from Hebei province, mustered her family’s savings to buy an apartment for her son, who was engaged to be married. But the apartment, promised for completion in 2021, was never finished. In China, men are traditionally expected to provide a home prior to marriage, and her son’s engagement broke off.

“We didn’t get the house, so he had no place to go,” Ms. Huang says.

Spooked consumers have shunned the market. Home sales measured by floor space have fallen by about half from 2021, and prices have declined to the level of six or seven years ago. This is despite government efforts to encourage demand, including a plan announced in May for banks to lend up to $70 billion to local enterprises to buy up unsold housing – an effort that has so far faltered.

“Homebuyers … are worried prices will keep falling,” says Yin Bolin, a senior broker at Deyou real estate in Chengdu.

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Yin Bolin, senior broker at Deyou Real Estate in Chengdu, says the biggest concern of would-be Chinese homebuyers is that housing prices will continue to decline, as they have for the past three years.

Hope and uncertainty

Still, the promise of lower interest and down payments, as well as recent moves by dozens of China’s cities to lift restrictions on homebuying, are generating some new demand.

With her handbag on one arm and her college-age daughter on the other, Ma Qin steps out of a real estate office onto a leafy street in Chengdu, capital of China’s Sichuan province, pleased with her home purchase deal.

“Before, we couldn’t buy houses here in Chengdu. I can now,” says Ms. Ma, who is buying an apartment for her daughter, a folk music student at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music in Chengdu. Ms. Ma had previously been disqualified from purchasing a home in Chengdu because she lives in another city.

Sales of new homes ticked up during the weeklong national holiday following China’s Oct. 1 National Day, with transactions increasing 27% in 25 Chinese cities, according to the China Index Academy.

But experts say that without a major stimulus package, the critical task of turning around the property market is unlikely. The government has so far been reluctant to step in and backstop property developers who ran a high-risk business model, but it’s necessary to restore confidence, says Mr. Batson.

“The people paying the price for developers’ bad behavior are not the developers, but the households themselves – and in fact every participant in the Chinese economy, which remains quite depressed,” he says.

Indeed, many Chinese and analysts alike are watching and waiting to see whether the government backs up its words with actions.

Passersby check out listings in the window of a Lianjia real estate office in Chengdu; many of these would-be house hunters move along, uncertain whether property prices will keep falling. Inside the office, even broker Zheng Renshu says he has no idea when property prices will hit bottom.

“Nobody can tell you that!” he exclaims. “Not even Warren Buffett!”

Robert Ullmann is standing next to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that shattered 13 years ago when a car bomb exploded a few blocks away.

He’s the head of a consortium of child care centers throughout Norway. Its main office is here on the third floor of a nondescript building on Møllergata street. Just a few blocks away is the Regjeringskvartalet, a cluster of government buildings in central Oslo.

“That’s the prime minister’s office. That’s our ‘Capitol Hill,’” says Mr. Ullmann, pointing out the top of a building just beyond the rusty roof of the building across the road.

But it’s now closed. In 2011, a far-right extremist placed a van full of explosives in the government center, causing a blast that killed eight people and wounded more than 200. Hours later, the same assailant opened fire at a youth summer camp 24 miles from central Oslo. He shot and killed 69 people, most of them teenagers and young adults affiliated with the youth wing of the country’s Labour Party.

The force of that blast shattered all the windows in Mr. Ullmann’s office, too. It was summer, so only two employees, one of whom was pregnant, were at their desks at the time. They were not wounded.

The deadly attacks, extraordinarily rare for Norway, affected him deeply, however. Mr. Ullmann, who heads the nonprofit Kanvas and the 64 child care centers it runs, started to reflect about his mission, his organization, and the important role it plays in Norway’s national commitment to the very youngest of its children.

Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report

Children play outside at the Jarbakken child care program in Oslo. The Norwegian government subsidizes private and public child care programs throughout the country.

“How can a young guy come up here and become a terrorist?” Mr. Ullmann says, looking out the window as he recalls that day and its existential aftermath. Norway, after all, has long been one of the most crime-free countries in the world.

As the head of an organization devoted to the care and education of children under 5 years old, he has a partial answer: “What’s important is that everyone feel they’re included,” he says.

Indeed, his reflections embody what has long been a primary belief in Norwegian early education: In order to build a nation of thriving adults, you must provide childhoods that are joyful, secure, and inclusive.

“A really important pillar of Norway’s early ed philosophy is the value of childhood in itself,” says Henrik D. Zachrisson, director of the Centre for Research on Equality in Education at the University of Oslo. “Early ed is supposed to be a place where children can be children and have the best childhood possible.”

It’s an idea that undergirds Norway’s nationalized approach to its “kindergartens,” which here serve children age 5 and younger, including toddlers and infants.

In the United States, the idea of child care often connotes a place to leave children so parents can go to work, and mostly at their own expense. Sometimes, these child care centers are called “preschools,” since American kindergarten is understood as a single year for mostly 5- and 6-year-olds.

On a drizzly morning earlier this year at Preståsen Kanvas-barnehage, one of Mr. Ullmann’s kindergarten programs in south Oslo, children roam around an expansive play yard, building sandcastles under the canopy of a large pine tree. Others zoom down a hill on bikes.

Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report

A child plays in a puddle on the playground of a kindergarten run by the Norwegian nonprofit Kanvas. Teachers in child care programs in Norway emphasize unstructured outdoor play for preschoolers.

In another playground on campus, children shriek as they splash through a large puddle. This draws more children hoping to play. Rather than caution the children about getting wet, a teacher walks over and hands them buckets to have at it.

Children with disabilities, who are often segregated in American child care programs, are included in activities. Some of them have a city-funded aide who attends to their needs.

In some rooms, posters on the wall show pictures of common items or common requests, so children still learning Norwegian can point to what they need. In one room, children are learning about the Muslim holiday, Eid al-Fitr.

At a different Kanvas location, administrators have placed a rack of free clothes and boots in the front lobby, with instructions telling parents to take what they need.

“Kindergarten is so important to level out social inequities,” says Mr. Ullmann. “In Norway, we think it’s democratic that everyone can have the same opportunities and move out of being poor. Social differences are something Norway does not accept.”

Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report

Children roam freely at Blindern Barnestuer, a kindergarten across the street from the University of Oslo.

Norway’s commitment to universal preschool and child care

In the U.S., child care is largely seen as an individual family’s concern. It is parents, mostly, who cover the costs for this care, though some employers and local jurisdictions may offer partial reimbursement.

In fiscal 2024, the U.S. federal government provided states with over $25 billion in block grants focused on the child care needs of families living in poverty. Nearly 6.3 million American children under age 5 qualify for these funds. Yet only about 840,000 of these children, or about 13%, benefit from these grants, according to an analysis by First Five Years Fund, a Washington-based advocacy group.

In Norway, universal child care is “both seen as an investment for the society and an investment for the child,” says Kristin Aasta Morken, a program leader in the city of Oslo’s focus on upbringing and education.

Ironically, Norway’s policies have been inspired in part by American studies that found troubling language skills gaps between higher- and lower-income children. Other influential American scholarship also revealed high educational returns from investing in early childhood programs.

Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report

Hilde Sandnes, a teacher at the Grønland Torg kindergarten in Oslo, teaches a child the names of birds using felt animals.

“The argument I’ve heard is that if you don’t send your children to kindergarten, then you steal some possible experiences from them,” says Adrian Kristinsønn Jacobsen, a doctoral candidate at the University of Stavanger in Norway who studies early childhood science education rooted in experiencing nature.

There are important contexts affecting each country’s approach, however. Norway is home to about 5.5 million people, and about 82% are ethnically Norwegian. This population lives in an area roughly the size of Montana. Norway is also a top producer of oil, which helped generate a per capita household income that was over $104,000 in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The U.S., on the other hand, has 62 times the number of residents that Norway has and a far more diverse population. In 2022, per capita household income in the U.S. was about $77,000.

In Norway, nearly 1.4% of the country’s gross domestic product goes toward early childhood programs. The U.S. spends less than 0.4% of its GDP, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Public funding covers 85% of operating costs for child care programs in Norway. As of this summer, the tuition parents pay has been capped at about $182 per month. This applies to both public and private programs, and includes in-home kindergartens, which preserve a certain amount of choice for parents. Programs receive funding on a per-child basis. Kindergartens that care for children under 3 years old receive twice the funding of those ages 3 to 5, since toddlers and infants require more individualized care.

Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report

Paintbrushes and containers sit in a sink. Norwegian kindergartens prioritize child-led play instead of academic learning.

Norwegian children are guaranteed a spot in a kindergarten after they turn 1 year old – about the time many parents’ paid leave ends. If parents decide not to send their children to a kindergarten, they receive financial assistance to stay home.

Norway’s understanding of kindergarten is deeply ingrained in its culture. But these benefits, signed into law in the Kindergarten Act of 2006 – which repeats the word “play” 56 times – also express some of the country’s deeply held values.

Child care programs must acknowledge “the intrinsic value” of childhood, according to the 63-page law. “The Kindergarten must be based on fundamental values in the Christian and humanist heritage and tradition, such as respect for human dignity and nature, on intellectual freedom, charity, forgiveness, equality and solidarity, values that also appear in different religions and beliefs and are rooted in human rights,” the law declares.

The law goes on to insist that kindergarten programs “must be a challenging and safe place for community life and friendship,” allowing children to develop their “creative zest, sense of wonder and need to investigate.”

The law proclaims, too, that kindergartens should “promote democracy and equality and counteract all forms of discrimination.”

Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report

Paula García Tadeo, a teacher at the Turi Sletners kindergarten in northwest Oslo, helps children as they play in the snow. Children at Turi Sletners spend hours outside each day and learn how to make fires and use knives safely.

What can the U.S. learn from Norway’s approach to child care?

About 7 miles north of Oslo, Sylvia Lorentzen’s two child care programs straddle a narrow, winding road that leads up to the lush forests that encircle parts of Norway’s capital.

Such a setting offers limitless opportunities for children to immerse themselves in nature. In the winter, those in Ms. Lorentzen’s care learn to ski and sled. In the summer, they swim, canoe, and rock climb – and then rest in hammocks.

Around age 4, they learn how to safely use a knife. Then they huddle together outside, whittling wooden figures out of sticks to practice. By age 5, they are cutting logs with a saw and building fires.

It’s 11 a.m. on a Tuesday this past spring at Ms. Lorentzen’s kindergarten, Turi Sletners Barnehave. It’s 39 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but toddlers, who have yet to set foot inside, are bundled up in colorful snowsuits and boots, crunching through the wet snow blanketing their picturesque play yard.

The toddlers splash through muddy puddles and giggle as they chase Ms. Lorentzen’s petite, playful dog.

As the morning wears on, the five toddlers make their way up a gentle slope and step inside a large tent modeled after one commonly used by the Indigenous Sami people of northern Europe. There, the children crowd around a metal firepit and peer at the remnants of their last bonfire.

“What did you find?” asks their teacher, Paula García Tadeo, as a child holds up some charcoal remnants. Ms. García looks closely and nods before instructing the child to put them back.

Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report

Strollers sit outside Grønland Torg, a kindergarten in Oslo.

Another child reaches into the remnants and starts to taste an ashy piece of wood. “Don’t eat it,” she says calmly.

For Ms. Lorentzen and many other early educators here, this sort of laid-back morning, marked by child-led outdoor exploration, is exactly how both child care and early childhood should look.

For Norwegians, experiencing nature and playing outdoors is not just a national tradition; it’s a staple of living.

There’s a name for it here: friluftsliv, which translates to “outdoor life.”

There’s never a wrong time for friluftsliv. In fact, Norwegians have a saying: “There is no bad weather, just bad clothes.”

It’s standard for Norwegian kindergartens to have rows of cubbies just inside the door, each storing layers of spare clothes, including rain and snow gear and boots and mittens.

Indeed, Norwegian children in publicly supported kindergartens spend, on average, 70% of their days outside. This includes the fact that in winter, kids only spend about a third of their time in the midst of friluftsliv.

Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report

Children play with a broom at the kindergarten Blindern Barnestuer in Oslo, Norway.

The country’s embrace of nature, experts believe, is one factor in Norway’s continuing high ranking in international studies of happiness, many of which find that spending time in nature can decrease anxiety and improve cognition.

Here at Ms. Lorentzen’s Turi Sletners, toddlers nap outside, bundled inside puffy, miniature sleeping bags affixed to their strollers.

“Putting all the pieces together, it’s a pretty consistent set of evidence that there are fairly long-term effects” of Norway’s early childhood programs, says Dr. Zachrisson at the University of Oslo.

“Which is funny, because what they do the first year is [walk] around in the woods, eating sand and hugging trees,” he says. “And [it’s] super interesting to try to think of what causes them to do much better on the math test in fifth grade.”

What does Norway’s focus on outdoor play mean for safety?

But what about the risks? On an April afternoon this year, children of professors and researchers at the University of Oslo are roaming around in the expansive play yard of Blindern Barnestuer, a kindergarten just across the street from the university.

In one area, a group of small children crowds around a teacher sitting on a bench as he paints insects on some of their faces at their request. Other kids chase each other up hills as a nearby pirate flag waves overhead. A group of preschoolers balances on an obstacle course constructed of wooden pallets and boards, and they clutch each other’s coats for stability. In another area, 4- and 5-year-olds are climbing trees and dangling from branches.

Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report

Children at Blindern Barnestuer, another child care center, or “kindergarten,” in Oslo, watch a tractor drive by their play yard.

It looks dangerous – as did the fire and wood-carving knives at other kindergartens. As did the preschoolers chasing each other with brooms or standing on swings. Even now, as kids jump down several feet from tree limbs.

Anne Gro Stumberg, one of the kindergarten’s top teachers, called “pedagogical leaders” in Norway, is unperturbed.

“We allow them to experience, and if they fall down, so what?” Ms. Stumberg says. “I can’t remember having one injury – not a serious injury.”

At Blindern, teachers purposefully avoid teaching formal academics, such as letters and numbers, unless a child is expressly interested in it.

“We think that’s what they’re going to learn in school,” says Ms. Stumberg. “I don’t think it’s necessary to try to learn [reading] before school. There are so many other things that are very important, like all of the social skills, and how to move and do things on your own, and to be able to have your own limits.”

Norway refers to kindergarten staff members as “role models,” and its kindergarten law is exacting when it comes to teacher qualifications and student-teacher ratios.

Programs are required to have one pedagogical leader for every seven children under the age of 3, and one for every 14 children older than that. That leader must be supported by two other teachers. In total, there should a 3-1 ratio of children to staff members for those under age 3, and a 6-1 ratio for those older.

Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report

Children’s artwork hangs in an Oslo child care program.

At Jarbakken barnehage, a kindergarten in northwest Oslo, director Mailinn Daljord says qualified teachers are vital.

They must be able to help children through the most critical of lessons: teaching them emotional regulation.

“I want [children] to like being in kindergarten,” she says. “But I also want them to feel disappointment, sadness, and disagreement with others, because here we have grown-ups that will help them with their emotions, so they will learn to handle those situations on their own when they get older.”

One thing Ms. Daljord, like Mr. Ullmann, does not want children to experience is bullying or exclusion. This year, she is especially focused on interactions and inclusion. Her teachers gather small groups of children during play to provide support with their interactions and give children ample opportunity to form connections with peers.

At certain times during the year, Ms. Daljord’s teachers meet to evaluate how much they themselves interact with individual children. Then they zero in on those getting less attention. Often, these are the most challenging.

“You need to do something to make sure all the kids are getting the same, and that they are seen and acknowledged for the person they are,” Ms. Daljord says.

Nearly a decade ago, while visiting a park in the U.S. with her then-nearly 3-year-old daughter, she was approached by an American parent who chastised her for sitting on a bench while her daughter ran free. The woman told Ms. Daljord that she “needed to watch her, and stay close.”

It was to her an amusing clash of contrasting cultural sensibilities.

Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report

Posters about dinosaurs hang on the wall at Jarbakken, a child care program in northwest Oslo, Norway.

Why Norway pays parents to stay home with their kids

Norway’s early childhood policies have set it apart. On a host of measures by a host of scholars, the country ranks at or near the top of countries that support the well-being and flourishing of children.

Yet aspects of Norway’s kindergarten system are still being developed, experts say, and many believe the country must adapt as its population becomes more diverse.

Between 2003 and 2018, the percentage of children from ages 1 to 5 attending kindergarten increased from 69% to 91%. Today, Norway is trying to focus more attention on those young children who are behind in language development.

“We’ve known for some time that the quality varies,” says Veslemøy Rydland, professor at the University of Oslo and one of the lead researchers for the Oslo Early Education Study. Despite government requirements, staffing lower-income kindergartens, where turnover rates are higher, can be difficult.

Over the past decade, the number of children with parents who speak a non-Scandinavian language other than English has nearly doubled. Almost 20% of children in Norway’s kindergartens primarily speak a language other than Norwegian. In some cities, as much as 35% of children are minority-language speakers. During the past decade, too, child poverty rates have begun to rise.

Not all of Norway’s early childhood researchers are convinced that the country’s informal approach to early learning will work as its demographics evolve.

“This pedagogy has been doing a great job in protecting childhoods ... and giving children the opportunity to explore,” says Dr. Rydland. But when children have that much freedom, she says, they may not be exposed to activities that could be beneficial, like whole-group reading, if they aren’t interested in it.

Some newcomers are also skeptical of the Norwegian model. Parents who have immigrated to Norway sometimes struggle to accept the freewheeling Norwegian approach to child care, expecting more academics or structure, even for their youngest.

Many immigrants also choose not to enroll their children in kindergarten at all, preferring Norway’s generous but divisive social policy that pays parents who stay home to care for their children – which is sometimes called “cash for care.”

Norwegian educators say this is unfortunate, since children new to Norway are the ones who could benefit the most from its child care system and from more exposure to the Norwegian language.

Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report

The Norwegian version of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” sits on a kindergarten shelf in Oslo.

Norway’s aim: A universal child care system rooted in trust

Elise Kristin Hagen Steffensen, director of Barnebo Barnehage in north Oslo, describes Norwegian kindergartens as a system based on trust.

Programs report issues, as small as forgetting to lock a window or as big as teacher mistreatment of children. Ms. Hagen Steffensen regularly writes reports for the city, explaining how the organization is meeting various parts of the law’s requirements.

Officials may visit, especially if a kindergarten is struggling. The government tracks staffing numbers and parent satisfaction metrics. But there are no fines when troubles arise or a program struggles to conform to the law’s strict regulations. Instead, local kindergarten officials strive to help programs improve.

It’s a sense of trust that seems to pervade Norwegian society. Fences are few and far between in Norway. The country’s “right to roam” law allows individuals to freely and responsibly enjoy “uncultivated” areas, regardless of who owns them.

Looking forward, Norway’s early educators and experts aren’t quite ready to declare full success in building their system, especially as the country’s demographics slowly begin to change. Many still would like to fine-tune existing standards to better ensure the high quality of kindergartens, including even lower student-to-teacher ratios – which are already very low compared with ratios in the U.S.

Mr. Ullmann at Kanvas, too, thinks there is still room to improve Norway’s fierce commitment to early childhood education and care.

“If you take the money and the structural quality that we offer in Norway, yeah, compared to every other country in the world, these are more or less the most expensive kindergartens in the world,” Mr. Ullmann says. “It’s fantastic when you compare it to every other country.”

But, he adds, even that may not be enough when it comes to the youngest of children, on whom the future rests.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, with support from the Spencer Fellowship at Columbia Journalism School. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Could life exist elsewhere in the universe?

Scientists are one step closer to discovering whether earthlings are alone in the universe, as NASA’s largest and most technologically advanced planetary spacecraft, the Europa Clipper, launched on Oct 14. The Clipper will head for Europa, one of Jupiter’s 95-plus moons, to find out if that celestial body holds the conditions for life as we know it here on Earth.

The Clipper is 10 years in the making, and will take 5 ½ years more to get to Europa. Over the course of 49 flybys that will take 3 ½ years, the Clipper will send back data allowing scientists to examine Europa’s oceans, rock, and atmosphere. Scientists believe the oceans, in particular, are similar to Earth’s and will be a good indicator for the possibility of life there.

Erin Leonard has been part of the Clipper mission since its inception. The planetary geologist and Clipper project staff scientist talked with the Monitor about the mission’s science and goals, and what it all means for humanity.

The discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

Courtesy of JPL

Erin Leonard, a planetary geologist and Europa Clipper project staff scientist seen here with the spacecraft being assembled in the background, in July 2023, has been part of the mission since its inception.

What exactly are you looking for? What will indicate conditions for life?

There’s this question of whether you have some sort of nutrient cycling on Europa that might be able to sustain life.

The simplest way I explain it is: water plus rock plus energy plus time. We have water, which we think is like our ocean water on Earth. We think there’s a rocky interior – Europa’s core – that’s in contact with that subsurface ocean. That water-rock interaction is what’s producing that chemistry that you need for life potentially. That’s how we think life originated on Earth; at these mid-ocean ridges on Earth where you had the ocean water in contact with rock, in contact with heat and magma coming out of Earth’s interior.

The energy for Europa is generated through its slightly elliptical orbit around Jupiter. It causes Europa to almost breathe or flex, and that flexing generates a lot of heat in the rocky interior and then it has to come out. We think this has all been simmering together for 4 billion years. And we don’t know how long it takes for life to originate. It could be instantaneous. It could be a billion years. That’s why it’s important that we have that time component.

What are the questions about habitability?

A lot of that is about the stability and the composition of the ocean. We think it’s salty. We don’t know exactly what salts are in there or are there organics in there also. That’s a really important chemical piece for habitability. If you think about it, life might be able to originate, and then it eats everything. And if those nutrients aren’t refreshed it’s going to die. And so there has to be a cycle, a nutrient cycle also within Europa. And we think that may come from the young surface.

Europa’s surface is so young, about 100 million years old. Earth’s surface is about 200 to 300 million years old. We think that there could be some essence of plate tectonics going on in [Europa’s] icy shell that’s refreshing the surface. Oxidants in the harsh radiation environment actually produce oxidants on the surface that can then be transported in the ice shell and then into the ocean. That may provide this nutrient conveyor belt, if you will, to help refresh nutrients in the ocean that may sustain life.

SOURCE:

NASA

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

What does that mean to us on Earth if life can exist on other planets, other moons?

It’s such an amazing, big question: Are we alone? And I think it’s amazing from both a fundamental humanity perspective and also from a very scientific perspective. We have one data point for life in the universe. We don’t know if we’re special and unique or if we are more common than we thought.

If we deem Europa habitable, we need to go and understand whether it’s actually inhabited, right? And there’s important implications. If it’s inhabited, maybe we understand how life originates and maybe we’re not alone in the universe. And maybe life is really common. And that would blow my mind, right? And if it’s not inhabited but we deem it to be habitable, then maybe we’re missing something. Maybe we don’t know how life really originated on Earth. We’re missing some piece to the puzzle. And it’s really hard when you only have this one data point of Earth to understand how life originates, where life might originate, and therefore whether we’re alone in our solar system or alone in the universe.

There’s also this larger philosophical question of whether we understand life at all. Does life have to originate in a way that it originated on Earth?

JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/NASA

Jupiter's icy moon Europa was captured by JunoCam, the public engagement camera aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft, during the mission's close flyby in September 2022. Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill processed the images to enhance the color and contrast.

What are you most looking forward to discovering?

I’m excited for the answers to the questions that we don’t even know to ask yet. We think we know some stuff about Europa. But we’re going to learn so much and discover so many things with this very capable and amazing spacecraft that I don’t even know what those questions are yet.

This is a generational mission. Not only do we do it for ourselves, but we do it for the next generation. I use Voyager 2 and Galileo data still, data that’s coming up on 50 years old and 20 years old. Not only do we do missions like this for our own scientific curiosity, but also to produce these datasets that are going to last for generations to come. And that is also just so cool to think about. It’s an exciting responsibility. It’s also a big responsibility to make sure that you’re producing these datasets that are going to be valuable for generations to come.

Reuters

Voters cast their ballots early at a polling station in Marietta, Georgia, Oct. 15.

The majority of U.S. presidential contests since 2000 have included a major-party nominee who was not white or male. This year, for the first time, two Black women are running for the Senate, an institution that in 200 years has had only two elected Black female members. Across the United States, roughly a quarter of state legislators are Black, Asian, or Hispanic.

Do the ethnicity and gender of candidates still matter to American voters? The answer is mixed, but probably less than they mattered before.

Polls show a gender gap in preferences for the two presidential candidates. Regardless of ethnicity, majorities of women back Kamala Harris over Donald Trump. Among Black and Hispanic men, however, the former president and the Republican Party have gained ground since previous elections.

Former President Barack Obama admonished Black men last week for not supporting Vice President Harris because of her gender. That premise may be only partially correct. Terrance Woodbury, president of Hit Strategies, a polling firm focused on minority voters, sees an ongoing realignment of Black, Hispanic, and working-class white men based on common economic concerns.

“Democrats have experienced erosion ... amongst Black men in every election since Barack Obama exited the political stage” in 2016, he told The New Yorker. “This is not just a Kamala Harris problem. This is a Democratic Party problem.”

One party’s problem may be democracy’s gain. During her short candidacy, Ms. Harris has focused far more on economic proposals and character issues than on her gender and ethnicity.

“We’re not going to lead with identity in the same way that Hillary Clinton did” in 2016 when she was the nominee, said Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, which supports women of color in political leadership. She told The Associated Press that candidates must now demonstrate that “You have a heart for people who you’re not like ... but deserve to be served by government and deserve representation.”

That approach echoes a lesson learned most recently in Mexico, which elected its first female head of state in June. In recent decades, as women there have achieved a record of expertise in leadership qualities and policy, the country’s still male-dominated culture has softened. The new president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, is an engineer, climate scientist, and former big-city mayor with a proven record in reducing violent crime.

When a recognition of higher – or even spiritual – qualities “has prevailed,” observed Annie Knott, an American contemporary of the women’s movement a century ago and an early worker in the religious movement behind this news organization, “woman has been accorded her rightful place, at least to the extent of having an opportunity to prove her fitness for sharing in the heroic task of elevating” the human race.

Voters in this U.S. election may be recognizing that qualities of character and ideas define a candidate’s identity rather than identity defining those qualities. Many democracies have already moved in that direction.