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Parental Intelligence - Issue 42 EDUCATION SPECIAL
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Bob Collier
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May 18, 2003 09:43 PDT
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-------------------PARENTAL INTELLIGENCE------------------
18 May 2003
Issue 42
Bob Collier, Editor mailto:quauss-@hotmail.com
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Welcome to Parental Intelligence!
Here in Australia, May 18-24 is Home Education Week.
So, as a home educator myself now, besides being the
publisher of a parenting newsletter, I've decided to make
this week's issue an 'Education Special'!
In the first of two articles in this week's Parental
Intelligence, Jerry Mintz of the Alternative Education
Resources Organization writes particularly for parents with
children in the school system who are maybe experiencing
problems, with "Ten Signs that You Need to Find a Different
Kind of Education for Your Child".
Following that, one of my personal favourite writers on the
subject of education Alfie Kohn gets down to the nitty-
gritty when he asks "What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated?".
This week's Website Of The Week is the AWESOME Project
HappyChild - truly a cornucopia of educational delights for
all our children!
And, when it comes to life-long learning, could that mean
24/7 learning? Doug Bench answers the question "Do those
subliminal tapes that you can get to learn while you sleep,
really work?"
By the way, Doug has now added audio to his Science for
Success website! Just click on the green 'Play' button when
you visit and he'll explain a little bit about his systems
and tools to you. You'll find a link to his website in its
usual spot near the bottom of this newsletter.
Watch out also for a section of links to Education Websites
of Interest.
Plenty of food for thought this week on a hugely important
aspect of our children's development. Thanks for reading. I
hope, as always, that you'll find something in this week's
issue of Parental Intelligence that will help you become
more successful at what you do.
Have a great day!
Bob
------------------------------------------------------------
Website Of The Week
Project HappyChild
http://www.happychild.org.uk/
"Linking children all across the world"
Project HappyChild is the magnificent achievement of Penny
Midas Rollo, a single parent with three sons whose interests
include writing poetry, classic rock music and rollerblading.
She also runs "Rollo Book Services" a book typing and proof-
reading service.
Project HappyChild is non-profit and is, says Penny, "here
to offer free educational resources, link up children and
schools across the world, and also highlight the needs of
less fortunate kids."
This website is HUGE! So far, there are over 2,500 pages on
line and Penny aims to have around 8,000 pages on line by
September 2003.
There are 14 main areas at the Project HappyChild website:
* Area 1 - The Infinite Facts Series
* Area 2 - The Project HappyChild Directory of children's
organizations
* Area 3 - Accelerated Learning
* Area 4 - Free Worksheets & Educational Resources
* Area 5 - "Bricks and Mortar" (a reading system designed
for children with little or no grasp of basic
reading skills)
* Area 6 - News and Views
* Area 7 - Fundraising & Resources
* Area 8 - Syndrome Links
* Area 9 - Schools Interchange (currently more than 150,000
schools on-line worldwide!)
* Area 10 - Build Your Own Website
* Area 11 - Free Translations
* Area 12 - Andy's Guide to Pokemon (the "walk through" for
the blue, red and yellow games is claimed to be
the most straightforward to be found anywhere on
the Internet)
* Area 13 - Solomon's Guide to the Magical World of Harry
Potter
* Area 14 - Free-to-Print French, Maths & English Worksheets
Project HappyChild has received over seven million visits
worldwide since it went online on 4th March 1998.
Add to the numbers! Grab your explorer's hat, your map and
compass, a flask of tea or coffee and plenty of sandwiches
and off you go!
See the "News" page for the latest news of what's happening
on the site. You can also sign up for the free Project
HappyChild Newsletter (around 10 issues a year, by e-mail).
And, by the way, enjoy all the bright, colourful pictures
while you're there. They're gorgeous! :)
Project HappyChild
http://www.happychild.org.uk/
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************************************************************
Australia will host the 3rd international Soul in Education
conference with the theme Celebrating Spirit of Learning to
be held in the Byron Bay region in September-October 2003.
"An experiential week-long international gathering for
innovative thinkers, practitioners and all those committed
to fostering soul in education, human potential and learning
for life."
For more information about this exciting event, please visit
the Spirit of Learning website at:
http://www.spiritoflearning.com/conference
************************************************************
============================================================
EDUCATION WEBSITES OF INTEREST
Learn in Freedom
http://www.learninfreedom.org/
John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
Education Otherwise [UK]
http://www.educationotherwise.org/
Home Education Association [Australia]
http://www.hea.asn.au/
National Home Education Network [USA]
http://www.nhen.org/
Unschooling
http://www.unschooling.com/
Learning First Alliance
http://www.learningfirst.org/
============================================================
************************************************************
THE PARENTAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT ON 'ADHD'
(Revised 17th May 2003)
Read my personal views on this controversial subject.
Send a blank email to: pire-@getresponse.com
************************************************************
------------------------------------------------------------
Ten Signs that You Need to Find a Different Kind of
Education for Your Child
by Jerry Mintz
Many parents do not realize that the education world has
changed drastically since they were in school. Back in those
days, schools were smaller, class sizes were smaller,
dropout rates were lower, violence in school was almost
unheard of, teachers were not terrified of showing affection
to the children, or of teaching and discussing moral values.
Even through rose-colored glasses, we know that school back
then was no picnic, was far from perfect, but at least the
teachers and usually the principal knew every student by
name at a minimum, something which is not necessarily true
today.
Because our public school system has now considerably
deteriorated, many parents, teachers, and individuals have
taken it upon themselves to create public and private
alternatives to that traditional system which is definitely
failing. It is important for parents to know that they now
have choices, alternatives to the neighborhood school.
How do you know that it is time to look for another
educational approach for your child? Here are some of the
signs:
1. Does your child say he or she hates school? If so,
something is probably wrong with the school because children
are natural learners. When they're young you can hardly stop
them from learning. If your children say they hate school,
listen to them.
2. Does your child find it difficult to look an adult in
the eye, or to interact with children younger or older than
they are? If so, your child may have become "socialized" to
that very narrow group which many children ordinarily
interact with in most schools, and may be losing the ability
to communicate with a broader group of children and adults.
3. Does your child seem fixated on designer labels and
trendy clothes for school? This is a symptom of the
shallowness of the traditional schools' approach, causing
children to rely on external means of comparison and
acceptance, rather than deeper values.
4. Does your child come from school tired and cranky? This
is a sure sign that their educational experiences are not
energizing but are actually debilitating.
5. Do your children come home complaining about conflicts
that they've had in school and unfair situations that they
have been exposed to? This is a sign that your school does
not have a proper process for conflict resolution and
communication.
6. Has your child lost interest in creative expression
through art, music, and dance? These things are generally
not encouraged in the traditional system today and are not
highly valued. They're considered secondary to the
"academic" areas. In some cases, courses are not even
offered in these areas any more. This tends to extinguish
these natural talents and abilities in children.
7. Has your child stopped reading for fun, or reading or
writing for pleasure? Are your children doing just the
minimum for homework and going off for some escapist
activity? This is a sign that these spontaneous activities
are not being valued in their school and another sign that
they are losing their creativity.
8. Does your child procrastinate until the last minute to
do homework? This is a sign that the homework is not very
interesting to them, is not really meeting his or her needs,
and is tending to extinguish their natural curiosity.
9. Does your child come home talking about anything
exciting that happened in school that day? If not, maybe
nothing exciting is happening for your child in school.
Would you want to keep working if your job was like that?
10. Did the school nurse or guidance counselor suggest that
your child has some strange three lettered disease, like
ADD, and that they should now be given Ritalin or some other
drug? I suggest that it is more probable that the school has
the disease EDD--Educational Deficit Disorder, and time to
get your child out of that situation!
If your child has exhibited several of these characteristics,
it is time for you to start looking for an alternative. In
most parts of this country today, there are many options to
choose from. For example, 30 states have now enacted
legislation which allows groups of parents and teachers to
create charter schools, schools which are not stuck with
having to fulfill the myriad of state regulations but can
create their own individualized approach. Four years ago
there were only five of these charter schools in the
country. By the end of this year there will be more than
1000 of them! Also, there are 4500 magnet schools throughout
the country, public schools which specialize in an area of
expertise, and draw students from a wider area.
In most communities there are many private alternatives
quietly offering a different educational approach. For
example, there are over 4500 Montessori schools based on the
experiential approach designed by Dr. Maria Montessori, and
hundreds of Waldorf schools which puts equal emphasis on
traditional academics areas and the arts. There are hundreds
of independent alternative schools, many emphasizing
participant control with parents and students taking
responsibility for their own educations.
Many public school systems have a variety of alternative
programs within their systems. These are divided into two
general approaches: 1. Public Choice; those programs which
are open to any student in the community. Sometimes they are
called Schools Within Schools. 2. Public At-Risk; those
programs for children who have had a variety of problems
coping with school. These programs run the spectrum from
helpful to dumping ground. Examine them closely before
making a decision to enroll.
Parents of over a million children in this country have
checked off "none of the above" and decided to teach their
children at home. It is now legal in every state and does
not require teacher certification. Homeschooling has taken
a variety of approaches. Some try to create "school at home"
with a fairly standard curriculum, the main difference being
that they can teach it one-to-one with their children. Some
families have signed up with a curriculum which has been
designed by an umbrella school. This school will help the
parents with the curriculum and in some cases, grade
homework, providing a basic curriculum for the parents to
follow and helping with any report forms that are necessary.
A third approach is one which is called "unschooling." In
this case the parent bases their educational approach on the
interests of the child and builds on that rather than a
pre-set curriculum. It could be said that in some of these
cases they design their curriculum "retroactively," keeping
records of the activities throughout the year and at the of
the process dividing the experiences into the appropriate
subject area.
Overall, since most states require some form of testing of
homeschoolers, it has been shown that remarkably, as a group,
they average in the 85th percentile compared to the 50th
percentile of the average public school student. There are
now so many homeschoolers around the country that virtually
all homeschoolers are part of some kind of homeschool group.
Some of these groups have coalesced into homeschool resource
centers and some of them will operate as often as four or
five days a week. Generally, colleges have discovered that
homeschoolers make such good students that they welcome
homeschooling students to apply to their schools. As more
and more parents become aware of these choices and as they
make these choices, we hope that the system will evolve into
one which meets the needs of an increasing number of
students. Meanwhile, don't wait for that system to change.
Take responsibility for your child's education. Find out
what your choices are and choose what is best for your
child.
None of these signs by themselves should be taken as a
reason to panic. But if you have noticed several of them,
you should certainly explore educational alternatives.
Copyright © Jerry Mintz
The Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO)
This article can be reprinted with permission and contact
information.
For more articles on Educational Alternatives, look at the
AERO magazine, "Education Revolution" at their website:
The Education Revolution
http://www.educationrevolution.org
Phone: 516 621-2195, Fax: 516 625-3257.
============================================================
The Alternative Education Resource Organization's
International Democratic Education Conference is to be held
in New York from July 16-24!
For more details, please go to:
http://www.idec2003.com
============================================================
------------------------------------------------------------
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************************************************************
SPECIAL MENTION
"Child Power: Keys to the New Learning of the Digital
Century."
The 11th Colin Cherry Memorial Lecture on Communication
by Seymour Papert, author of the book "The Connected Family:
Bridging the Digital Generation Gap", Imperial College,
London, June 2, 1998.
http://www.connectedfamily.com/main_alt.html
************************************************************
************************************************************
FREE e-learning. Free Computer Training.
For details, please go to:
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************************************************************
------------------------------------------------------------
"One of the questions I have asked [former New York City
Teacher of the Year] John Taylor Gatto and Win Wenger
[author of 'Beyond Teaching & Learning'] is how long it
would take to learn the basic skills taught in school. Both
believe that all of the necessary skills taught in school
can be learned in under 100 hours." - Don Winfield, in
"Have Your Critical Thinking Skills Been Sabotaged?"
------------------------------------------------------------
What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated?
by Alfie Kohn
No one should offer pronouncements about what it means to be
well-educated without meeting my wife. When I met Alisa,
she was at Harvard, putting the finishing touches on her
doctoral dissertation in anthropology. A year later, having
spent her entire life in school, she decided to do the only
logical thing . . . and apply to medical school. Today she
is a practicing physician -- and an excellent one at that,
judging by feedback from her patients and colleagues.
She will, however, freeze up if you ask her what 8 times 7
is, because she never learned the multiplication table. And
forget about grammar ("Me and him went over her house today"
is fairly typical) or literature ("Who's Faulkner?"). After
a dozen years, I continue to be impressed on a regular basis
by the agility of her mind as well as by how much she
doesn't know. (I'm also bowled over by what a wonderful
person she is, but that's beside the point.)
So what do you make of this paradox with whom I live? Is
she a walking indictment of the system that let her get so
far -- 29 years of schooling, not counting medical residency
-- without acquiring the basics of English and math? Or
does she offer an invitation to rethink what it means to be
well-educated since what she lacks hasn't prevented her from
being a deep-thinking, high-functioning, multiply
credentialed, professionally successful individual?
Of course, if those features describe what it means to be
well-educated, then there is no dilemma to be resolved. She
fits the bill. The problem arises only if your definition
includes a list of facts and skills that one must have but
that she lacks. In that case, though, my wife is not alone.
Thanks to the internet, which allows writers and researchers
to circulate rough drafts of their manuscripts, I've come to
realize just how many truly brilliant people cannot spell or
punctuate. Their insights and discoveries may be changing
the shape of their respective fields, but they can't use an
apostrophe correctly to save their lives.
Or what about me (he suddenly inquired, relinquishing his
comfortable perch from which issue all those judgments of
other people)? I could embarrass myself pretty quickly by
listing the number of classic works of literature I've never
read. And I can multiply reasonably well, but everything
mathematical I was taught after first-year algebra (and even
some of that) is completely gone. How well-educated am I?
The issue is sufficiently complex that questions are easier
to formulate than answers. So let's at least be sure we're
asking the right questions and framing them well.
1. The Point of Schooling: Rather than attempting to
define what it means to be well-educated, should we instead
be asking about the purposes of education? The latter
formulation invites us to look beyond academic goals. For
example, Nel Noddings, professor emerita at Stanford
University, urges us to reject "the deadly notion that the
schools' first priority should be intellectual development"
and contends that "the main aim of education should be to
produce competent, caring, loving, and lovable people."
Alternatively, we might wade into the dispute between those
who see education as a means to creating or sustaining a
democratic society and those who believe its primary role is
economic, amounting to an "investment" in future workers and,
ultimately, corporate profits. In short, perhaps the
question "How do we know if education has been successful?"
shouldn't be posed until we have asked what it's supposed to
be successful at.
2. Evaluating People vs. Their Education: Does the
phrase well-educated refer to a quality of the schooling you
received, or to something about you? Does it denote what
you were taught, or what you learned (and remember)? If
the term applies to what you now know and can do, you could
be poorly educated despite having received a top-notch
education. However, if the term refers to the quality of
your schooling, then we'd have to conclude that a lot of
"well-educated" people sat through lessons that barely
registered, or at least are hazy to the point of irrelevance
a few years later.
3. An Absence of Consensus: Is it even possible to agree
on a single definition of what every high school student
should know or be able to do in order to be considered well-
educated? Is such a definition expected to remain invariant
across cultures (with a single standard for the U.S. and
Somalia, for example), or even across subcultures (South-
Central Los Angeles and Scarsdale; a Louisiana fishing
community, the upper East side of Manhattan, and
Pennsylvania Dutch country)? How about across historical
eras: would anyone seriously argue that our criteria for
"well-educated" today are exactly the same as those used a
century ago - or that they should be?
To cast a skeptical eye on such claims is not necessarily to
suggest that the term is purely relativistic: you like
vanilla, I like chocolate; you favor knowledge about poetry,
I prefer familiarity with the Gettysburg Address. Some
criteria are more defensible than others. Nevertheless, we
have to acknowledge a striking absence of consensus about
what the term ought to mean. Furthermore, any consensus
that does develop is ineluctably rooted in time and place.
It is misleading and even dangerous to justify our own
pedagogical values by pretending they are grounded in some
objective, transcendent Truth, as though the quality of
being well-educated is a Platonic form waiting to be
discovered.
4. Some Poor Definitions: Should we instead try to
stipulate which answers don't make sense? I'd argue that
certain attributes are either insufficient (possessing them
isn't enough to make one well-educated) or unnecessary (one
can be well-educated without possessing them) -- or both.
Let us therefore consider ruling out:
Seat time. Merely sitting in classrooms for x hours doesn't
make one well-educated.
Job skills. It would be a mistake to reduce schooling to
vocational preparation, if only because we can easily
imagine graduates who are well-prepared for the workplace
(or at least for some workplaces) but whom we would not
regard as well-educated. In any case, pressure to redesign
secondary education so as to suit the demands of employers
reflects little more than the financial interests -- and the
political power -- of these corporations.
Test scores. To a disconcerting extent, high scores on
standardized tests signify a facility with taking
standardized tests. Most teachers can instantly name
students who are talented thinkers but who just don't do
well on these exams - as well as students whose scores seem
to overestimate their intellectual gifts. Indeed,
researchers have found a statistically significant
correlation between high scores on a range of standardized
tests and a shallow approach to learning. In any case, no
single test is sufficiently valid, reliable, or meaningful
that it can be treated as a marker for academic success.
Memorization of a bunch o' facts. Familiarity with a list
of words, names, books, and ideas is a uniquely poor way to
judge who is well-educated. As the philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead observed long ago, "A merely well-informed man is
the most useless bore on God's earth. . . . Scraps of
information" are only worth something if they are put to use,
or at least "thrown into fresh combinations."
Look more carefully at the superficially plausible claim
that you must be familiar with, say, King Lear in order to
be considered well-educated. To be sure, it's a classic
meditation on mortality, greed, belated understanding, and
other important themes. But how familiar with it must you
be? Is it enough that you can name its author, or that you
know it's a play? Do you have to be able to recite the
basic plot? What if you read it once but barely remember
it now?
If you don't like that example, pick another one. How much
do you have to know about neutrinos, or the Boxer rebellion,
or the side-angle-side theorem? If deep understanding is
required, then (a) very few people could be considered well-
educated (which raises serious doubts about the
reasonableness of such a definition), and (b) the number of
items about which anyone could have that level of knowledge
is sharply limited because time is finite. On the other
hand, how can we justify a cocktail-party level of
familiarity with all these items - reminiscent of Woody
Allen's summary of War and Peace after taking a speed-
reading course: "It's about Russia." What sense does it
make to say that one person is well-educated for having a
single sentence's worth of knowledge about the Progressive
Era or photosynthesis, while someone who has to look it up
is not?
Knowing a lot of stuff may seem harmless, albeit
insufficient, but the problem is that efforts to shape
schooling around this goal, dressed up with pretentious
labels like "cultural literacy," have the effect of taking
time away from more meaningful objectives, such as knowing
how to think. If the Bunch o' Facts model proves a poor
foundation on which to decide who is properly educated, it
makes no sense to peel off items from such a list and assign
clusters of them to students at each grade level. It is as
poor a basis for designing curriculum as it is for judging
the success of schooling.
The number of people who do, in fact, confuse the possession
of a storehouse of knowledge with being "smart" - the latter
being a disconcertingly common designation for those who
fare well on quiz shows -- is testament to the naïve appeal
that such a model holds. But there are also political
implications to be considered here. To emphasize the
importance of absorbing a pile of information is to support
a larger worldview that sees the primary purpose of
education as reproducing our current culture. It is
probably not a coincidence that a Core Knowledge model wins
rave reviews from Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum (and other
conservative Christian groups) as well as from the likes of
Investor's Business Daily. To be sure, not every individual
who favors this approach is a right-winger, but defining the
notion of educational mastery in terms of the number of
facts one can recall is well-suited to the task of
preserving the status quo. By contrast, consider Dewey's
suggestion that an educated person is one who has "gained
the power of reflective attention, the power to hold
problems, questions, before the mind." Without this
capability, he added, "the mind remains at the mercy of
custom and external suggestions."
5. Mandating a Single Definition: Who gets to decide
what it means to be well-educated? Even assuming that you
and I agree to include one criterion and exclude another,
that doesn't mean our definition should be imposed with the
force of law - taking the form, for example, of requirements
for a high school diploma. There are other considerations,
such as the real suffering imposed on individuals who aren't
permitted to graduate from high school, the egregious
disparities in resources and opportunities available in
different neighborhoods, and so on.
More to the point, the fact that so many of us don't agree
suggests that a national (or, better yet, international)
conversation should continue, that one definition may never
fit all, and, therefore, that we should leave it up to local
communities to decide who gets to graduate. But that is not
what has happened. In about half the states, people sitting
atop Mount Olympus have decreed that anyone who doesn't pass
a certain standardized test will be denied a diploma and, by
implication, classified as inadequately educated. This
example of accountability gone haywire violates not only
common sense but the consensus of educational measurement
specialists. And the consequences are entirely predictable:
no high school graduation for a disproportionate number of
students of color, from low-income neighborhoods, with
learning disabilities, attending vocational schools, or not
yet fluent in English.
Less obviously, the idea of making diplomas contingent on
passing an exam answers by default the question of what it
means to be well- (or sufficiently) educated: Rather than
grappling with the messy issues involved, we simply declare
that standardized tests will tell us the answer. This is
disturbing not merely because of the inherent limits of the
tests, but also because teaching becomes distorted when
passing those tests becomes the paramount goal. Students
arguably receive an inferior education when pressure is
applied to raise their test scores, which means that high
school exit exams may actually lower standards.
Beyond proclaiming "Pass this standardized test or you don't
graduate," most states now issue long lists of curriculum
standards, containing hundreds of facts, skills, and
subskills that all students are expected to master at a
given grade level and for a given subject. These standards
are not guidelines but mandates (to which teachers are
supposed to "align" their instruction). In effect, a Core
Knowledge model, with its implication of students as
interchangeable receptacles into which knowledge is poured,
has become the law of the land in many places. Surely even
defenders of this approach can appreciate the difference
between arguing in its behalf and requiring that every
school adopt it.
6. The Good School: Finally, instead of asking what it
means to be well-educated, perhaps we should inquire into
the qualities of a school likely to offer a good education.
I've offered my own answer to that question at book length,
as have other contributors to this issue. As I see it, the
best sort of schooling is organized around problems,
projects, and questions - as opposed to facts, skills, and
disciplines. Knowledge is acquired, of course, but in a
context and for a purpose. The emphasis is not only on
depth rather than breadth, but also on discovering ideas
rather than on covering a prescribed curriculum. Teachers
are generalists first and specialists (in a given subject
matter) second; they commonly collaborate to offer
interdisciplinary courses that students play an active role
in designing. All of this happens in small, democratic
schools that are experienced as caring communities.
Notwithstanding the claims of traditionalists eager to offer
- and then dismiss -- a touchy-feely caricature of
progressive education, a substantial body of evidence exists
to support the effectiveness of each of these components as
well as the benefits of using them in combination. By
contrast, it isn't easy to find any data to justify the
traditional (and still dominant) model of secondary
education: large schools, short classes, huge student loads
for each teacher, a fact-transmission kind of instruction
that is the very antithesis of "student-centered", the
virtual absence of any attempt to integrate diverse areas
of study, the rating and ranking of students, and so on.
Such a system acts as a powerful obstacle to good teaching,
and it thwarts the best efforts of many talented educators
on a daily basis.
Low-quality instruction can be assessed with low-quality
tests, including homegrown quizzes and standardized exams
designed to measure (with faux objectivity) the number of
facts and skills crammed into short-term memory. The
effects of high-quality instruction are trickier, but not
impossible, to assess. The most promising model turns on
the notion of "exhibitions" of learning, in which students
reveal their understanding by means of in-depth projects,
portfolios of assignments, and other demonstrations - a
model pioneered by Ted Sizer, Deborah Meier, and others
affiliated with the Coalition of Essential Schools. By now
we're fortunate to have access not only to essays about how
this might be done (such as Sizer's invaluable Horace
series) but to books about schools that are actually doing
it: The Power of Their Ideas by Meier, about Central Park
East Secondary School in New York City; Rethinking High
School by Harvey Daniels and his colleagues, about Best
Practice High School in Chicago; and One Kid at a Time by
Eliot Levine, about the Met in Providence, RI.
The assessments in such schools are based on meaningful
standards of excellence, standards that may collectively
offer the best answer to our original question simply
because to meet those criteria is as good a way as any to
show that one is well-educated. The Met School focuses on
social reasoning, empirical reasoning, quantitative
reasoning, communication, and personal qualities (such as
responsibility, capacity for leadership, and self-awareness).
Meier has emphasized the importance of developing five
"habits of mind": the value of raising questions about
evidence ("How do we know what we know?"), point of view
("Whose perspective does this represent?"), connections
("How is this related to that?"), supposition ("How might
things have been otherwise?"), and relevance ("Why is this
important?").
It's not only the ability to raise and answer those
questions that matters, though, but also the disposition to
do so. For that matter, any set of intellectual objectives,
any description of what it means to think deeply and
critically, should be accompanied by a reference to one's
interest or intrinsic motivation to do such thinking. Dewey
reminded us that the goal of education is more education.
To be well-educated, then, is to have the desire as well as
the means to make sure that learning never ends.
Copyright © 2003 by Alfie Kohn
Reprinted from PRINCIPAL LEADERSHIP with the author's
permission.
For more on this topic, please see http://www.alfiekohn.org
and the book "THE SCHOOLS OUR CHILDREN DESERVE".
Read Alfie Kohn's biography at:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/biography.htm
This essay may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed
without permission as long as each copy includes this notice
along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical
in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and
author's name).
Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this essay
in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any
form. Please contact: permis-@alfiekohn.org.
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"Education is our passport to the future; for tomorrow
belongs to those who prepare for it today." - Malcolm X
------------------------------------------------------------
DOUG BENCH'S BRAIN STUFF
From "Questions and Answers" in Volume 2, Issue 6 of
"Possibilities!", Doug Bench's Neuroscience Self-Motivation
Newsletter, April 9, 2003:
Q. Do those subliminal tapes that you can get to learn
while you sleep, really work?
A. NO and YES! This past January, I attended the Brain
Learning Exposition in San Diego. At that Conference, the
results of some very serious and lengthy research on this
subject was presented. Based on the latest brain neuron
impulse measuring equipment, the results of the study
indicate that auditory impulses taken in during sleep, DO
NOT enter the cerebral cortex, but rather are turned back
away from the cortex. Therefore, such impulses cannot be
stored in the brain's memory centers. HOWEVER, it is also a
research finding that the conscious brain (cortex) is most
receptive to "pure" neuron impulses when we are in a very
relaxed state, similar to the state we are in during the 15
minutes just before we fall asleep. Conclusion: subliminal
tapes work well for the 15 minutes just before we fall
asleep, but have someone turn off the tape player when we
fall asleep. Save the batteries.
Learn the SCIENCE of PERMANENT Self-Motivation. So you
don't have to go back again and again and again, and spend
more and more and more money for a short term fix!
Scientific facts do not lie and do not fail, and neither
will you! Guaranteed!
*** 7 Mini-Science Lessons for Maxi-Success ***
This Course is FREE, and a great starting point for you to
run toward the Science of Permanent Self-Motivation.
Subscribe to the 7 Mini-Science Lessons for Maxi-Success
course and to Doug Bench's free Neuroscience Self-Motivation
News at his Science for Success website:
http://www.mcssl.com/app/aftrack.asp?afid=69141
AUDIO has been added to Science for Success website!
Doug Bench has added Audio examples of nearly all of his
Systems and Tools to his website.
Go check it out now! Everywhere that you see the
Green 'Play' Button, you can hear a helpful sample of that
Tool.
http://www.mcssl.com/app/aftrack.asp?afid=69141
------------------------------------------------------------
ONGOING PROJECTS
The Parenting Project
http://www.parentingproject.org/
The Natural Child Project
http://www.naturalchild.org/
Project HappyChild
http://www.happychild.org.uk/
Project Renaissance
http://www.winwenger.com/
------------------------------------------------------------
I hope you've enjoyed this issue of Parental Intelligence!
Issue 43 will be published on 25 May 2003
PLEASE MENTION PARENTAL INTELLIGENCE TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS
WHO HAVE CHILDREN - THEY'LL THANK YOU FOR IT!
Do you have any comments or suggestions? Would you
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If you want to unsubscribe for any reason, please see the
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Copyright (c) 2003, Bob Collier except where indicated
otherwise.
Published by:
Bob Collier
3 Goldie Place
Kambah
CANBERRA
ACT 2902
Australia
mailto:quauss-@hotmail.com
Have a happy and successful day!
------------------------------------------------------------
"Who is this bloke?" Find out more about the publisher of
Parental Intelligence by sending a blank email to:
bobco-@getresponse.com
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