Issues in Education: Social Competency
Old-Fashioned
Play Builds Serious Skills
National Public Radio, February 21, 2008
Text of program
On October 3, 1955, the Mickey Mouse Club debuted on television. As we all now know, the show quickly became a cultural icon, one of those phenomena that helped define an era.
What is less remembered but equally, if not more, important, is that another transformative cultural event happened that day: The Mattel toy company began advertising a gun called the "Thunder Burp."
I know — who's ever heard of the Thunder Burp?
Well, no one.
The reason the advertisement is significant is because it marked the first time that any toy company had attempted to peddle merchandise on television outside of the Christmas season. Until 1955, ad budgets at toy companies were minuscule, so the only time they could afford to hawk their wares on TV was during Christmas. But then came Mattel and the Thunder Burp, which, according to Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University, was a kind of historical watershed. Almost overnight, children's play became focused, as never before, on things — the toys themselves.
"It's interesting to me that when we
talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys," says
Chudacoff. "Whereas when I would think of play in the 19th century, I would
think of activity rather than an object."
Taming
Baby Rage: Why Are Some Kids So Angry?
New research indicates babies are born
with violent tendencies that most learn to control
Scientific American online, October 16,
2007
"It's a natural behavior and it's surprising that the idea that children and adolescents learn aggression from the media is still relevant," says Richard Tremblay, a professor of pediatrics, psychiatry and psychology at the University of Montreal, who has spent more than two decades tracking 35,000 Canadian children (from age five months through their 20s) in search of the roots of physical aggression. "Clearly youth were violent before television appeared."
Tremblay's previous results have suggested that children on average reach a peak of violent behavior (biting, scratching, screaming, hitting…) around 18 months of age. The level of aggression begins to taper between the ages of two and five as they begin to learn other, more sophisticated ways of communicating their needs and wants.
Tremblay on Wednesday is set to present preliminary study results showing a genetic signature consistent with chronic violent behavior at a meeting of The Royal Society, the U.K.'s academy of science, in London.
"We're looking at to what extent the chronically aggressive individuals show differences in terms of gene expressions compared to those on the normal trajectory," he told ScientificAmerican.com. "The individuals that are chronically aggressive have…more genes that are not expressed." The fact that a gene can be silenced or the level of protein it encodes reduced, he added, "is an indication that the problem is at a very basic level."
One Size Fits Whom?
The core curriculum stymies reform
Commentary by Ronald A. Work, Teacher
Magazine, March 1, 2007
Curriculum is the engine of our public education system. To a large degree it shapes the allocation of financial resources and time, the preparation and assignment of teachers, and the formulation of academic standards and standardized tests. Despite its importance, curriculum doesn’t get much attention from parents, politicians, or the media, except for calls for more rigor and a national curriculum (God forbid). Nearly everybody just accepts curriculum as it’s always been—without questioning whether it is appropriate for a very diverse student body and a high-tech, rapidly changing world.
The standards movement and the increasing emphasis on accountability
(especially since the enactment of No Child Left Behind) tend to make the core
curriculum even more impervious to criticism or change. And that is unfortunate
because the key to significant improvement in student learning might well be a
serious examination of—and national debate about—the traditional core
curriculum
Children's Chances for
Success Vary Dramatically by State, Report Warns
Released online by Education Week/Editorial Projects in Education Research
Center
January 3, 2007
"A child born in Virginia is significantly more likely to experience success throughout life than the average child born in the United States, while a child born in New Mexico is likely to face an accumulating series of hurdles both educationally and economically, according to an analysis published in Education Week..."
By chasing 'masculine' ideals -
subjects and careers - young males may be sabotaging their chances of excelling...
Last year a bright 15-year-old, who
comes from a home without books but goes to a highly rated grammar school, came
to stay with us for a week over Christmas. At first he said little. It was clear
that he wasn't accustomed to laying tables for dinner or making conversation
with adults. Then, as he listened to other people's noisy discussions, he began
to ask tentative questions. What is a government minister? What is the EU? Who's
Mozart? Did Japan fight in the second world war? What does Palestine mean, and
what does it have to do with Israel? His curiosity and his intelligence were
obvious. His inarticulacy and lack of a general or social education, despite his
apparently desirable schooling, were heartbreaking...
The Handwriting Is on the
Wall
Researchers See a downside as Keyboards
Replace Pens in Schools
Article by Margaret Webb Pressler,
Washington Post, October 11, 2006
"The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it's threatening to finish off longhand.
"When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.
"And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.
"Many educators shrug. Stacked up against teaching technology, foreign languages and the material on standardized tests, penmanship instruction seems a relic...."
"Lighting A Fire:
Motivating Boys To Succeed"
Commentary by Kathy Stevens,
Duke Gifted Letter, September 2006, http:www.dukegiftedletter.com
"You’ve got a bright child on your hands! As a preschooler he loved books, drawing, and creating with blocks. He was excited by the things around him and was a bundle of energy, wanting to explore, handle, and figure out his world.
"When he started school he was enthusiastic and looked forward to the wonderful adventures you told him were in store. In elementary school you started getting notes from his teacher indicating that he was “having some problems.” The list included comments like: doesn’t stay on task, fails to turn in homework, doesn’t complete projects on time, can’t seem to stop fidgeting and sit still. In middle school your bright, gifted son is getting by with mediocre grades and an attitude that you find disheartening. He just doesn’t seem motivated to succeed in school the way you and his teachers know he could.
"What happened when he entered the classroom?"
"Why Thinking 'Outside the Box' Is Not So Easy"
(And Why Present Reform Efforts Will Fail)
Commentary by Marion Brady,
Education Week, August 30, 2006
"Of all the education-related unexamined assumptions, none is more deeply embedded than the belief that the main business of schooling is to teach the “core curriculum”—math, science, social studies, and language arts. Supporting that belief is another assumption: that these four fields of study are the only, or at least the optimum, organizers of general knowledge.
"That last assumption is so powerful it shapes education worldwide. At all levels, from middle through graduate school, the four areas of study are the main institutional organizers. So taken for granted is it that they are the fundamental building blocks of education, that reform movements don’t question their centrality. Separate sets of “standards” reinforce them. “Measures of accountability” are keyed to them. Even those who know that knowledge is seamless, who know that the walls between fields of study are artificial and arbitrary, tend to assume that the four are the ultimate organizers of knowledge....
School, finally, isn’t about disciplines and subjects, but about what they were originally meant to do—help the young make more sense of life, more sense of experience, more sense of an unknowable future. And in that sense-making effort, math, science, social studies, and language arts simply aren’t up to the challenge. They’ve given us a curriculum so deeply flawed it’s an affront to the young and a recipe for societal disaster."
For discussion of this
issue, please visit this Education Week webpage: http://www.edweek.org/tb/2006/08/29/939.html
"Children are less able than they used to be"
John Crace in The Guardian,
January 24, 2006
It has become an annual rite of summer. Out come the Sats/GCSE/A -level results - take your pick - and up pops a government minister to say that grades are higher than ever, teachers and schools have done a fantastic job, but there's still room for improvement. Not everyone takes this at face value and there are a few grumbles about exams becoming easier. But even if there are suspicions that standards have dropped, no one has ever seriously suggested that children's cognitive abilities have deteriorated. Until now.
New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and conducted by Michael Shayer, professor of applied psychology at King's College, University of London, concludes that 11- and 12-year-old children in year 7 are "now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago", in terms of cognitive and conceptual development.
"It's a staggering
result," admits Shayer, whose findings will be published next year in the
British Journal of Educational Psychology.
"Worlds Collide"
Ronald
Wolk, Teacher magazine, January 1, 2006
In
preparation for a recent meeting, I had to read half a dozen documents. Among
them was a copy of Lauren Resnick’s brilliant presidential address to the
American Educational Research Association in 1987. Titled “Learning In School
and Out,” it focuses on what I view as perhaps the central issue in education:
the gap between the real world and the world of school.
Resnick, now a distinguished researcher and education reformer who heads the Learning
Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, offers a
clear premise in her opening sentence. “Popular wisdom,” she writes,
“holds that common sense outweighs school learning for getting along in the
world—that there exists a practical intelligence, different from school
intelligence, that matters more in real life."
Report from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills
Results That Matter: 21st Century Skills and High School Reform
Reports from the Program for International Student Assessment
Learning for Tomorrow's World – First Results
from PISA 2003 presents initial results from the PISA 2003 assessment. The
report goes well beyond an examination of the relative standing of countries in mathematics, science and reading. It also looks at a wider range
of educational outcomes that include students’ motivation to learn, their
beliefs about themselves and their learning strategies.