A Father-Daughter Bond, Page By Page

 Great story about the cultivation of a father-daughter relationship through reading.

Hattip to Don Hauptman.

The Montessori Way

My review of Tim Seldin and Paul Epstein's book, The Montessori Way, on the Montessori approach to education, in which I connect biological, social, and political issues.

An Engineer's Incisive Take on Deconstructionism

Read Chip Morningstar's trenchant analysis of deconstructionism. A naive engineer-scientist, he encountered it in spades at the Second International Conference on Cyberspace in Santa Cruz, CA, April 1991 from the humanities types attending the conference.

Shocked and perplexed by the mumbo-jumbo so many were taking seriously, he devoted serious time reading up on it. His analysis is dead-on.

Remember, this is the theory that many, many, many humanities professors use to teach our children, in high school and college - the brighter, the more likely they will be introduced to it and their minds deformed.


Hattip to John Enright.

Employers want 18th century skills

 New data reviewed by Mark Bauerlein in The Chronicle of Higher Education which argues for getting a high-level liberal arts education.

Hattip to Laurie Morrow.

The Philosophical Baby

Researcher Alison Gopnik talks about the amazing findings on what babies grasp.

Hat tip to Anja Hartleb-Parsons.

Illiteracy in the Detroit Public Schools' Superintendent's Office

 If we had any doubts about root causes of Detroit's problems, this will help to dispel them:

Iliterate emails from Detroit Public School's Superintendent, Otis Mathis.


Hat tip to John Enright

Sam Adams on Education

Samuel Adams

letter to James Warren

"If Virtue & Knowledge are diffused among the People, they will never be enslav'd. This will be their great Security."

An Evaluation of Public Higher Ed in Illinois, Grade = F

Read the Association of Trustees and Alumni/Illinois Policy Institute's "A Report Card on Public Higher Education in Illinois" - and weep. What's going on in Illinois is a crime, literally.

Cultivating Failure

Passionate article about the latest crazed trend in California - chef Alice Waters' movement to make kids work in school gardens because "Gardens help students to learn the pleasure of physical work."

The article's point: these are largely immigrant and poor students who desperately need the knowledge and skills that will enable them to get better jobs than their parents. The author thinks they shouldn't be spending so much time doing physical labor - like their parents.

I couldn't agree more with the point, and I find Waters' Progressive approach is out of touch with their needs. It's too bad she didn't institute these gardens in schools - mostly populated by upper middle class students - where the parents are too busy to let their children play outside and learn about nature. Working in a garden, especially with a knowledgeable teacher to guide them, is one of the best ways to learn about biology and botany. Hands-on science, filled with the essential of science: first-hand observation.

First-hand observation and its attendant skills are sorely needed by most students these days, whether they go to an inner city public school or a upper class private school.


And, if these urban garden programs organized the work around science, as we do in Montessori classrooms, the immigrant and poor students would flourish. I'm not sure if the author realizes that many immigrant and poor students, once in the city, get little experience of nature.

Hattip to Aleks Kulczuga

Homeschooling a Crime in Europe

I almost flipped reading this article in the Economist about a German family that needed asylum in the U.S....because they were homeschooling! The implications are mind-boggling.

The American Founders' Study of History

"The founders’ immersion in ancient history had a profound effect upon their style of thought. They developed from the classics a suspicious cast of mind. They learned from the Greeks and Romans to fear conspiracies against liberty. Steeped in a literature whose perpetual theme was the steady encroachment of tyranny on liberty, the founders became virtually obsessed with spotting its approach, so that they might avoid the fate of their classical heroes. It has been said of the American Revolution that never was there a revolution with so little cause. Whatever his faults, George III was hardly Caligula or Nero; however illegitimate, the moderate British taxes were hardly equivalent to the mass executions of the emperors. But since the founders believed that the central lesson of the classics was that every illegitimate power, however small, ended in slavery, they were determined to resist every such power. Even legitimate authority should be exercised
sparingly, lest it grow into illegitimate powers. (pp. 118-19) Prof. Carl Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment

http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Classics-Greece-American-Enlightenment/dp/0674314263

Quoted in:
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/01/31/whats-the-matter-with-you-americans/

(Hat tip John Enright)

"Professor Is A Label That Leans To The Left"

 This New York Times article reviews new research into why the Academy leans left. The researchers' conclusion: typecasting, which influences a young person's idea about what they want to be. The article reviews some other recent theories, also.

While I'm sure "typecasting" influences some, I'm waiting for someone to research the numbers of highly qualified academics who consider themselves libertarians, classical liberals, or economic conservatives and have not been able to get jobs in Academia. I know far too many, and their stories, for it to be a fluke.

"Hollywood and Howard Zin's Marxist Education Project"

I shuddered when I read Michelle Malkin's report on the latest indoctrination efforts by leftist activist professor Howard Zin "The People Speak." Not only will this be aired on the History Channel, but Zinn has launched a related nationwide teaching project "Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change." Here's a few choice principles they promote:

"There is no such thing as pure fact."

In the "Rethinking Mathematics" part of their curriculum, "Short lessons, provocative cartoons and snippets of statistics" emphasize "racial profiling, unemployment calculation, the war in Iraq, environmental racism" etc., etc., etc.


It's a teacher's job to encourage students to "reach beyond [American] chauvinism" and "nurture student empathy" for U.S. enemies, such as the jihadists who attacked New York City on 9/11.

Parents - watch your children!

College Press Run by Students - Montessori-Style Pedagogy

According to Inside Higher Ed's, January 11, 2010 article, Champlain College is opening a new press, to be run by the students. It's going to use technological bells and whistles such as podcasts and Facebook fan pages, but it's aim is to give writing students practical experience in publishing.

Although I doubt the project creator, Tim Brookes, realizes it, this is exactly the kind of activity which teachers help students to create in every classic Montessori classroom. And for the same reasons. If students are to become successful as adults, they need to develop practical knowledge and skills. Good thinking Professor Brookes!

Obvious, but often ignored in current education.

Are "Learning Styles" Relevant to Teaching?

Some new research about student "learning styles" puts into question the belief that different students need to be taught different ways. The research implies that there is an optimal way to teach each subject, no matter the style of the learner. Some researchers dispute this article's conclusions.

I'm waiting for someone to have a unified theory of human learning to resolve these issues!

Hat tip to Iris Bell for the article.

Can Videogames Teach Kids?

 Here's a good, short article from Parade Magazine on how schools are using videogames for education. Not surprisingly, there are many creative applications of games, and these seem like a huge step up from the traditional way students are taught.

Games are especially wonderful for creating whole worlds in which people can learn, i.e. how to navigate, strategize, learn finance, see photos of far-off places - heck, I can't begin to summarize the numbers of things you can learn through games.

But young children and adolescents - well, even adults - need sensory and physical experience to adequately develop their minds. Virtual reality just isn't the same.

Since students don't get a lot of sensory and physical experience in the way knowledge is taught in traditional schools, games may not be worse than all the paper-and-pencil learning, in this respect. But there are far better ways to convey knowledge through sensory-motor and real-world experiences, such as the materials and experiences used in the Montessori Method.

In fact, at our school, Council Oak Montessori, we're seeing so many children who hardly get to play outside anymore. Their parents are too busy or worried about danger. This deprives them of essential experiences with nature and physical reality.  What we do through the Montessori Method, then, is more important than ever.

Consequently, I'd like to see the use of games - but judiciously.

Reading and the Brain

"Information, Please: Our species ancestors didn't have to follow recipes or digest 'Catcher in the Rye.' So how did the brain learn to read?" from the Wall Street Journal reviews neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene's new book Reading in the Brain. Looks like an excellent read - I've ordered it already.

One element I liked: the research on reading tests the commonly-held view that the brain functions "modularly" with little interaction between different modules. That theory has always flown in the face of human experience but it hasn't stopped it's advocates, who seem to argue that the experience of wholeness is an "illusion."

The Answer to Future Shock

John Davis sent me a link to this fascinating video on the exponential changes happening right now, due to technology. It can leave a person with the feeling: how can I keep up with all this change and information?



As usual, that genius, Maria Montessori, had the answer - decades ago:

"It is not the accumulation of a direct knowledge of things which forms
the man of letters, the scientist, and the connoisseur; it is the
prepared order established in the mind which is to receive such
knowledge. On the other hand, the uncultivated person has only the
direct knowledge of objects; such a person may be a lady who spends a
great part of the night reading books, or a gardener who spends his
life making material distinctions between the plants in his garden.

"The knowledge of such uncultured minds is not only disorderly, but it
is confined to the objects with which it comes into direct contact,
whereas the knowledge of the scientist is infinite, because,
possessing the power of classifying the attributes of things, he can
recognize them all, and determine now the class, now the
relationships, now the origins of each; facts much more profound than
the actual things could of themselves reveal." Maria Montessori, The Advanced Montessori Method, 1917


Hat tip to Rachel Davison for the Montessori quote

Liberating Montessori Ideas on Social Skills

Maria Montessori's thinking and work presents some of the most liberating ideas about education to be found on the planet. 

Here's her answer to a question about how the set-up of her classrooms advances excellent social skills which prepare the child for a life of productive work, trade, collaboration, and individual expression. It's from the Association Montessori Internationale website, in the section under Montessori's articles and letters.

"This article was first published in the Call of Education Vol, 1. No. 1, 1924.

"If the children in a Montessori school work individually rather than collectively how will the be able to prepare themselves for social life?

"Social life does not consist of a group of individuals remaining close together, side by side, nor in their advancing en masse under the command of a captain like a regiment on the march, nor like an ordinary class of school children.

"The social life of man is founded upon work, harmoniously organised and upon social virtues - and these are the attitudes which develop to an exceptional degree amongst our children. Constancy in their work, patience when having to wait, the power of adapting themselves to the innumerable circumstances which present themselves in their daily contact with each other, reciprocal helpfulness and so on, are all exercises which represent a real and practical social life and which we see, for the first time, being organised amongst the children in a school. In fact, whereas schools used to be equipped only so as to accommodate children, seated passively side by side, who were expected to receive from the teacher (we might almost say in a parasitic manner), our schools, on the contrary, have an equipment which is adapted to all those forms of work which are necessary in an active and independent little community.

"The individual work in which the child is able to isolate himself and to concentrate, serves to perfect his individuality and the nearer man gets to perfection, the better is he able to associate harmoniously with others. A strong social movement cannot exist without prepared individuals, just as the members of an orchestra cannot play together harmoniously unless each individual has been thoroughly trained by repeated exercise when alone."

An advocate of individualism down to the root.

The War on Kids

My friend and Marketing Advisor, Don Hauptman, highly recommends this new documentary. He described it as: "a scathing attack on American education—on everything from curricula and teaching methodology to draconian security measures to psychotropic drugging that turns normal children into zombies."

Currently playing only at the Quad Cinema in Greenwich Village, you can see a trailer at their website. I'm planning to get the DVD!