Half of Children Won't Live to Adulthood, So Why Torture ...

Nothing is more uncertain than the life span of individual man; very few men reach old age. The greatest risks are incurred at the beginning of life: the less we have lived the less we may expect to live. Of the children that are born half at most grow to adolescence; thus it is probable that your pupil will not attain the age of manhood. What must we think then of the barbarous education which sacrifices the present for an uncertain future, which surrounds a child with all sorts of fetters ...

 IQ Gains from Early Childhood Programs Fade

Children enrolled in Head Start or in another enriched preschool program, compared to similar children without such preschool, typically show a gain of about 10 IQ points during the year of the Head Start experience. This IQ gain typically fades and then disappears within the first few years of school, so that by second grade neither IQ nor achievement test scores nor¬ mally reveal any difference in performance between those children who had been in Head Start and those who had not been in...

 Adult Participation in Children's Worldplay

In The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood (2006), the art theorist Ellen Handler Spitz argues that "[t]he topic of adult participation in children's play is delicate, complex, and controversial," largely due to the overwhelming influence a parent or a teacher or even adult-generated entertainment media can have. Adults must work hard not to impose their owti interests, methods, or judgments upon play activity. The act of modeling and encouraging can, indeed, be fi-aught with miss...

 Why Kids Abandon Creative Play

The observation that play gets short shrift as children come of age in the Western world is surely as old and as perennial as that civilization itself. The Bible puts it thus: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that 1 am become a man, I have put away childish things." Turning their attention to the phenomenon, psychologists have asked what might be the causal factors. In the early 1900s, for instance, G. Stanley Hall argued that as children...

 World-Play as Self-Apprenticeship

...worldplay can be studied as a kind of self-apprenticeship in creative practice, rather than prodigious application in discipline or craft. The childhood inventor of imaginary lands often elaborates his or her world in multiple ways at once. He or she may write stories and compose music, draw maps and build models, design games, and possibly construct a secret language—all within the context of play. It is likely, therefore, that childhood woridplay confers benefits that differ substantia...

 Children's Art Has Its Own Logic

Even simple scribbles are meaningful. While it was once thought that kids only scribbled to experience the physical sensation of moving their arm along the page, “now it’s been shown that when children are scribbling … they’re representing through action, not through pictures,” said Boston College’s Winner. “For example, a child might draw a truck by making a line fast across the page and going ‘zoom, zoom,’ and so it doesn’t look like a truck when the child is done, but i...

 Risk of Childhood Kidnapping are Very Low

A generation ago 70 percent of children played outside; today the rate is down to 30 percent.209 In 2008 the nine-year-old son of the journalist Lenore Skenazy begged her to let him go home by himself on the New York subway. She agreed, and he made it home without incident. When she wrote about the vignette in a New York Sun column, she found herself at the center of a media frenzy in which she was dubbed “America’s Worst Mom.” (Sample headline: “Mom Lets 9-Year-Old Take Subway Home A...

 Lego Letter About Gender

To Parents The urge to create is equally strong in all children. Boys and girls. It’s the imagination that counts. Not skill. You build whatever comes into your head, the way you want it. A bed or a truck. A dolls house or a spaceship. A lot of boys like dolls houses. They’re more human than spaceships. A lot of girls prefer spaceships. They’re more exciting than dolls houses. The most important thing is to put the right material in their hands and let them create whatever appeals t...