Early Advocacy for Public Education

From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live; and, as at the instant of birth we partake of the rights of citizenship, that instant ought to be the beginning of the exercise of our duty. If there are laws for the age of maturity, there ought to be laws for infancy, teaching obedience to others: and as the reason of each man is not left to be the sole arbiter of his duties, government ought the less indiscriminately to abandon to the intelligence and prejudices...

 The Information Age has Increased Abstract Intelligence

Most dramatically, an increase in one kind of abstract intelligence is visible all over the world: mastery of digital technology. Cyberspace is the ultimate abstract realm, in which goals are achieved not by pushing matter around in space but by manipulating intangible symbols and patterns. When people were first confronted with digital interfaces in the 1970s, like videocassette recorders and ticket machines in new subway systems, they were baffled. It was a running joke of the 1980s that mo...

 Games are Patient and Know You

What this small group of tinkerers found is that games focus, inspire, and reassure young people i; in ways that school often can't. Then as now, they believed, if you are a young person, games give you a chance to learn at your own pace, take risks, and cultivate deeper understanding. While teachers, parents, and friends may encourage and support you, these natural resources are limited. Computers work on a completely different scale and timetable. They're "infinitely stupid and infinitely p...

 Parental Resistance to Educational Change

The greatest challenges facing parents stem from their own school experiences. Every adult has been educated in some way, and the methods their teachers used usually shape the values they carry with them and color their perceptions of how education “should be.” These learned values are very powerful and can be seen in the ongoing controversies that manifest in social media regarding the Common Core State Standards and math instruction, for example. The notion that there is a critical-thin...

 Quantity of Time Spent with Children has No Impact on Out...

Does the amount of time children spend with their mothers matter for children’s behavioral, emotional, and academic outcomes? The results from ordinary least squares regression models for the child sample are shown in Table 2. There were no statistically significant associations between maternal time of either type and any child outcome. In contrast, social status resources, as measured by mother’s education, family income, and family structure, was related to some outcomes. Mother’s ed...

 Professional Parents

If a smaller number of families raise children, however, why do the children have to be their own? Why not a system under which "professional parents" take on the childrearing function for others? Raising children, after all, requires skills that are by no means universal. We don't let "just anyone" perform brain surgery or, for that matter, sell stocks and bonds. Even the lowest ranking civil servant is required to pass tests proving competence. Yet we allow virtually anyone, almost without...

 The Experiment that Disproved Astrology

A story told by this friend, Firminus, shook the young Augustine from his pagan faith. Firminus’ father, an earnest experimenter in astrology, always noted the positions of the stars and even “took care with the most exact diligence to know the birth of his very puppies.” Firminus’ father learned that one of his women-servants was to be delivered of a child at about the same time that Firminus’ mother was expecting. “Both were delivered at the same instant; so that both were const...