Children are Smarter Than Adults

This precocity of childhood may be said to characterise all the known races of man, and to be even more marked the more primitive the race. On this point, ‘It is an interesting fact,’ says Havelock Ellis (183, p. 177), ‘and perhaps of some significance, that among primitive races in all parts of the world, the children, at an early age, are very precocious in intelligence.’ And again, ‘ It seems that, the lower the race, the more marked is this precocity, and its arrest at puberty. It is a fa...

 Teens Need a Psychological Moratorium

She remembered psychologist Erik Erickson's exhortation about teenagers: they need a "psychosocial moratorium," he wrote, an environment and a stretch of time in which they can explore different aspects of their personality and try on a series of identities without fear of consequence. In a way, that was what school was supposed to offer, but it didn't always do so with much success. She realized that this was exactly what virtual worlds offered all the time, to anyone with a computer and an ...

 Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Rationalia

In Rationalia, the Constitution stipulates that a body of convincing evidence needs to exist in support of an idea before any Policy can established based on it. In such a country, data gathering, careful observations, and experimentation would be happening all the time, influencing practically every aspect of our modern lives. As a result, Rationalia would lead the world in discovery, because discovery would be built into the DNA of how the government operates, and how its citizens think....

 What Students Should Develop During Pre-K and Kindergarten

Language skills At entry to first grade, students will need to have had a broad array of language experiences. Oral language, vocabulary, and other language concepts are crucial foundations for success in reading, especially reading comprehension. In particular, children need to be able to use language to describe their experiences, to predict what will happen in the future, and to talk about events that happened in the past. Early childhood programs can develop children's language by givin...

 Petitionary Prayer

I was raised in a culture of petition, inculcated from an early age with a repertoire of formulaic prayers addressed to God, his angels, or his saints. All of the prayers assumed a response: Here I am, Lord, deserving of your attention, favor, heating, forgiveness. Never did it pass my mind that my prayers were not heard. My education was hemmed about with a huge body of stories affirming God's intervention in human affairs. Had not every religious person experienced firsthand the power of pr...

 Watson's Afterward Concerning Rosalind Franklin

All of these people, should they desire, can indicate events and details they remember differently. But there is one unfortunate exception. In 1958, Rosalind Franklin died at the early age of thirty-seven. Since my initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal (as recorded in the early pages of this book), were often wrong, I want to say something here about her achievements. The X-ray work she did at King's is increasingly regarded as superb. The sorting out of the A and B forms, ...

 Imitation is Instinctive

Recent research shows that babies begin to imitate facial expressions and gestures from an early age whether they are rewarded or not. Babies are able to mimic facial expressions they see and sounds they hear when they are too young to have learned by practice or by looking in mirrors (Meltzoff 1990). Successfully imitating something seems to be rewarding in itself. We can see now, as the behaviourists could not, why so much of our behavior has to be instinctive. The world is too complicated ...