An Ezine with information and resources for 21st century education

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Issue 8:

  

 
Article 5: How To Enhance The Quality Of Parenting          By Peter Kline



Social scientists studying the problem of parents who fail to see to it that their children get a really good chance to be successful in life believe that it is often because of a deeply ingrained belief that what they say and do to their children will not affect their development. Therefore, these parents see no reason to engage their children in the process of learning.

Even understanding the problem, however, social scientists usually can recommend no really effective approach to solving it. That's because they don't understand the true malleability of the human mind and how easy it can be to change the behavior and the learning ability of human beings at any stage of their development. In fact, recent research demonstrates that this can be accomplished by giving them properly designed interactive video games to play with.		  
 
Proof that this is true can be found in two brilliant books by educational psychologist Jane Healy, Endangered Minds and Failure to Connect. Healy shows how the exposure of children to television and video games can significantly alter the wiring in their brains, causing them to behave very differently from children who are not influenced by such electronic stimulation. She recommends using computers in positive ways to stimulate the development of the mind, but is very clear about how these uses must be different from the kinds of computer programs traditionally in use. For more on Jane Healy go to http://www.edtechnot.com/nothealy.html

A recent evaluation by the Learning Enhancement Corporation of its new product BrainWare Safari emphasizes the extraordinary positive impact that computers can have.

In less than three months, working at home under the supervision of their parents, elementary school children spent no more than an hour a day playing using this interactive program with a video-game format and, on average, raised the level of their cognitive skills (that is, their basic mental processing skills) by over four years, and their academic skills by slightly less than two years. No one in the field of education has ever seen a result like this before, and it has profound implications for early childhood education as well as for improving the academic performance of children and adults at any age. For more go to http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=brainware+safari

Now, what about helping parents learn how to do a better job of parenting?

Harvard psychologist David McClelland's (1917 - 1998) work in achievement motivation long ago demonstrated that adults can undergo profound changes in motivation in as little as two weeks, and that these changes do not wear off over time. That means that in the future it will be possible to design computer games so that they can rapidly alter anyone's capacity to do almost anything. All that's needed to make this happen is to find out what components are essential to achieving the desired behavior, and use the computer game to teach those components. The process differs very little from that demonstrated in the popular film The Karate Kid. For more on David McClelland's theories go to
http://www.accel-team.com/human_relations/hrels_06_mcclelland.html .

This is the kind of situation Ray Kurzweil was predicting when in a recent article he foresaw that, given the brain-machine interface that is increasingly characteristic of human beings on the Internet, the average human being of tomorrow may well be a million times more intelligent than are you who are reading this and I who am writing it.
See http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1

As the recent debut of BrainWare Safari demonstrates, there are already starting to be answers for parents who want to make changes and begin to build a new atmosphere of encouragement and success orientation into their families - affecting every family member's ability to earn a living, including their own. What a powerful new era in human achievement we now have the ability to usher in!
 
 

Article 6: Books Reviewed
 
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