education

A friend sent a link to a New York Times article about technology in the classroom – NOT.

The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard. But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix...   More

Related articals:

The Weaver Becomes the Web

Just Say NO to Baby Einstein

A list of interesting essays

Appropriate Use of Technology in Education

The overarching insight in neuroscience the past decade is:

‘Brain and environment are one, interdependent, reciprocal dynamic process. Change the environment and you change the brain.'

The human brain created Technology that changed the environment that is now changing the brain. In the mid 1800’s Emerson, cautious of the industrial revolution, noted; the weaver becomes the web.

Yes, technology is here to stay, and like guns and sugar can be very useful in moderation. The typical young child, teen and adult however, invest five or more hours each day relating to flat, two dimensional screens. Relating to a flat screen with eyes and fingers is sensory deprivation compared to swinging on a rope and dropping in a rushing stream.

Screen based technologies are all ‘virtual’. To have an appropriate relationship with a virtual reality one must first have a well-developed physical, emotional, cognitive foundation in what used to be the only reality – natural experience and relationship based and perception.

Introduce virtual reality too early, when the natural reality is still forming and you displace, push aside, critical experiences in the development and stabilization of that natural reality. Do this, and do it in mass and we weaken the core foundation upon which individual and collective life and all its complexities rest.

Consider the crippling retardation of descriptive language as it has been pushed aside by screen based technologies. We have moved from Tom Sawyer to Spiderman. Every picture displaces the need for a thousand descriptive words. Descriptive language is the only way imagination unfolds, imagination being the brains capacity to create inner images not present to the senses, which Einstein openly and correctly declared is much more important than knowledge. Push aside symbol and metaphor with pictures and we retard the capacity to deal with abstractions such as mathematics and science. Imagination is THE core capacity upon which all higher human potentials depend. Knowledge is content. Knowledge without imagination however, is like fireworks on the fourth of July without a match and that is what we have.

It is capacity not content that ‘real’ learning cultivates. The whole body, feeling, movement and thought, in the moment, interacting with the natural world – not some buzzing, flashing, gadget – this rich ‘organic’ engagement and experience, running, jumping, squishing with fingers, smelling, laughing, changing, bigger, smaller, heavy, light, hot, cold, wet, rough, smooth, symphony of three dimensional sounds, and the quiet, intuitive inner ‘knowing’ and shared meaning of real communion with our ‘god given’ natural universe. That is what learning is.

Reality is brain development dependent. Introducing screen – and that means image based technologies - to young children, before age eleven, is like feeding steak to a baby or sexually explicit material to a seven year old. The developing ‘reality’ is not prepared nor is it stable enough to ‘appropriately’ digest these inappropriate experiences. All the so called ‘learning’ that is taking place, at a precious price in terms of money and more importantly in the child’s attention and true whole development is placed on a malnourished foundation.

Virtual reality is sensory deprivation to the developing brain, similar in many ways to bottled feeding. Not only is bottle feeding ‘junk’ food compared to the infinitely more complex nature of the breast but it displaces the touch, smell, the warmth, the heartbeat, the closeness of mother’s loving smile, not to mention the pleasure that mother and baby, possibly even orgasmic pleasure the shared experience offers. The pleasure inducing hormones released through this simple experience is the glue that bonds human relationships for a life time, not only mother and baby but baby and the natural world. Technology has none of these ‘experiences.’ The developing body and brain weaned on technology is more selfish, less empathic, far less imaginative, less connected to the ‘real’ natural, organic world around him or her.

The known addictive techniques the gaming industry use are exploitive to the young child’s body, emotions and mind. Like pimps the gaming and most of the so called – educational media products –steal all these living, moving, relationship based experiences for a profit and call their dolled up prostitute-products ‘learning.’ I know. I am a documentary film maker and have studied and developed media for 30 years.

Yes, technology is here to stay. So are genetically engineered food, toxic pollution in the environment, radiation in the air, food and water and our bodies, broken families, domestic violence, corruption from sea to shining sea, sexual exploitations and addictions of every kind. All these are here to stay but are they necessary and appropriate? Do we cozy up to, embrace and become these or do we see the dangers they represent to ourselves and to our child’s ‘real’ development and put them in their proper place?

A question the blind leading the blind can’t ask is: ‘Does a population deprived of what was normal and natural (organic) developmental experiences have the capacity to know what they have missed?’ Obviously not.

Those who are color blind experience their monochromatic world as ‘normal.’ If they ruled the world, published the text books, sat on school boards, like Midas, everything they touched would be beautifully black and white. Systemic sensory deprivation alters the perceptual baseline we call reality. Entire colors of the human potential spectrum can disappear in a single generation and won’t ever be missed. In there lies the rub.

Michael Mendizza

See:
Michael Mendizza
Virtual Reality is Sensory Deprivation
http://www.ttfuture.org/blog/2/Virtual-Reality-is-Sensory-Deprivation

Jerry Mander
on media, the mind and democracy
http://ttfuture.org/files/2/members/int_mander.pdf

Ralph Nader
On corporate exploitation of children
http://ttfuture.org/files/2/members/int_nader.pdf

Joseph Chilton Pearce
Play is Learning
video: http://ttfuture.org/store/play-is-learning

Bev Bos
Tour of the Roseville Preschool
video: http://ttfuture.org/authors/bos

James W. Prescott, PhD
The origins of love and violence,
how sensory deprivation impacts the developing brain.
video: http://ttfuture.org/bonding/front

Marian Diamond, PhD
Enriching Heredity, how stimulation grows the brain
http://ttfuture.org/authors/marion_diamond

Given the ‘state of the nation’ our founding fathers, those who authored the constitution and signed the declaration of independence, would be called rebels, unpatriotic, terrorists. The police state, FBI and CIA would have them under surveillance. There is no doubt about that. The men who pined their names to the declaration of independence were hunted down, many hanged, their homes and families ruined.

Some say, don’t’ be negative, don’t be cynical, color between the lines, accept it – this is the way the world is and has always been. Don’t cause trouble. Smell the flowers. Pet the cat.

A trick question:
When is waking up from a bad dream bad?

Sure, there are many reasons to go to college. Getting a good job is not one of them. 50% of 2010 graduates are unemployed and the prospects for 2011 grads are similar. We have been told/sold that doing ‘good’ in school is the road to the good life. Good education = a good job and secure future. Not true. The costs of a college education continue to rise. Student loans (which use the same predatory Wall Street scams that burst the housing bubble) are greater than credit card debt in the US!

The costs of so called higher education pimped with false promises of ‘the good job and better life’ keep going up, funded by the same predator banking schemes that caused the housing bubble and well-crafted depression. Student debt is larger than credit card debit. Education is big business. The truth is, many PhD’s are flipping hamburgers. We each have a choice, freedom or trying to reform the system.

The forces that created NCLB (no child left behind) are larger than education. 9/11, as controversial as JFK’s regime change, was a prelude for increasing Fascist policies in the US, (Fascism being corporate-government). Habeas Corpus, the right of every prisoner to challenge the terms of his or her incarceration in court before a judge, has been tossed out. The US engages in routine torture. Police forces throughout the country have been militarized.

The Orwellian-Double-Speak-Patriot-Act allows corporate-government, against, not for the people, search without warrant or probable cause, not just ‘hypothetical’ terrorists but every US citizen. Surveillance, metal detectors, routine searches, police presence are common schools. There has been a systematic dumbing down of curriculum with a pretext of improving education, more Orwellian rap. Articles and essays have been written about our schools becoming more detention camps and prisons than sanctuaries for learning.

For my sons, Memorial Day 2011

God Bless America blared from the flag waving Harley as boy scouts, soon to be men, marched between white lines. Memorial Day, a national glance inward to mourn the lives mangled and lost ‘serving’ freedom and civic liberty. I almost wept, not out of patriotic duty and honor but for the deep feeling of shame and betrayal that this and past pageants endure.

While I honor the ultimate sacrifice brothers and sisters have made through the ages, some urgent, some heroic and necessary, so many lives, however, have been mangled for reasons – that had they known – they would have wept too.

In the spring of 2010 a small group, including the editor of Joe’s latest book and David B. Chamberlain, PhD, a leader in the field of prenatal intelligence and memory, gathered in Ojai California to explore with Joseph Chilton Pearce his Collected Works.

Throughout his life Joe shunned speaking about himself. For the first time, with this close group, Joe explored what was happening in his life and life around him as he wrote each of his major publications beginning with Crack in the Cosmic Egg.

A long time colleague, Kali Woodward, Director at American Youth Literacy Foundation, sent a link to a New York Times article - The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers. The article describes a Harvard study following 12,000 kindergartners for twenty five years and confirms, as many other studies do the long-term impact of early experiences, in this case the value of good a Kindergarten teacher.

The first rung on the ladder holds up the rest. The very early stages of human development provide the foundation for all that follow. As is our habit and social conditioning the research paper focused on Kindergarten Teachers and concluded that the impact of a ‘good one’ translated into lifelong learning and earning potential (in children and therefore long term economic impact) valued at $320,000/year.