Many expectant parents, pregnant women, and excited family members have joined the bandwagon of buying educational baby audio and video CD’s/DVD’s. The purchase is made in the hopes of enriching the learning experience of kids as early as it’s conceiving and until the baby becomes a toddler. Now recent studies have shown that while the intention of most parents and families is admirable, this practice might be doing more harm than good. Read on and find out why.

How Not to Raise a Genius
By ALICE PARK
Thursday, Aug. 16, 2007

There are no shortcuts when it comes to learning, and that applies to becoming a prodigy as well. Popular videos such as the Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby series have attracted millions of parents eager to give their babies an intellectual leg up.

But a recent study shows that these products may be doing more harm than good. Experts at the University of Washington reported early in August that for every hour each day that infants watched the kaleidoscope of changing images and music on these DVDs, they understood an average of seven fewer words than babies who did not use such products. “The assumption is that stimulation is good, so more is better,” says Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician and co-author of the study. “But all the research to date shows there is no such benefit.”

That’s hardly reassuring to parents who last year spent $200 million on the Baby Einstein series. They might consider instead the advice of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends that infants under 2 not watch anything on a screen and just interact with their parents.

For the full resource of the article, please click here.

Read this insightful article written by John Cloud for Time Magazine on 16 August 2007. As you proceed to read the article, pose yourself these questions: does the government make room in the academe for gifted students? Can the new education system still make room for a few more Einsteins? Or are rules simply designed to accommodate the majority, making the rare jewels of the populace fend for themselves and hope for the best?

Are We Failing Our Geniuses?
by John Cloud

Any sensible culture would know what to do with Annalisee Brasil. The 14-year-old not only has the looks of a South American model but is also one of the brightest kids of her generation.

When Annalisee was 3, her mother Angi Brasil noticed that she was stringing together word cards composed not simply into short phrases but into complete, grammatically correct sentences.

After the girl turned 6, her mother took her for an IQ test. Annalisee found the exercises so easy that she played jokes on the testers–in one case she not only put blocks in the correct order but did it backward too. Angi doesn’t want her daughter’s IQ published, but it is comfortably above 145, placing the girl in the top 0.1% of the population.

Annalisee is also a gifted singer: last year, although just 13, she won a regional high school competition conducted by the National Association of Teachers of Singing.

Annalisee should be the star pupil at a school in her hometown of Longview, Texas. While it would be too much to ask for a smart kid to be popular too, Annalisee is witty and pretty, and it’s easy to imagine she would get along well at school.

But until last year, Annalisee’s parents–Angi, a 53-year-old university assistant, and Marcelo, 63, who recently retired from his job at a Caterpillar dealership–couldn’t find a school willing to take their daughter unless she enrolled with her age-mates. None of the schools in Longview–and even as far away as the Dallas area–were willing to let Annalisee skip more than two grades. She needed to skip at least three–she was doing sixth-grade work at age 7.

Many school systems are wary of grade skipping even though research shows that it usually works well both academically and socially for gifted students–and that holding them back can lead to isolation and underachievement. So Angi home schooled Annalisee.

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Soledad O’Brien, a special correspondent for CNN: Special Investigations Unit, wrote about Drew Gilpin Faust on the annual list of TIME magazine on ‘The 100 People Who Shape Our World’ (2007). Read on to hear what she has to say about how Faust’s presence is redefining the face of the Ivy League academe.

“I come from a Harvard family—no, there’s no O’Brien Library, but every kid in my family (there are six of us) got a degree from Harvard College or Harvard Law School or Harvard Medical School.

Credits.

The school will teach girls to be the best human beings they can ever be; it will train them to become decision-makers and leaders; it will be a model school for the rest of the world.

— Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey dreamt of building a first-class school to nurture, educate and turn gifted South African girls from impoverished backgrounds into the country’s future leaders. Now, the school welcomes the first two classes of students - 7th and 8th grade.

Their Mission

The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls - South Africa supports the development of a new generation of women leaders who, by virtue of their education and leadership, will lead the charge to positively transform themselves, their communities and the larger world around them.

To accomplish this goal, the Academy provides a rigorous and supportive educational environment for academically talented girls who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

The History

During a December 2000 visit with Nelson Mandela, Oprah Winfrey pledged to build a school for girls in South Africa. Two years later, on 6 December 2002, Mr. Mandela and then Minister of Education Professor Kader Asmal joined Ms. Winfrey to break ground on the site of the Academy, located in Henley on Klip in Gauteng province.

On 2 January 2007, the Academy officially opened with 7th and 8th grade girls. The Academy will grow by one grade each year until it reaches full capacity in 2011, with approximately 450 girls in grades 7 through 12.

Answering Criticisms

Winfrey speculates, “I perhaps will get criticism about, ‘Why didn’t you do this for children in America?’ “

Her reply: “Because we have a school system in America. … There’s no 12-year-old girl in America that you’re going to find crying because this is the last year for her education because nobody can afford to send her to school. You want to give the gift to the person who’s going to love it the most.”

Winfrey says candidly that when she has tried to help kids in the US but she has failed.

Attempting to mentor a group of girls from her adopted hometown of Chicago, “I took them on ski trips, we had etiquette classes … you’d teach them how to do their makeup, we’d read and talk about books. And when they went home, they were criticized and beat up because their families said, ‘Who do you think you are?’ “.

The failure taught her “You can’t just give people money, new homes, new stuff and think that you’re giving them a new life.”

Interview Resource.
School Literature.

What do you think are the views of our great social icons regarding the importance of education? Well, read on and learn a bit or two straight from their brilliant minds. Who knows, maybe if you take their advice serious enough, you might just be the next heir to their fame.

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
~ Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela is the first black President of South Africa to be elected in fully representative democratic elections. Mandela has received many South African, foreign and international honors, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, the Order of Merit and the Order of St. John from Queen Elizabeth II and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush.

“By education I mean that training in excellence from youth upward which makes a man passionately desire to be a perfect citizen, and teaches him to rule, and to obey, with justice. This is the only education which deserves the name.”
~ Plato

Plato was a Classical Greek philosopher. Together with his teacher, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the philosophical foundations of Western culture. Plato was also a mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world.

“Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.”
~ John Fitzgerald Kennedy

John Fitzgerald Kennedy aka JFK was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. The charismatic President’s wife is fashion icon Jacqueline Lee Bouvier who has later become known as Jackie O. The couple is icons of the modern US civilization.

“We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, poet, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement in the early nineteenth century. He is the son of the Rev. William Emerson, who is also a Unitarian minister in a famous line of ministers. He gave the speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which is considered to be America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

“Education makes a greater difference between man and man than nature has made between man and brute.”
~ John Adams

John Adams, Jr. was the second President of the United States (1797–1801) and he was the first President to reside in the newly built White House in Washington, D.C., when it was completed in 1800. Adams also served as America’s first Vice President (1789–1797).  John Adams is famed as a sponsor of the American Revolution in Massachusetts, was a driving force for independence in 1776; Thomas Jefferson called him the “Colossus of Independence”.

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically… Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.”
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement. In 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other non-violent means.

“Knowledge without education is but armed injustice.”
~ Horace

Horace is generally considered by classicists to be one of the greatest Latin poets. He was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus.

“Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not a preparation for life but is life itself.”
~ John Dewey

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, whose thoughts and ideas have been greatly influential in the United States and around the world. He, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophical school of Pragmatism. He is also known as the father of functional psychology and he was a leading representative of the progressive movement in U.S. schooling during the first half of the 20th century.

“All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.”
~ Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He was one of the first to systematize philosophy and science. It is the opinion of many that Aristotle’s system of thought remains the most influential one ever put together by any single mind. According to historian Will Durant, no other philosopher has contributed so much to the enlightenment of the world. He single-handedly founded the sciences of Logic, Biology and Psychology. Aristotle is referred to as “The Philosopher” by Scholastic thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas.

“Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”
~ Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a German born theoretical physicist. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E = mc2. Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” In 1999 Einstein was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Century”, and a poll of prominent physicists named him the greatest physicist of all time.

The unending press releases, that A-levels schools have already dumbed down, are seriously damaging the confidence of the public in the system. This is a report advised by Simon Lebus, who is the head of qualifications department at Cambridge University.

Lebus want to have an open debate about demands to sustain exam standards while making qualifications more flexible. He also opened the idea of creating a new exams regulator, if more alternatives to A-levels are proposed. Lebus says is has already been difficult to pinpoint exactly what has happened about the whole issue of standards; nonetheless, it has been notoriously complex, not to mention technically challenging.

Starting next year, ministers are introducing 17 new diploma types, which could eventually replace A-levels GCSEs as the ‘qualification of choice’. There will also be wider use of the International Baccalaureate, which will mean the introduction of significant scopes of confusion as to how the qualifications compare.

Full and original source of the story.

Schoolfriend etc, a charity who works in cooperation with schools in England and Wales, reported that there are 150 clubs are threatened with closure. The after-school clubs in deprived area are now closing down, while middle class areas continue to benefit and enjoy their extra curricular educational facilities.

Fewer parents can now afford to pay the fees, as needed by their children to sustain the after-school program. In deprived areas, 50 pence is considered too expensive or unnecessary by most parents according to Stephen Argent who is the Chief executive of Schoolfriend etc.

By 2010, the UK government aims to have all of England’s school to offer a range of clubs in its extended schools program. The government describes the after-school programs to the teachers as a ‘key vehicle’ for delivering its original objective which is to lift children out of poverty.

Full source of the story here.

In Portland, Maine, education officials have implemented a possible answer to unplanned pregnancies among middle school girls: making birth control pills available to girls as young as 11 years old.

Since condoms have been available since the year of 2000 at King’s health center, King Middle School will be the first middle school in Maine to offer a full range of contraceptives (including birth control pills and patches).

Students still need parental permission in order to gain access to the school’s health center. However, treatment is strictly confidential under state law. Meaning, it is still upon the students whether they would be informing their parents regarding the services that they are receiving.

According to Divya Mohan, spokeswoman of National Assembly on School-Based Health Care, it is very rare for a middle school to implement a birth control campaign such as this. But then again Portland’s three middle schools have already reported 17 unplanned pregnancies during the last four years and this is excluding those which are miscarried are terminated during the course of pregnancy, without the knowledge of the school nurse.

According to school official Richard Veilleux, this is not to encourage kids to have sex but rather, this is about kids who are engaging in sexually activity and those are two entirely different things.

What do you think?

Full source of the story here.

Still unbeatable hoop legend Michael Jordan accompanies his son, Jeff Jordan, to his first game with the University of Illinois basketball team. He is freshman player No. 13 and with a father like his, it is not easy to stay in the background.

Michael Jordan, 44, is said to have always taught his kid to set his own expectations, and if he is happy, that’s all that really matters. Jordan said to his little player that he’s never going to make everybody and he has to be his own person, by enjoying his life in whichever field he chooses to venture into. Jordan always lets his son know that whether he’s going to be a basketball player, doctor, lawyer, or whoever, he will always be there to support him all the way. What a good father and son relationship, eh?

Everybody can all learn from the education advice that Michael Jordan has told his son. Every parent should make it a point to let their kids know that what’s really important in choosing the career that they want is not peer pressure or living up to expectations. Education should be fun and not something that will make life difficult. If you’re parents are legendary artists, basketball players, or multi awarded engineers, it doesn’t mean that you would have to follow the same path that they have been to. True enough, Jordan says you just have to be your own person and education should be a pleasant ride.

Original and full source of the story.

Here are some countries which uses the term ‘Ministry of Education’ as a government department:

Austria
Canada
People’s Republic of China
Netherlands
Egypt
Ethiopia
Germany
Finland
France
Greece
India
Iraq
Ireland
Israel
Japan
Kenya
Republic of Korea
Lebanon
Malaysia
Norway
New Zealand
Ontario, Canada
Peru
Poland
Russia
Saint Lucia
Saudi Arabia
Serbia
Singapore
Sri Lanka
Sweden
United Kingdom
Zimbabwe