Group items tagged

Stories,

stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

nterprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive.

the RRSG theory of reading comprehension is predominantly cognitive rather than cultural. It depicts the text as an encoded representation of a specific situation.

Making and having meaning, then, transcend cognition and involve a commitment to values and the pursuit of ideals.

These moral qualities are essential to human life, yet they seem to be completely redundant in the case of the aforementioned reader of “the cat is on the mat.”

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

To date, education research shows that good teachers matter a lot, class size may be less important than once thought and nothing improves student performance as much as one-on-one human tutoring.

The potential benefits of technology are greater as students become older, more independent learners. Making that point, Mr. Gates said in an interview that for children from kindergarten to about fifth grade “the idea that you stick them in front of a computer is ludicrous.”

Egypt, where the Mubarak regime today reportedly shut down Internet and cell phone communications -- a troubling predictor of the fierce crackdown that has followed.

The tools that connect, organize and empower protesters can also be used to hunt them down.

Narus provides Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway.

Socialism, until recently, was supposed to connote political democracy, social equality and internationalism. There is not the smallest sign that any of these things is in a way to being established anywhere, and the one great country in which something described as a proletarian revolution once happened, i.e. the USSR, has moved steadily away from the old concept of a free and equal society aiming at universal human brotherhood. In an almost unbroken progress since the early days of the Revolution, liberty has been chipped away and representative institutions smothered, while inequalities have increased and nationalism and militarism have grown stronger. But at the same time, Burnham insists, there has been no tendency to return to capitalism. What is happening is simply the growth of "managerialism", which, according to Burnham, is in progress everywhere, though the manner in which it comes about may vary from country to country.

Burnham does not deny that "good" motives may operate in private life, but he maintains that politics consists of the struggle for power, and nothing else.

Lenin, indeed, is one of those politicians who win an undeserved reputation by dying prematurely.

Why is a second grader "comparing and contrasting"? Because the Common Core is designed to preserve education as a self-contained hazing ritual for wealth and power maintenance. From the start we are preparing students to write the worthless five paragraph essay, so that those who comply best succeed best.

It is, of course, within those "extras" that the human spirit lies. Why learn to read if you cannot read about the things which matter most to you? Why learn to write if you can not write a song? Why learn to count if you do not appreciate the value of what you are counting?

The reason we must abandon "core subjects" and embrace Passion-Based Learning is that today we give students absolutely no reason to learn anything. We have turned school into a series of chores with no purpose. Eight-year-olds hate books and reading because they've spent three years drilling in decoding - literacy is pointless effort, not a path to passions. Sixteen-year-olds hate mathematics because they've spent eleven years drilling with numbers, x-s and y-s - maths are totally irrelevant, not a link to a magical world of real and virtual construction.

“For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”