Cultivating Genius in the 21st Century | Wired Magazine. Illustration: Bartholomew Cooke Most economic growth has a very simple source: new ideas. It is our creativity that generates wealth. So how can we increase the pace of innovation? Is it possible to inspire more Picassos and Steve Jobses? The answer to that question is hidden in history books. Several years ago, statistician David Banks wrote a short paper on what he called the problem of excess genius: It turns out that human geniuses aren’t scattered randomly across time and space. What causes such outpourings of creativity? And yet it’s not a total mystery: We can begin to make sense of the “clotting” of creative talent. The first pattern that becomes clear is the benefit of human mixing. Another recurring theme is the importance of education. The last meta-idea involves the development of institutions that encourage risk-taking. This might seem like an impossibly ambitious agenda.
We’ve never needed geniuses more than we do now. Wendy Kopp: The Trouble With Humiliating Teachers. Survey: Teacher Job Satisfaction Hits a Low Point. Does Preschool Matter? | Wired Science. For many kids, the most important years of schooling come before they can even read. Consider the groundbreaking work of the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, who has repeatedly documented the power of early childhood education. One of his best case studies is the Perry Preschool Experiment, which looked at 123 low-income African-American children from Yspilanti, Michigan. (All the children had IQ scores between 75 and 85.) When the children were three years old, they were randomly assigned to either a treatment group, and given a high-quality preschool education, or to a control group, which received no preschool education at all.
The subjects were then tracked over the ensuing decades, with the most recent analysis comparing the groups at the age of 40. Why is preschool so important? The answer is obvious: The young mind is wonderfully malleable, able to develop new habits with relative ease. His main finding might, at first glance, seem somewhat paradoxical. Browse: Subject Area: Social Sciences.
Www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/hss/final.pdf. SnappSchool. A startup called SnappSchool is compiling a weekly rundown of the Kindergarten to 6th-grade math curriculum — for parents. The idea is that if parents understand more about what and how their children are learning, they can better support their children's education. Each digest contains a "quick refresher" about the topic, links to further resources and exercises, and a link to a news story or other information that connects the topic to the real world. SnappSchool hires certified teachers to write the digests, and they're based on Common Core Standards that all but five states use. Because the emails are not coordinated by your children's specific teachers, however, they might be paced slightly ahead or behind their actual classroom lessons. Parents simply sign up for the appropriate grade level to receive emails each week. The service is free for three weeks and then costs $7.99 to continue the year.
There are legs to the startup's theory that more-involved parents beget better students. Susan Cain: The power of introverts. MindSnacks Turns Learning a Language Into a Game. Piggybackr. Teaching Channel: Videos, Lesson Plans and Other Resources for Teachers. Santorum flunks the history of home-schooling - Education. At the Republican debate Wednesday night, Rick Santorum repeated a claim he’s been making, that the federal government, and the state governments, should “get out of the education business.” Last weekend, Santorum declared public education “anachronistic.” If elected, he would home-school his children in the White House, just like – he claimed – most presidents did in the first 150 years of our national life. “Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America?” He asked.
“Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.” The presidential candidate suggested that America should look to its 19th-century educational system to prepare this generation to meet 21st-century problems. The fraudulence of almost every single one of these claims makes Santorum himself a cautionary example of the failures of the American education system. Martin Van Buren’s son Abraham attended the U.S. Ulysses S. Resource Library - Gooru.