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What are you teaching your children? Probably not what you think, a new study suggests. And in many cases, maybe not much at all.
Babies learn words for things they find interesting, not necessarily for what you find interesting.
The study has implications for education in general, says researcher Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University. She worries that U.S. education is increasingly about memorizing things for standardized tests. How many of those SAT words that you crammed for in high school do you remember now, she asked me. I said I barely remember taking the SAT.
Hirsh-Pasek thinks education should be based much more on the interests of the learners. Psychology is her passion, and she said she’s always had a relative lack of interest in human biology, how the parts fit together. But last week she visited Body Worlds, a display of human corpses in creative poses revealing muscles, bones and all that.
“It blew me away,” she told me. “All of a sudden, biology was so interesting.”
So again: What are you teaching your children?
March 22nd, 2006 at 9:57 am
Having seen the Body Worlds exhibit for myself, about a month ago in Toronto, I’d have to agree wholeheartedly with Kathy Hirsch-Pasek. No matter how comprehensive today’s anatomy textbooks can be, nothing beats the in-your-face visual of a REAL human body, inner workings and all, on display.
The best example: a bit I omitted in my article on the topic was the table featuring actual “slices” of a man who was morbidly obese, and presumably died of this condition. The hardened cross-sections (picture cutting someone in half and looking at them from the side), some several inches thick, featured his massive folds and flabs in all their (un)glory. His internal organs were tiny by comparison and struggled under the weight of his, well, weight. It was disturbing and fascinating all at once, and I could think of no better way to warn people about the dangers of obesity. Let’s just say that no one in my gang, all of us healthy and thin, was up for a burger afterwards.