… Primary-level education has always been, and still is, far and away the highest standard of teaching and learning in British education. The challenge, and the ultimate reason for current levels of illiteracy and innumeracy, lies in both what is happening before these children arrive in primary schools, and the support given to teachers on their arrival.

In the UK we have removed the stick from the classroom, a decision I whole-heartedly support. In decades gone by, however, this stick was the only way to keep in check the unruly minority, and to allow teachers to deliver learning to the majority. If you add to this equation the total lack of support provided to parents before children arrive in school, you have a perfect recipe for our country’s current literacy problems.

Primary-school teachers will continue to face the thankless task of attempting to engage unengageable pupils. The government must address both the parenting and early-years issues seriously; it must replace the missing stick with enough carrot to compensate.

Dare I suggest that the carrot might just be to teach our children how to learn, opening every child’s eyes to the potential and infinite capability of their brain, building confidence and self-esteem? This must start with early-years development…

Source: Guardian Unlimited
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2154239,00.html

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) said too many pupils leave school unable to turn up to work on time or dress smartly and lacking good communication skills. And the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) demanded urgent reforms to secondary education…

FSB education chairman Colin Willman said firms were looking to hire migrant workers who were better prepared for work. “The secondary school system is not producing enough 16-year-olds that can hit the ground running on their first day in the world of work,” he said. “The skills that businesses need from school leavers are literacy, numeracy, punctuality, communication skills and an ability to be well-presented. This allows them to contribute immediately as they start their new job…

Meanwhile, the BCC surveyed 300 businesses and found that 61% thought the education system was failing to produce individuals with an adequate grounding in the skills needed for work. The survey found 57% of businesses did not think the quality of school leavers had improved over the last five years.

David Frost, director general of the BCC, said: “It is nothing short of a national scandal that so many school leavers neither have the qualifications or the aptitude to enter the workforce. We have to ask, what can be done to reform the education system so that a generation of teenagers do not end up left behind with no experience of the world of work? …

Source: Guardian Unlimited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-6869688,00.html

UK researchers have provided an explanation for why some children hate to try new foods — it’s in the genes.

In a large study of twins, which included both identical and fraternal twin pairs, Dr. Lucy J. Cooke of University College London and her colleagues found that nearly 80 percent of children’s tendency to avoid unfamiliar foods was inherited.

“Parents can be reassured that their child’s reluctance to try new foods is not simply the result of poor parental feeding practices, but it is partly in the genes,” Cooke and her team write. And, they add, repeatedly offering foods to children can make the foods more familiar, and eventually even liked.

Both humans and other animals show a reluctance to try new foods, known scientifically as “food neophobia.” This avoidance may have had an evolutionary advantage in preventing exposure to potentially toxic foods, the researchers note in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. “In the modern environment where foods are generally safe to eat, neophobia appears principally to have an adverse effect on food choices, particularly on intake of foods and vegetables,” they say…

Past studies of other behavioral similarities among family members have also found they are strongly influenced by genes and “surprisingly little” by the shared environment, Cooke and her colleagues note.

But these findings do not mean that parenting is unimportant in these behaviors. It’s more likely, they add, that parents treat children differently, possibly because they sense differences in their needs, or that more genetically different children experience the same situation differently…

Source: Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSKIM16188320070821

Young Chinese families are trying to give their kids an early start in the ultra-competitive process of education: By starting lessons in the womb.

Pregnant women are talking to their unborn babies, and even playing Mozart music, to their bellies in an effort to help their child get a headstart on education and an edge in intelligence.

According to heath experts, the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practice, taijiao, has re-emerged as a trendy way for the new generation of urban mothers.

Taijiao, or fetal education, is designed to boost the mood of mothers-to-be in a bid to ensure a smooth pregnancy and a healthy, intelligent child…

According to M.K. Chin, a nurse-midwife who has delivered more than 3,000 babies, she has seen more expectant mothers take up taijiao in the past five years and says its is beneficial.

However she says no amount of taijiao is as effective as mother-child bonding after birth and says breastfeeding is a far more positive choice for a child’s intelligence than taijiao.

Source: People’s Daily Online, China
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/6245116.html

Alternative treatments for autism - some of them potentially deadly - are growing more pervasive and run the gamut from dietary supplements to prescribing a potentially dangerous diabetes drug, which now carries the government’s most stringent warning.

“What this all boils down to is that people are very motivated to help their children. They’re desperate and there are people out there who are preying on their desperation,” said James Mulick, a professor of pediatrics and psychology at Ohio State University. Autism is an incurable neurodevelopmental disorder usually diagnosed in early childhood and marked by language and communication deficits and withdrawal from social contact.

Mulick cited diets, such as those in which the wheat protein gluten is eliminated, to the use of vitamin supplements as some of the harmless but he believes ineffective treatments sought by parents of autistic children.

Chelation therapy, Mulick said, is a potentially dangerous process that uses a compound that is supposed to remove heavy metals from children’s tissues. Many parents believe mercury contained in routine vaccines is the cause of autism. A 5-year-old Pittsburgh boy with autism died in 2005 after undergoing chelation therapy, according to news accounts…

Source: Newsday, NY
http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-hsauti215340114aug21,0,7750405.story

A study recently released by the University of Washington (Journal of Pediatrics, September 2007) suggests that infants who are exposed to “smart baby” DVDs and videos to promote early childhood language development actually have a lower vocabulary than children who hear stories and have books read to them. Vocabulary and letter recognition at an early age are essential building blocks for reading. Librarians and early childhood educators have long advocated that infants and toddlers be introduced to books, stories and alphabet games, not on television but in person, in the home or library.

At the Chicago Public Library, we recommend that parents and caregivers start reading to children at birth, and the library provides books, educational tools and lapsit storytimes free of charge to help reinforce that message. Twenty-five percent of a child’s brain is formed at birth and from that moment on, talking, singing and reading aloud to the child develops the remaining 75 percent. Without a foundation in books and letters, children start formal schooling already behind their peers and struggle to catch up.

Read to your child for as little as 20 minutes a day every day, and your child will enter preschool and kindergarten ready to read…

Source: Chicago Daily Southtown
http://www.dailysouthtown.com/news/opinion/letters/517160,201LTR2.article

While debates rage over how to teach math, kids aren’t learning and teachers are struggling. In spite of valiant efforts on the part of Washington educators, too many students are underperforming on the WASL, SAT and other national tests…

Teacher preparation in math education needs a new direction if we are to ready our children for the challenges of life in the new century. Students need to know how to solve problems using the conceptual framework of mathematics and scientific inquiry. They need math teachers who can show them how.

Leaders need to work together to solve three problems in order to produce enough qualified math teachers: the so-called math wars, math phobia and math teacher funding.

State curriculum leaders must step out of the paralyzing impasse of opposing philosophies about how to teach math. On one side are those who say students need basic math skills, including memorizing formulas and practicing drills. Their opponents say students need to understand the concepts underlying mathematical reasoning, an approach that emphasizes real-world story problems. Curriculum leaders must close the gap between memorizing an abstract mathematical formula and solving the same problem in a real setting. For students to learn math and be able to use it for their lives, they need both high-level skills and problem-solving knowledge learned in a hands-on setting…

Source: Seattle Post Intelligencer
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/328343_mathwars21.html

Women’s fondness for the colour pink is so deeply embedded that it may have been shaped by evolutionary history, according to scientists whose study of colour preferences is published today.

Rather than marking a girlie approach to home decoration or cake-icing, the trait’s roots are more likely to lie in the struggle to find food in hunter-gatherer days, the researchers suggested.

Prehistoric women who zeroed in on red-coloured fruit would have been the star equivalents of male animal-slayers, according to two British neuroscientists, who have found a consistent liking for pink in surveys of women volunteers.

Although blue was by far the most popular “simple” colour among men and women, the study showed a striking difference in the sexes when follow-up experiments tested reactions to blends.

“We expected to find gender differences, but we were surprised at how robust they were,” said Anya Hurlbert, professor of visual neuroscience at Newcastle University. “They appear to give biological and not simply cultural substance to the old saying: pink for a girl and blue for a boy.” …

Chinese participants were tested for possible cultural differences in colour preference, but their results were in line with the overall findings. The theory is encouraging for Barbie enthusiasts, who have seen the doll attacked for her “anti-feminist” pink clothes and decor…

Source: Guardian Unlimited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/aug/21/sciencenews.fashion

A lack of spousal support is an impediment to career success

Now that women have solidly earned their place in the work force, many find themselves still yearning for something men often have: wives.

“The thing I most want in life is a wife. I’m not kidding,” said Joyce Lustbader, a research scientist at Columbia University, who has been married for 29 years. “I work all day, sometimes seven days a week, and still have to go home and make dinner and have all those things to do around the house.”

It is not just the extra shift at home that is a common complaint. Working women, whether married or single, also see their lack of devoted spousal support as an impediment to getting ahead in their careers, especially when they are competing against men who have wives behind them, whether those wives are working or staying at home. And research supports their argument: It appears that marriage, at least marriage with children, bolsters a man’s career but hinders a woman’s.

One specialist in women’s studies dismissed wife envy as something women “are usually joking about” and another called it “a need for a second set of hands, regardless of gender.” But therapists who work with couples on equality issues say it is no joke…

According to 2006 survey data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in five men engages in some kind of housework on an average day, while more than half of women do…

The argument is made, even by feminists, that an unmarried man might face the same challenges and wife-envy as does a woman without a non-working spouse to support her life and career. But a common response is that the situations are not the same, because of individual and societal expectations that tend disproportionately to pressure women…

Source: Seattle Post Intelligencer
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/328212_womenwives20.html

It’s called the “word spurt,” that magical time when a toddler’s vocabulary explodes, seemingly overnight.

New research offers a decidedly un-magical explanation: Babies start really jabbering after they’ve mastered enough easy words to tackle more of the harder ones. It’s essentially a snowball effect.

That explanation, published in the journal Science in early August, is far simpler than scientists’ assumptions that some special brain mechanisms must click to trigger the word boom.

Instead, University of Iowa psychology professor Bob McMurray contends that what astonishes parents is actually the fairly guaranteed outcome of a lot of under-the-radar work by tots as they start their journey to learn 60,000 words by adulthood.

If McMurray is right, it could have implications for parents bombarded with technology gimmicks that claim to boost language.

He thinks simply talking and reading to a child a lot is the key.

“Children are soaking up everything,” he said. “You might use ’serendipity’ to a child. It will take that child maybe hundreds of exposures, or thousands, to learn what ’serendipity’ means. So why not start early?”

Sometime before the first birthday comes that first word, perhaps “mama.” A month or so later comes “da-da.” Now, it may seem like it took the baby almost a year to learn the first word and a month to learn the second. Not so. He’d been working on both the whole time, something scientists call parallel learning.

Up to age 14 months, on average — and how soon kids speak is hugely variable — words pop out here and there. Then comes an acceleration, and after they can say 50 or so words there’s often a language explosion, sometime around 18 months, McMurray says…

Consider: Scientists know children learn through the process of elimination. If Mom asks, “Please pass me the plate,” and the child sees a fork, a spoon and some round thing, by age 2 most will match the new word to the unknown object.

That fits with McMurray’s model. As you acquire many words, the process of elimination for new ones becomes easier so that vocabulary accelerates…

Source: Orangeburg Times Democrat
http://tinyurl.com/2frp6q