endangered minds

John Deal sent me a message about a book he is reading by Jane Healy called Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think and What We Can Do About It. Jane is also the author of a book about computing and education called Failure to Connect, which is a classic. The following is a quote from Endangered Minds:

"visual stimulation is probably not the main access route to nonverbal reasoning, Body movements, the ability to touch, feel, manipulate, and build sensory awareness of relationships in the physical world, are its main foundations." She says further, "in schools, traditionally, the senses
have had little status after kindergarten."

Now kindergarten is being undermined by the unreasonable emphasis placed on early reading. It as though all the wisdom of hundreds of years of pedagogy have been discarded in favor of technology and testing.