Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children

by Roberta Michnick Golinkoff

Learning scientists have not given up. In 2004, the National Science Foundation began a project called the Science of Learning Centers that would fund applied research capable of moving learning science from the lab to our schools and to our living rooms. An army of scientists is involved, collecting evidence about how children learn best—about how brains process the written word, about how spatial skills like map reading feed into mathematical learning, and about how the inability to stop yourself from making impulsive decisions can impair learning. Those of us who study how kids learn in high-tech worlds with avatars and in low-tech environments like parks have much to share with the learning industry. And, most important for our economy and our children’s future, the findings that flow from our work are completely consistent with the needs expressed by the business community. But our education right now—the education brought to us by the learning industry—could not be further from this vision. With scripted texts, many teachers—despite their concerns—must be on page 3 on Tuesday and page 6 by Wednesday. The irony of the press to test pushed by the learning industry is that we are not educating but eradicating our future. One of our most prized (and lamentable) examples of this problem is that of the young Teach for America volunteer we knew who had been placed in the Philadelphia school system and called us to lament the fact that she had been asked to teach adjectives....