Sharp sums in the head aim at blunting the impact of TV
A daily dose of mental arithmetic has been placed
on the curriculum for primary and even nursery schools in France, under a
government scheme to sharpen young minds dulled by television.
A daily dose of mental arithmetic has been placed on the curriculum for primary and even nursery schools in France, under a government scheme to sharpen young minds dulled by television.
Gilles de Robien, the Education Minister, has ordered children to carry out between 15 and 20 minutes of calcul mental every day from the age of 5, when they are in the final year of nursery school, as part of a back-to-basics programme.
He also wants five-year-olds to resume the study of multiplication and division, as well as addition and subtraction, for the first time since the 1970s.
Pierre Léna, education delegate at the academy, pinned responsibility for the decline on pupils rather than teachers. “With children watching more than three hours of television a day there is a real problem of attention span and the mobilisation of memories,” he said. “Their memories are more cluttered up than they were 50 years ago.”
Only part of the problem, perhaps; but, probably a useful approach to teaching children how to think — once again.
So, what would happen if we tried to introduce something this "radical" here in the U.S.?
Posted: Thu - January 25, 2007 at 07:07 AM