Education psychologist Gerald Coles reports that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg plan to fund neurological research to find out why poor children’s brains aren’t working well enough to produce higher test scores.
Coles writes:
“Why are many poor children not learning and succeeding in school? For billionaire Bill Gates, who funded the start-up of the failed Common Core Curriculum Standards, and has been bankrolling the failing charter schools movement, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s time to look for another answer, this one at the neurological level. Poor children’s malfunctioning brains, particularly their brains’ “executive functioning”–that is, the brain’s working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control–must be the reason why their academic performance isn’t better.
“Proposing to fund research on the issue, the billionaires reason that not only can executive malfunctioning cause substantial classroom learning problems and school failure, it also can adversely affect socio-economic status, physical health, drug problems, and criminal convictions in adulthood. Consequently, if teachers of poor students know how to improve executive function, their students will do well academically and reap future “real-world benefits.” For Gates, who is always looking for “the next big thing,” this can be it in education.
“Most people looking at this reasoning would likely think, “If executive functioning is poorer in poor children, why not eliminate the apparent cause of the deficiency, i.e., poverty?” Not so for the billionaires. For them, the “adverse life situations” of poor students are the can’t-be-changed-givens. Neither can instructional conditions that cost more money provide an answer. For example, considerable research on small class size teaching has demonstrated its substantially positive academic benefits, especially for poor children, from grammar school through high school and college. Gates claims to know about this instructional reform, but money-minded as he is, he insists these findings amount to nothing more than a “belief” whose worst impact has been to drive “school budget increases for more than 50 years.”
“Cash–rather, the lack of it–that’s the issue: “You can’t fund reforms without money and there is no more money,” he insists. Of course, nowhere in Gates’ rebuke of excessive school spending does he mention corporate tax dodging of state income taxes, which robs schools of billions of dollars. Microsoft, for example, in which Gates continues to play a prominent role as “founder and technology advisor” on the company’s Board of Directors would provide almost $29.6 billion in taxes that could fund schools were its billions stashed offshore repatriated.
“In a detailed example of Microsoft’s calculated tax scheming and dodging that would provide material for a good classroom geography lesson, Seattle Times reporter, Matt Day, outlined one of the transcontinental routes taken by a dollar spent for a Microsoft product in Seattle. Immediately after the purchase, the dollar takes a short trip to Microsoft’s company headquarters in nearby Redmond, Washington, after which it moves to a Microsoft sales subsidiary in Nevada. Following a brief rest, the dollar breathlessly zigzags from one offshore tax haven to another, finally arriving in sunny Bermuda where it joins $108 billion of Microsoft’s other dollars. Zuckerberg’s Facebook has similarly kept its earnings away from U.S. school budgets.”
Look up Melina Uncapher at UCSF. She and Adam Gazelley are developing digital medical treatment protocols. She has a grant to map the executive function of 1,000 elementary students in Santa Clara, CA using video games. In the third year of her study, the plan is to “fix” those kids. This is true. Gazzelly has spun off a for-profit company Akili that just finished trials at Duke for a prescription pediatric ADHD video game treatment. The head of the MIT Media Lab is on the board of PureTech Health, primary investor in Akili. It is going through the FDA now. This is only the tip of the iceberg. https://wrenchinthegears.com/2018/05/05/beware-the-learning-engineers/
“If executive functioning is poorer in poor children, why not eliminate the apparent cause of the deficiency, i.e., poverty?”
Well, it’s circular in ed reform though. The answer to that is “better functioning brains” will eliminate poverty, thereby eliminating the need for any proposals that might be unpopular with the billionaires, like paying higher wages or taxes.
Some rural schools are cutting instruction days because ed reformers have gutted their funding. Ed reformers refer to this as a “phenomenon”, as if it’s an absolute mystery that just appeared out of nowhere.
The absolute last place either Zuckerberg or Gates should be is in the minds of poor kids. Or, well, any kids.
Agree.
Awful as he is, Gates is at least a reasonable facsimile of a human being.
Zuckerberg, on the other hand, still needs a lot of tweaking by his tech crew to come off as anything other than a cyborg, as programmed by Ayn Rand…
Neither can instructional conditions that cost more money provide an answer. For example, considerable research on small class size teaching has demonstrated its substantially positive academic benefits, especially for poor children, from grammar school through high school and college. Gates claims to know about this instructional reform, but money-minded as he is, he insists these findings amount to nothing more than a “belief” whose worst impact has been to drive “school budget increases for more than 50 years.”
This is another area where they’re completely incoherent. They do believe in smaller class sizes. I know this because it’s one of the main selling points they use to market ed tech product.
The idea is teachers will have the half the class working on canned instructional programs, which frees the teacher up to work with smaller groups of students. So they take a class of 40 students and put half of them on a device, thereby making a class of 20 students. Then they switch groups. Read any of the ed tech marketing- it’s endless fluffing but at the core it’s “smaller class sizes”.
This is a small class size. That’s all it is. Tutoring, which the countries with high test scores rely upon and their families pay for out of pocket, is just a REALLY SMALL class size 🙂
There’s so much opportunity cost in ed reform. What if Gates and Zuckerberg had just hired tens of thousands of high quality tutors in lower income schools?
Viola! Smaller class sizes. VERY small class. One student 🙂
They’d also have gotten all the added benefits of person to person interaction, like kids forming relationships with adults. It wouldn’t have been controversial at all. Parents would think it was great and generous and real philanthropy. They could be heroes.
Them again … wish they would just GO AWAY forever. Bill and Mark are reprehensible people who have no clue about education. For them, our young is an endless stream of money.
It’s the lack of background knowledge,stupid. Their brains are fine.
Well, no, their brains are not “fine”. Exposure to chronic poverty and traumatic stress has a demonstrable negative effect on the developing brain. More background knowledge is not going to fix that. Fixing poverty would fix that.
Poverty affects the brains “processing” ability, the ability to use intellegence to process knowledge. If your intellegence is hamstrung and crippled by external factors, especially during the developmental phases of childhood, no amount of knowledge can bypass that. This in part is because acquiring knowledge itself becomes much more problematic. Those internal reasons as well as the economic and time opportunity costs imposed by the external realities of poverty prevent kids from realizing their potential. And, FYI, this is well known to start before birth in many cases. Poor pre-natal care and maternal nutrition + stress really don’t help.
However they come at the problem of educational inequity, they forever do it from their privileged and notably math/tech-oriented understanding of the world, as if they simply cannot conceive of a world different, bigger, wider, more diverse, not privileged, not White, not male, not left-brain dependent….
Ponderosa: thought you were talking about Gates here.
My perspective on this issue comes from working with many black foreign students and being a member of the Student Intervention Team for many years. I have come to the conclusion that all poverty is not equal. Many of my foreign minority students had faced trauma in their native country, and some had issues related to this. However, most of them got through their problems and were able to adjust and do well in school. These students generally had stable, two parent homes. Their mothers prepared good, well balanced meals for them despite poverty. They were taken to the doctor on a regular basis. What they viewed on TV or on-line was parent monitored. These students had a close knit family that they loved and respected, and their parents valued education.
From hearing the histories of many black American students on the SST team, I noticed that their lives were different. The family was often a mother and children, and the mother worked long hours to put food on the table. Some students lived with an elderly grandparent or even a great grandparent that could barely handle the children. The black American students suffered from extreme family dislocation from parent incarcerations and parents with substance abuse problems. These poor young people ate whatever was available, and there was very little supervision. One student went out for bike rides at ten o’clock at night. Teachers noticed that he often fell asleep in class. Many students lived in fragmented families in homes with apparent dysfunction and instability.
Students from unstable homes have a harder time concentrating and focusing in class. The instability and anxiety from their poverty, dysfunction and sometimes trauma left them little energy for academic work.
Your description of issues affecting poor black American students you taught is also apt for kids from poor rural white families I knew in ’50’s upstate-NY — unchanged for similar kids my sister taught there in recent decades. Hardest off were families ravaged by mental illness and addiction.
I was looking for something to smile about this morning. Two of the biggest corrupt individuals in corporate America or going to worry about why poor kids don’t do well in school. Mr. Gates who has done everything to exploit farming in Africa, public schools and Mr. Sell your privacy to the highest bidder, need to leave poor people alone. Keep your money and your tainted feelings of good will for poor people. LEAVE US ALONE, you both have done enough to ruin public education, your not going to do anything about poverty, health care that the GOP have been allowed to destroy. So stop trying to put yourself in some positive light after all that you have done.
Some people can’t see the forest for the trees, and we can’t fault them for that because humans can get fixated and trapped in a sort of cognitive cul du sac. It is possible and common to break free of that after a bit. Then you have those like Gates and Zuck who continually refuse to see the forest for the trees, who insist on imposing the arrogance of their ignorance on the entire forest ecosystem in complete denial of reality itself, even when they fully understand that reality. Gates will spend his wealth reinventing the wheel, he will discover what everyone else already knows about the effects of poverty, and then he will refuse to use the reinvented wheels to build any kind of cart to take kids out of poverty or take poverty out of the equation, insisting instead that they remain seated on his deceased data donkey. Gates is the poster boy for “when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. He is incapable of accepting the fact that some problems are best solved by humans and not by technology. I predict that Gates will find a way to reprise the sales pitch behaviors of his $50 million dollar lie, the MET study, where the conclusions published were unsupported by and in often in complete opposition to what the data actually indicated. My question to you history buffs out there is which of the mad kings in earths history does Gates most resemble? An afterthought: since we already know what Gates will “discover” about the neurology of poverty, it would be a great prank to write his studies conclusion for him now and then release it when he releases his as a giant “WE TOLD YOU SO OVER AND OVER!”
The madness of King Bill!
This is laughable. if Gates, Microsoft, and other billionaires and corporations paid their fair share of taxes there’d be plenty of money for schools, healthcare, infrastructure, etc.
Bingo.
Corporations do not pay taxes. Corporations only collect taxes. The top 1% of American taxpayers (by wealth), paid 39.48% of all federal income taxes, in 2016. see
https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2016-update/
The “rich” are already paying more than their “fair share” of federal/state taxes.
The poverty in the USA is not the fault of the wealthy not paying. The poverty in the USA is the result of many factors:
Fatherlessness. If all unmarried welfare recipients were to marry the father of their offspring, then 1/3 of the spending on welfare could be eliminated.
Education. If lower income people had access to quality education, they could earn more. Crime and drug dealing would decline precipitously.
And on and on.
Oh go away with your long-debunked libertarian garbage. Maybe you want to fight for your right to be abused, but the rest of us are rather tired of being abused. You could better spend the time you spend here by looking for your humanity.
Horace Mann, Common school champion and abolitionist:
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
This data is provided by the Internal Revenue Service, a US government agency, which liberals/progressives put a lot of faith in. It is not libertarian “garbage”.
The “rich” are pushing a lot of money into the US government. If the feds want more money, they are going to have to increase tax collections from people who earn less than the top 1%. That means you and me.
Taxing the 1% at the level during the Eisenhower administration (90%) would be a good place to start. Instead, the GOP Tax Plan just gave them a windfall. Warren Buffet said his company increased by $29 Billion in one day thanks to the tax cut, which he did not ask for.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/24/17048378/warren-buffett-berkshire-hathaway-tax-cuts
Charles, I’m sure the 1% are happy you are looking out for their best interests
Okay, Chuck, then address this: “Education. If lower income people had access to quality education, they could earn more.”
If education = earning more, how come we have hundreds of thousands of un- or underemployed scientists, engineers and other highly educated people?
I’ll give you a hint. Education does not create jobs. As usual with you libertarians, you have your cart and your horse exactly backward (as you also do with the issue of marriage and welfare).
BTW, Chuck, the Tax Foundation is not the IRS. They are an advocacy group with a libertarian agenda.
Be Fair. The DATA is provided by the Internal Revenue Service. The reports can be accessed in the hotlinks in the article, and they are verbatim.
Don’t hold the foundation responsible.
@Diane: Are you seriously advocating a 90% tax rate (for some individuals)?
Yes. It worked during the Ike administration. Inequality is sky-high now.
Or do you think Eisenhower was a Socialist?
@Dienne: I should think that you would appreciate the value of education. Educated people generally earn higher incomes that high-school dropouts. My brother-in-law earned a degree in philosophy and religion. When he graduated college, he went to work in fast-food. He later learned robotics, and he has not been out of work since.
The USA currently has nearly full employment. Of course, there are some people with STEM backgrounds, that are under or unemployed. Education alone, does not guarantee employment.
“Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. ” – Calvin Coolidge
Unemployment exists, when there is a disconnect between the jobs available, and the quality/quantity of candidates to fill these jobs. There are currently worker shortages in the USA (in some career fields).
As for myself, I learned engineering and computer science, using slide rules and punch cards. These are about as useful as stone knives and sling-shots. I have had to keep myself abreast of current technologies, else I would be an unemployed engineer too.
Charles
“Corporations do not pay taxes. Corporations only collect taxes. The top 1% of American taxpayers (by wealth), paid 39.48% of all federal income taxes, in 2016.”
Where do we start with that statement. We could start with; they own 38% of all wealth but that does not tell us much . Except that it is more than the bottom 90% combined . Then we could ask how they manage to do that . Example Bill Gates would still be a rich man; if he was not granted an exclusive monopoly by the US congress. But he would only have a small fraction of his wealth .Go China I am not bothered one bit by the theft of intellectual property rights . I love the Idea of cheaper stuff. There are other ways to fund research. Obviously the concerns of our Tech and Pharma moguls are more important than the 3 million manufacturing jobs that were lost and up to 15 million other jobs when you take onto account the velocity of money. . The point we pick winners and losers . The most anti market concept is patent protection . I don’t hear their elimination on anybodies agenda.
But picking winners and losers is not the whole story; from labor law to trade ……. the system is rigged.. That is a fraction of the story. The figures you cite are for income taxes . But real wealth pays tax on dividends and capital gains not on income .The rate paid on gains is only 20% and only when it is realized not when it is earned . So Bill try as he may, cannot hope to spend but a tiny fraction of his immense wealth. Those gains keep rolling over and building more wealth. You are correct the corporate tax is a pass through and a very low pass through at that . If the effective rate was 13-17% when the corporate rate was 35% . At 22% with no loopholes closed will it be 5% ?. Of course the markets saw this coming and the anticipation of Buy Backs and Dividends probably added 20% to the value of the holdings. Almost all of it owned by the top 10% and within that group most of it by the top 1% and especially the top 1/10th of 1% . Where it builds wealth on top of wealth much of it getting sheltered overseas and passed on generation-ally. . But it is not like the income the average American earns . He does not get paid in gains, dividends or stock options . He pays his taxes on income and then the few that can afford to invest pay again when they cash in earnings on that money . The amount that he can shelter in an IRA or his 401k is very limited ..
So yes the system is rigged and the 1% do not pay their fair share.
their fair
“Be Fair. The DATA is provided by the Internal Revenue Service.”
So next time someone links to a socialist website that uses IRS data, you are going to agree that the data is from the IRS? You’re not going to have any issues with how this website chooses to present the data?
You are so transparent. Again, Chuck, we can assume you are this stupid if you really want us to.
“The US has nearly full employment”.
Again, Chuck, what would you like me to assume about you? That you’re too stupid to know that those figures are massaged and manipulated? That those figures don’t reflect people who have been unemployed so long that they’ve given up? That those figures don’t represent people who have advanced degrees yet work at fast food restaurants and big box stores?
The fact is – and I’m sure that you know this – there are not enough professional jobs for the number of people we are graduating from colleges and universities as it is. Giving more people “better” education is not going to change the availability of professional jobs in the current “austerity” climate.
BTW, this, Chuck: “@Diane: Are you seriously advocating a 90% tax rate (for some individuals)?”
Once again you apparently want us to think you’re really stupid. Or do you seriously not understand the concept of marginal tax rates? I think you know perfectly well that no one every pad 90% in taxes. 90% of everything over a certain very high amount, yes, but that’s as it should be. No one legitimately “earns” a billion dollars. Or even hundreds of millions.
Dienne
However the effective tax rate was 70% .today the effective tax rate on income is 23%
32% of the federal tax revenue was from corporate taxes today it is 10% . Of course the budget has grown but so has the economy.
Critically only 50% of S&P corporate profits were returned to shareholders leaving money for investment and investment in human capital . Today 94% goes to shareholders. Leaving little for anything else.
Hey Charles, do you make up this nonsense up all on your own, or do you get assistance?
Shameless, isn’t he?
Dienne “no one every pad 90% in taxes. ”
But some certainly should.
Gates and Zuckerberg are what they are, but perhaps a better question is why and how were they permitted to utterly dominate the public sector like this?
These people weren’t elected. No one consented to them running public education. Why are our lawmakers so weak and malleable and easily impressed?
“…why and how were they permitted to utterly dominate the public sector like this?”
Good question. I haven’t the $lighte$t idea.
Because our laws allow it.
Many students are coming to school hungry or have no access to wholesome food. Students must have adequate housing and food to learn!
Re: Billionaires Want Poor Children’s Brains To Work Better
I can think of few things bullionaires fear more than poor people’s brains working better.
Amen!
Bullionaires. Typo or good new word.
=a person who has at least $1 billion dollars and thinks he or she knows everything and orders everyone else around.
This Star Trek episode, The Cloud Minders, over and above its echo of Aristophanes, is strangely prescient of the Stratos City Dwellers who mind our Store Tech today.
I read the opening paragraph of this post and started to laugh. Anyone with an open mind (brain) already knows the answer to that question. It’s the poverty. Living in poverty is a crushing force on children and their families. Living in poverty causes a TON of problems for children.
In addition, PBS actually did a story on this: “How does ‘toxic stress’ of poverty hurt the developing brain?”
Instead, the research should be why Bill Gates and Mark Suckerberg have no brains. What’s inside their heads? A bank vault holding all their offshore cash.
No, this study funded by Gates and Suckerberg is the same kind of studies the Koch brothers funded to deny global warming was being caused by carbon emissions. The results have already been determined before the study even starts.
There’s plenty of research demonstrating that the frontal lobes, which mediate Executive Functions, are not fully developed until long past childhood –when people are in their 30s:
“The frontal lobes, home to key components of the neural circuitry underlying “executive functions” such as planning, working memory, and impulse control, are among the last areas of the brain to mature; they may not be fully developed until halfway through the third decade of life ” (Johnson, Blum & Giedd, 2009, p. 216).
That is not news. I first learned this when I was working on my doctorate and studying neuropsychology in the 90s. Gates has education advisors and could have easily known this then, too. His solution? Make kids grow up faster, such as via the Common Core, which pushes down academic expectations and curriculum onto our youngest children and robs them of the ability to play –which is how kids learn best.
Lesson Learned: Don’t buy any education that Gates and his billionaire posse are selling for the masses which they don’t first pilot on their own privileged kids’ schools –typically, private, Progressive schools that include small class sizes and lots of time for learning through exploration, experimentation and discovery, i.e., play. Those are the kinds of schools the wealthy should be replicating, but it looks like they think that model is too good for the rest of us, so they keep hunting for something cheaper and settle for much lower quality, while unrealistically expecting the same results as advantaged kids who still get to have their childhoods –and with lots of perks.
References
Johnson, S. B., Blum, R. W. & Giedd, J. N. (2009). Adolescent maturity and the brain:
Sorry that reference got messed up. Here’s the link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892678/
If Gates gets to sell lots of cheap virtual instruction for the children of the working and poor classes, Gates and company can make lots more money, and even more from data mining.
Right, because the rich can never, ever get enough money and power. I suspect we are witnessing the race to become the first trillionaire.
I swear, these people have far too much money and too little knowledge of education and schools. No one has ever stood up to Bill Gates and said “Why should highly educated teaching professionals and educational leaders feel we have to listen to you, a college dropout, just because you have made a lot of money. Making money doesn’t make you an authority on anything else than what you made your money on.”
Research shows that poor kids are distracted from such things as homework, and learning by the worries about whether they will have a roof over their head, food on the table, a peaceful home without mom and dad fighting, and so on.
If these billionaires want to really help poor kids why doesn’t their proposals actually attack the root cause of these kids poor performance. There is a question in this blog that really hits the nail on the head. “If executive functioning is poorer in poor children, why not eliminate the apparent cause of the deficiency, i.e., poverty?”Just think of what could happen if all the money these guys are wasting on the latest “educational fad calling it self ‘educational reforms’, on Charter Schools that actually don’t perform better than the local public schools, etc. and used it to end poverty! Now that would make a real change in these kids lives!
This is no joking matter. These are two incredibly powerful people pulling ideas from the eugenics playbook.
It is ike brain based social engineering. Frankly, I want billionaires’ brains to work better. Stop with the emperor complex for the emperor has no clothes!
Well, let’s see Bill and Mark’s ACE scores for starters. And, let them luve in my students’ neighborhood and eat school lunches for a year. Then, they can take their own imposed tests!
Its all about the money. They don’t ever have to answer to the public
Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sometimes normal words are insufficient.
Yes, Lloyd. YES!!! Zuckerberg’s & Gates’ brains are the ones that should be researched!
They haven’t a clue into the understanding of REAL people. I (almost) have never read anything so ignorant & stupid in my entire life! &…what a COLOSSAL waste of $$$!!!!
Again (& sadly), I have to bring up the fact that the children in Sandy Hook were exempted from standardized testing after the tragedy, because it was recognized there that trauma will have a negative effect on test results. But this doesn’t happen for our kids in Chicago, for example, who are CONSISTENTLY traumatized by street shootings & other factors, such as environmental crap (pet coke, courtesy of the Kochs) that affects their physical health which would, of course, affect their mental health, not to mention limited access to good health care (there was a recent “study” {duh, again} that impoverished people do not seek out dental care; so we have kids w/rotting teeth out there, who may not be able to chew properly, or who suffer from toothaches which, for sure, are a mental distraction).
Duh…
Money better spent on help in all the areas I just mentioned…
&, to Kas Winters, copy that long “Aargh….!!”
If the brains of Bill Gates and Mark Suckerberg were studied by reputable scientists and doctors, they’d probably find the psycho gene. For sure, beyond a doubt, the psycho gene will be found in Trump’s tiny, tiny brain.
“While the idea of a ‘criminal gene’ is nonsense, there is growing evidence that some psychopathic behaviour might indeed be grounded in genes”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2933872/
I suspect (judging from the content of their discussion on brain function in poor children) all we’d find is a heap of 1’s & 0’s.
“For sure, beyond a doubt, the psycho gene will be found in Trump’s tiny, tiny brain.”
No, there is no brain there, only the gene operates in overdrive.
No brain. Maybe a Microsoft computer ship called the “Idiot 1.0”.
My favorite professor when I was in school was Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, professor of neurology, brain surgeon, one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people of the 20th century. I highly recommend his ole’ book, my all time favorite, Phantoms in the Brain. He, in lecture, constantly derided those, pop psychologists, sociologists, education meddlers and product peddlers, etc., who proclaimed to understand the human brain without understanding even the basics of neuroanatomy. That was well over twenty years ago.
“Executive function” is not a thing. In medical science, it’s not a thing! It doesn’t exist. It’s pseudoscience. The Gerald Coles article nailed it. Gates is a fraud. So is Carol Dweck.
In fairness to Dweck, having read some of her earliest work, I think she started off with good intentions and made some decent contributions to the field of psychology. I think her downfall came when she got “discovered”. She found she had a “brand” and couldn’t bring herself to critically examine it any further lest she loose her fame and fortune, so, sadly, she allowed it and herself to be co-opted.
Gates, however, has always been a fraud. As has Duckworth and her foremost cheerleader Paul Tough.
I have to admit I haven’t read her earliest work. And there is something to be said for her advocacy of the age old idea that, “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” That said, “brainology” is not a thing. The brain is not a muscle. It’s a little more complicated than that. A little, wink wink and a smile. And, Bill Gates and other computer lovers, the human brain doesn’t have algorithmic functionality modules. It’s a little more complicated than that. Wink.
Here is the abstract of my research proposal:
Hungry brains need food.
Here is the full proposal.
Hungry kids’ brains think about food and not close reading. Feed the kids.
My ground breaking research will need a 10% Gates and 90% publicly founded Interdisciplinary Brain Research Leadership Academy at my university, the director of which will be naturally me. In return, I promise all profs working in the Academy will publish devotionals to Gates ideas and will suppress their natural desire to serve the public in any way.
Maybe Gates and Zuckerberg want to make it look like that are doing something worthwhile.
But we already know the answers to what they’re after, and we’ve known for a long time.
Marian Diamond, who died last year, was well-known for the research she did on rat brains, finding that rats raised in “enriched” environments had bigger, denser brains than those raised in a control group, which in turn had bigger, denser brains than those raised in an “impoverished” environment. Diamond said that she and her fellow researchers had no problem extrapolating the rat brain research to human brains.
There’s a reason for that. Because it’s true.
Everyone has a brain. Not many know much about it and how it works. The development of the brain is critical in the early years. Young brains that develop under conditions of malnutrition, environmental degradation, violence and abuse tend to end up very different in size and neural wiring than those that develop in more ideal conditions .
The American Academy of Pediatrics puts it this way: “toxic stress in young children can lead to less outwardly visible yet permanent changes in brain structure and function….chronic stress is associated with hypertrophy and overactivity in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex, whereas comparable levels of adversity can lead to loss of neurons and neural connections in the hippocampus and medial PFC.”
In plain speak, alleviating poverty and its pernicious effects, and providing children with high quality environments before they get to school, and following up with health and academic and social policy programs while they are in school, results not only in high-quality education but also in a high-quality citizenry….and in promoting the general welfare of the nation.
Isn’t that what public education in a democratic republic is supposed to do?
Let’s make this even more real. Republicans and conservative evangelicals want to privatize public education. They will simultaneously cut social programs that help to alleviate poverty, including heath care. Isn’t it stunningly clear to say that they are not committed to the general welfare of the Republic whatsoever? They aren’t even committed to the teachings of The Gospels they claim to revere.
We’ve known for some time that poverty affects the developing brains of children. Research confirms it. A recent study at MIT “found differences in the brain’s cortical thickness between low-income and higher-income teenagers.” Not surprisingly, those differences find their way into test scores. Another recent study found that low-income children had brain surface areas 6 percent smaller than those of upper-middle class kids. That typically translates into less brain density, and then, into a lessened ability for ” language, memory, spatial skills and reasoning.” These things can be ameliorated. But not for free.
As Richard Rothstein reported in ‘Class and the Classroom’ nearly a decade-and-a-half ago in discussing literacy gaps between low-income and higher-income children, “deficits like these cannot be made up by schools alone, no matter how high the teachers’ expectations. For all children to achieve the same goals, the less advantaged would have to enter school with verbal fluency that is similar to the fluency of middle-class children.”
So, guess what? It really does take the concerted effort(s) of “a whole village” to raise a child. We are the keeper of our brother. We have an obligation to create “a more perfect Union, and to “promote the general Welfare” of the country so that we genuinely have a government “of the people, by the people for the people.” That’s the social contract at the core of a democratic republic.
There’s nothing new or radical about any of this. It’s in the Constitution. The Framers envisioned a democratic society “ in which the common good was the chief end of government.” They agreed with John Locke’s view that the main purpose of government –– the main reason people create government –– is to protect their persons through –– as historian R. Freeman Butts put it –– a social contract that placed “the public good above private desires.” The goal was “a commonwealth, a democratic corporate society in which the common good was the chief end of government.”
Is there any sane person who would say that Trump, the Republican party, white evangelicals, and white supremacists – among others, like the NRA, the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – share in that conception of democratic government? It’s abundantly obvious they they don’t.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote about the desire of humans to know, and the fear of knowing, because knowing requires doing. It’s easier to pin a flag on a lapel than it is to commit to and work for “liberty and justice for all.” It’s a cinch to profess you’ve been “saved” by a “lord and savior” if you really don’t have to do much beyond that, especially if “God wants you to be rich.”
Psychologist Milton Rokeach explained in ‘The Open and Closed Mind’ that ‘beliefs’ often lead to the quest for “power and status,” identification with absolute authority and “a cause,” and “the moral condemnation” of those one deems inferior or different. People who are more dogmatic — close-minded — are more likely to believe and behave that way. The Republican party is their ideological home. Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it this way in a piece, ‘Let’s Just Say It: Republicans Are the Problem’:
“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition..”
Let me put that a different way. Republicans are now inherently opposed to democracy and everything it represents. There is – in fact – what can accurately be described as a Russian agent in the Oval Office.
We are in uncharted waters There is a way out, and public education has a major role to play in it, and that’s educating for democratic citizenship. Not “college and careers.” Not STEM. Not ACT and SAT scores. Citizenship for democracy, developing the “character of democracy.”
As cyber-warfare and cyber-terrorism expert Ciint Watts framed it:
“Russian trolls were different from normal trolls…they were sharing basically the same message. They would share the same content or links…Michigan and Wisconsin were the two closest contests in the United States…Bernie Sanders performed better than Hillary Clinton during the primaries in those two states, which was a surprise. The narrative that Bernie Sanders got a raw deal from the DNC came 100 percent from a Russian action…They stole the DNC’s records. They leaked that, and they powered that narrative…The biggest challenge we face moving forward isn’t the Russians. It’s other Americans…”
Guess who made the Russian “message” a central part of his campaign, and keeps repeating all those lies?
“What kind of government have you given us, Dr. Franklin?”
A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
Indeed.
Thanks Diane and all who posted. In today’s LA Times, Steve Lopez wrote a great piece on poverty and it’s victims, the children. These children here in LA and across the country live in conditions that one would ascribe to 3rd world countries. These billionidjits are just that, idiots. http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-child-poverty-06092018-story.html