Sarah and I attended a Dallas Symphony Orchestra performance Friday night with some extra tickets my dad had. This got me thinking about the need to play classical music to my baby. After all, everyone knows about the Mozart effect, where playing classical music stimulates alpha brain waves and, over time, improves your I.Q. Everyone knows babies and children should be exposed to classical music, especially Mozart. I just saw a large collection of Mozart's music on 40 CD's at Half Price Books the other day, but it was $100, and, money being tight and about to become tighter, I was figuring I would have to stick to our local classical radio station, WRR.
Well, it turns out, according to the above link, that the Mozart effect might just possibly have been exaggerated. In fact, it might actually be a statistical insignificance.
Boy, do I feel stupid. "Alpha waves"? Sounds like something somebody made up. (According to wikipedia, such waves do exist.) How could I have been taken for a ride like this?
Of course, I learned about the Mozart effect in public school, from at least two teachers, whom I knew I could trust. One was my calculus and pre-calculus teacher, and another was my English teacher. Neither one ever spoke a word about the Mozart effect being questioned or disputed. It was something everybody knew.
This just makes me angry and strengthens my resolve to educate my children myself. My children will learn about topics like the Mozart effect from sources like Wikipedia, where people have argued and debated over the subject, where multiple sources of information are open to public examination and criticism, where critical thinking is encouraged rather than just swallowing every pet theory that comes around.
My children will probably still listen to Mozart. But everyone in our family will have our eyes wide open.
This just makes me angry and strengthens my resolve to educate my children myself.
Um, I'd guess that you were in public school more than a couple of years ago - which means that it was at the time that the original research was published and publicised, but before the contradictory research was published (or at least before it was widely enough publicised to have caught up with the original story).
So, are you certain that nothing you will teach to your children will become invalidated by new research in subsequent years? Do you think that Calculus and English teachers should never make a statement about cognitative development theories less their interested bystander comments be taken as authoritative teachings and scar a pupil for life?
I'm using a touch of hyperbole here, but when you use this as proof of the need for home schooling, so are you.
Re:off-topic comments should not be taken as gospe
jdavidb on 2005-01-17T19:57:43
My point is that what was presented to me was not presented as new research which had not yet been confirmed, but as fact that could now be taken for granted. The real point behind that is to get at the fact that I was encouraged to simply accept what I was told rather than to learn to evaluate new ideas in a rational spirit of inquiry. Nobody said, "There's some new evidence that listening to Mozart might have a positive effect." What was said was, "They've discovered that listening to Mozart stimulates your alpha brain waves!"
And I'm definitely not using this one issue as proof of the need for homeschooling. My homeschooling decision was made in 2003, and it probably has a lot more to do with my politics than with the quality of education I received (which, despite the tone of this journal entry, was actually pretty top-notch).
Re: The Mozart effect: possibly not real
jdavidb on 2005-01-17T20:37:10
a) Public schools sure vary a lot from country to country (and in the U.S., state to state and county to county). Education-wise, the main point of this journal entry is that children need to be taught to critically evaluate new ideas presented to them, and that the failure of my own excellent local schools to do so in myself reinforces my previously made decision to homeschool my children.
b) You're absolutely right. I was once committed to starting my independent life without a television at all, but this has gone by the wayside. The family that my wife and I have formed watches quite a bit more TV than I would have planned on ten years ago, but as the children arrive TV for them is going to be quite selective in their formative years. There are two PBS children's shows I definitely plan on them watching, along with some particular things I liked from my own childhood. Tivo and DVDs are great here; our children can watch what we want them to when we want them to and understand that the rest of their time is to be spent doing something else. Instead of watching some of the drek I see in children's programming nowadays, there's probably going to be a specially selected Saturday morning cartoons with Daddy tradition.
And as for talking with them and telling them stories, you better believe it. Ours is a literate house, and Joseph is already responding to Daddy reading to him in the womb.
Reading to your kids
jmm on 2005-01-25T16:00:04
Ours is a literate house, and Joseph is already responding to Daddy reading to him in the womb.Great. My 16 year old son, Jordan, still enjoys having me read to him. That started when he was a toddler - making up a bed-time story every night for a couple of years (he would choose the topic and I'd then have to make up the story - "The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Light Bulb"), which turned into reading from kids books (Richard Scary was a favourite), then reading "regular" books (he heard "The Hobbit" when he was about 4, and "Lord of the Rings" when he was 6/7). He is never to be seen these days without a book available, in case there are a few moments that would otherwise be "wasted" time; but he also still likes being read to even though my verbal reading speed is probably slower than a quarter of his visual reading speed.
Re:Reading to your kids
jdavidb on 2005-01-25T18:13:42
He is never to be seen these days without a book available, in case there are a few moments that would otherwise be "wasted" time
That's the way to be.
:)
Re:Hm
jdavidb on 2005-01-25T15:14:06
I don't trust Wikipedia, per se. Wikipedia just opens up the process to review by myriads of sources, making it more likely that if some item is controversial or uncertain that controversy or uncertainty will be reflected. Ultimately, Wikipedia opens up the process of source checking; hard-to-believe facts will tend to be challenged and sourced if there is a source (or removed if not).
Imagine the whole Rather memo fiasco concentrated and put on one website, with each viewer of the website having equal participation privileges. The way CBS news handled the situation, they trusted their limited fact checking and never told us how it had been checked (well, at least, not until they were called on it). Had the information been put into Wikipedia, the discussion page for the relevant article would have immediately lit up with all of the objections to the authenticity of the memo. Ultimately, either the article would have to contextualize the information by reporting its source, or it would have been removed as unverifiable.
Wikipedia is basically a great (though certainly not perfect) process for hashing things over in an attempt to make the truth emerge. I'm interested in my children learning that process more than I am interested in most of their "factual" learning.
