Customer Reviews

Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think and What We Can Do About It

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Healy begins this interesting, understandable book by proposing that kids' brains must be different today than what they used to be. While she offers no conclusive evidence for her contentions, she does provide a great deal of circumstantial evidence for them. An in-depth description of the influence of language on mental development is given; the importance of verbal interaction bertween the child and the adult is emphasized. However, changes in our use of language are not encouraging in this regard. Issues related to attention and learning disabilities of students in today's schools are also raised. Healy launches an attack on video games and television, including the children's program, Sesame Street. I think any adult, not just parents, will find her work interesting and thought-provoking. In addition, she provides many thoughts on the impact of poverty on children's brain development and success in today's schools. Lastly, Healy offers recommendations for improving students' learning, many of which would result in major changes in many schools. In the end, the question remains about the type of skills that are needed for our information-age, changing society. Healy believes curiosity in our children must always remain. Her purpose in writing is to raise awareness about the needs of the brain today--that she does!

This book is not for the timid, not for those who just want to just park them in front of PBS, or pack their children off to public school! She even attacks the liberal establishment's God-send "Sesame Street"! I have seen explanations of many things that I have seen in my own 4 sons in this book. But, if you figure your job as a parent is just to pay the day care bill, and go to the 2 parent teacher conferences per year, save your feelings. Don't read this book. For those who want to push their children so fast that they never have a childhood. Don't read this book. To me, just seeing the order in which different centers of the brain develop was worth the full cost of the book. No surprize that her biggest critics are those who swear by the flashy teaching methods that have failed dismally over the last few decades. It's a shame it's out of print.

Wow! While this book never mentions "homeschooling" as the answer for our educational problems, that was one of the answers we came up with for our children after reading this book.

We already knew video games, day care, and the fast pace of life was bad for kids, but I was shocked to discover Sesame Street isn't all its cracked up to be and may actually be one of the causes of our current educational problems. Her information about language development was excellent, and (suprise!) proper language development takes place by interaction with parents!

Jane Healy carefully reviews the scientific research on child development, both psychological and physical and combines it with her 20 years of experience in the classroom to explain the hows and whys our children do not do as well in school as other children. It is well written and in plain language for all parents to understand.

It is probably the most valuable single book on the market today. I have given over 25 as baby gifts. If you decry the decline of intellect in American society, this book will lead you to some surprising conclusions. I urge everyone who has an interest in the future of children, indeed then, the future of the nation, to read this book!

I discovered Dr. Jane Healy's 1987 book, Endangered Minds, researching a novel I was writing on early man. I wanted to better understand what parts of our brain show significant evolution since our species appeared (like the increasing size of the frontal lobe, the evolution of the Wernecke and Broca regions). I admit, part of it was also that I was a new mother and there are so many competing opinions about when kids should read, write, what they should learn when, I didn't want to make a mistake and mess up my kids.

Somehow, I stumbled across Healy's book and what a find it is. You can tell from the title that she's not happy with the path education has taken, but approaches it as a scholar, using facts, figures, proofs to sustain her opinions rather than the emotional tag words that too many throw at us. She sets out to examine the reasons why kids show increasing difficulties with the skills of concentration and focus than kids, well, when I was young. She includes chapters like:

* Kids' brains must be different
* Environment shapes intelligence
* Language changes brains
* Why can't they pay attention: Sesame Street and the death of reading

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

* As American IQs have continued a moderate rise, scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test have taken a major nosedive
* Before brain regions are myelineated, they do not operate efficiently. For this reason, trying to 'make' children master academic skills for which they do not have the requisite maturation may result in mixed-up patterns of learning
* In development it is now well known that there are certain times when an organism is ready to deal with certain stimuli
* ...data support this real-life phenomenon of use it or lose it
* ...a child's early experiences with language have powerful long-term effects on school achievement
* ...the amount of physical activity since the turn of the century has declined seventy-five percent
* American youngsters on average now spend more hours in front of the TV than at any other activity except sleeping

This is a well-written down-to-earth book that a layperson can understand. She uses appropriate words, but explains everything so the non-technical mind can get it. I highly recommend it for new parents, parents of ADHD children and teachers who want to understand the variety of their daily charges.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who works with, lives with, or is involved with children in any way. This work provides an understanding and substantiation of a problem plaguing our children and provides solutions to deal with it. Author Jane Healy has systematically analyzed what she considers to be the roots of the educational crisis, here in America, and also progressively in European countries. She builds strong case for the fact that our children's brains are different physically from those of children 50 years ago. This physical difference manifests itself in distinct strengths and weaknesses unlike those of previous generations of children. She examines the relationship between the brain and language learning, attention, and passivity. Her work is backed with hard research. If there was ever a solid argument that the media is impacting our children and how they think, this is it!

Slate recently highlighted a Cornell study linking TV watching before the age of 3 years with increased rates of autism.

You can read the Slate article here: http://www.slate.com/id/2151538/
or go directly to the actual publication of the research here:
http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/faculty/profiles/Waldman/AUTISM-WALDMAN-NICHOLSON-ADILOV.pdf

I've pasted the abstract in down below - and remember, in science we don't "prove" things. All we can do is provide a rationale for our hypothesis, and then do studies that support it. My prediction is that we'll be seeing more and more of this. It makes sense.

ABSTRACT

Autism is currently estimated to affect approximately one in every 166 children, yet the cause or causes of the condition are not well understood. One of the current theories concerning the condition is that among a set of children vulnerable to developing the condition because of their underlying genetics, the condition manifests itself when such a child is exposed to a (currently unknown) environmental trigger. In this paper we empirically investigate the hypothesis that early childhood television viewing serves as such a trigger. Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey, we first establish that the amount of television a young child watches is positively related to the amount of precipitation in the child's community. This suggests that, if television is a trigger for autism, then autism should be more prevalent in communities that receive substantial precipitation. We then look at county-level autism data for three states - California, Oregon, and Washington - characterized by high precipitation variability. Employing a variety of tests, we show that in each of the three states (and across all three states when pooled) there is substantial evidence that county autism rates are indeed positively related to county-wide levels of precipitation. In our final set of tests we use California and Pennsylvania data on children born between 1972 and 1989 to show, again consistent with the television as trigger hypothesis, that county autism rates are also positively related to the percentage of households that subscribe to cable television. Our precipitation tests indicate that just under forty percent of autism diagnoses in the three states studied is the result of television watching due to precipitation, while our cable tests indicate that approximately seventeen percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s is due to the growth of cable television. These findings are consistent with early childhood television viewing being an important trigger for autism. We also discuss further tests that can be conducted to explore the hypothesis more directly.

If you're looking for a book to validate your prejudices and fears about life in the information age, this is it. If you want clear, unbiased analysis with conclusions drawn from the evidence gathered (as opposed to "evidence" gathered to support what the author assumes is true), keep looking. An honest introduction to the book would have included something like: "The evidence doesn't support much of what I'm saying, but some educated people agree with me, so I'm going to suggest the evidence is there after all." If you're patient enough to wade through a mountain of weak scholarship and undisguised crisis mongering, there are still some solid points to be gleaned, but a magazine article would have been sufficient to convey the really good stuff.

As if U.S. schools were not saturated with enough child-damaging fads (whole language, constructivism, discovery learning, developmentally appropriate practices), Healy comes along and tries to provide a "scientific" foundation for this destructive twaddle by deriving instructional practices from brain research that is considered questionable by the brain researchers themselves. It's this sort of bunk that really endangers our children's minds. Only morons (i.e., knee-jerk "progressives" and education "deformers") will go for this clap-trap: because they don't read anything serious and couldn't understand it if they did.