Judy Aron does a great job of digging up news around education, preschool, mental health and government involvement in these issues. Here are some of the following items she has dug up:
A Mother Speaks Out Against TeenScreen is an eight minute video of a mother who speaks against mental screening without parents permission. The school did a ten minute screening on a teenager and labeled the girl OCD. The mother read a few of the questions. The questions did not let the students explain the answers. The questions were badly written. But even more importantly, the schools should not have testing the girl, and especially without the permission of the parents. It was a powerful argument against letting schools do any kind of mental examination.
Matt McGann gives some advice for students applying to MIT - Homeschooled applicants. Matt works in the MIT admissions office.
There has been a big push to fingerprint and do iris scans of children, and their parents. There are all kinds of warnings over safety. Iris scanning begins in US schools makes the point that since most kidnappings are done by partners or spouses, and so only letting parents pick up children won't prevent many kidnappings. In Tracking children goes high-tech is an account of Children's Identification and Location Database (CHILD) Project system. Would You Let Them Scan Your Child? has a scary account of parents trying to opt out of having their children fingerprinting and the school going ahead anyways.
Recently the Prime Minister of the UK has said that "All pupils should leave school able to cook, enjoy the theatre, handle home finances and surf the internet." I don't know about the UK but in the US most public schools are still struggling with teaching children how to read, write and do math.
In another effort to push preschool is an announcement: Latin America, Caribbean, Lead in Pre-School Education. The press release says that studies have shown the value of preschool. All the studies I've seen show some improvement for children from broken families. But when tracking children from healthy two parent homes, preschool provides no benefit. Unfortunately this won't stop the push for universal preschool.
Judy Aron has just recently started her own blog. So you can stop on top of all the fascinating things she finds by going to Consent Of The Governed.
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Technorati tags: mental, health, mental health, MIT, fingerprint, iris scan, children, students, education, preschool, Judy Aron
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