Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Infant Intelligentsia: Can Babies Learn to Read? And Should They?

September 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Baby with Book

THE VIDEO CLIP on Larry Sanger’s website shows the cofounder of Wikipedia looking both scholarly and paternal with his owlish glasses, thinning pate, open book, and lapful of chubby-cheeked 3-year-old. Sanger’s son is gazing hard at the book pages and pronouncing words with the charming r-lessness of a toddler: “Congwess shall make no waw wespecting an establishment of wewigion or pwohibiting the fwee exewcise theweof or abwidging the fweedom of speech or of the pwess…” It’s not clear whether the boy is working toward a doctorate, like his dad’s, or training to be our future ... Read More

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Learning to Read When a School System Falters

February 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Dolan and Moustafa

On a hot, sunny September afternoon — the sticky kind so common in New York City that time of year — a tall, dark-haired young man with his shoulders hunched slightly forward padded into Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School’s back entrance and into a small courtyard. Moustafa Elhanafi sought the school’s principal. He needed her help. Not being a student there, he didn’t know what she looked like or where he would find her inside the massive, unfamiliar building. In the courtyard beneath the shade of a wide-leafed tree, looking for crafty students cutting class, stood Principal ... Read More

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Are the Arts Irrelevant to the Next Generation?

November 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Are you concerned about the future of the fine arts? New research from Norway suggests you have every right to fret. A study just published in the journal Poetics suggests art forms such as literature and classical music “are becoming increasingly more irrelevant for most students’ cultural lives.” This points to “an increasingly precarious position for traditional highbrow culture,” according to a trio of researchers led by the University of Bergen’s Jostein Gripsrud. Gripsrud and his colleagues conducted two surveys of students enrolled at the major institutions of higher ... Read More

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Music Education Improves Literacy of Second-Graders

March 17, 2009 • By • 1 Comment

According to a just-published study in the journal Psychology of Music, the reading skills of young children who received structured training in music were clearly superior to those of their peers who did not have the benefit of such instruction. The finding is particularly striking because both groups of kids took part in comprehensive literary training, in which lengthy periods of their school day were dedicated to reading and writing. The study, conducted by psychologists Joseph M. Piro and Camilo Ortiz of New York's Long Island University, directly compared second-graders from two New York ... Read More

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