Education in America

Frankly, until the classroom becomes more visually stimulating than the distractions in the home, we will continue to lag behind the 28 other countries... If we can manage to approach visual alertness as a strength, rather than a hindrance, we may have hope. If our children's minds have been compacted by constant visual hype, then let's assume they can think fast visually, and start to teach faster. Give them the hype at school! Make school a more visually stimulating experience. This necessitates teachers learn visual thinking themselves. Basically it's the fast lane of cognitive skill. They need to learn to use the blackboard more, powerpoint effectively, the internet search engines and perhaps even a few applications like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw. Wide-encompassing computer savviness may be compulsory soon anyway. Perhaps teachers should even be skilled engineers of some sort or artistically armed with a skill that immediately demonstrates the enjoyment that learning can promise. Our teachers should be more than just pedants and verbalizers of information - kids are bored by all the talk! Teachers would get more attentiveness if they were exemplary and made manifest the function of knowledge, and acted out the physical world at times. What I'm saying is: is that projects and hands-on activities, short videos, art classes and field trips are wonderful - but not enough. We as parents too need to be more visually inclined and therefore far more aware of the visual potential of our children. They've been primed for short bytes of stimuli - let's not step over that presumed weakness but develop a more intense curriculum that can take advantage of it!