Marc Brackett never liked school. “I was always bored,” he says, “and I never felt like any of my teachers really cared. I can’t think of anybody that made me feel inspired.” It’s a surprising complaint coming from a 42-year-old Yale research scientist ...
Most adults reflect fondly on the days when long hours spent at school were punctuated by a sunny and loud recess break. Playtime is an essential component in a child’s development, providing venues for creativity, allowing space to socialize informally, and giving opportunity ...
Sometimes, the best way to progress isn’t to advance — to step up with more money, more technology, more modernity. It’s to retreat. Towards the end of the 1970s, the Mother and Child Institute in Bogota, Colombia, was in deep trouble. The institute ...
For months, psychologists struggled to reach the eight year old boy in the burn unit of the Pediatric Hospital of Tacubaya, in Mexico City. He had been discovered in the basement of a house, tied to a water tank after being burned along ...
Imagine there was a cure for meanness. Well, maybe there is. Lately, the issue of bullying has been in the news, sparked by the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a gay college student who was a victim of cyber-bullying, and by a widely circulated ...
Five-year-olds from low-income communities have one-quarter the vocabulary of their more affluent peers, and half of them enter first grade as much as two years behind in preschool skills. That’s a severe handicap, which will persist for life unless something powerful intervenes. That's ...
Nancy Henkin believes there isn’t enough contact across generations. For the past 30 years she’s been striving to remedy that imbalance. As the founder and executive director of the Intergenerational Center, Nancy works to enhance and engage these communities by pairing old and ...
Keeping with the creativity theme from last week, what can we do to augment our creative powers? One thing we know from the field of neuroscience is that, unlike computers, the brain is very slow at individual processing. In one second, a computer ...
Yesterday I wrote a post about the "creativity crisis" recently reported by Newsweek. Over the past 20 years, American children have steadily lost ground on a long-standing creativity assessment that's strongly associated with entrepreneurship and invention. This is a serious problem. I've spent ...
If you're interested in children, education, social innovation, or, for that matter, the future of America, Newsweek's recent cover story on the "creativity crisis" by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman is a must read. It makes a powerful argument that our system of ...