In past posts, I’ve highlighted the systemic problems in Virginia’s educational system — an industrial-era model laboring to keep pace with a knowledge-era economy. The problems run deeper than the bureaucratic, top-down funding and administration of our public schools, which answer to masters at three levels of government: local, state and federal. The problems run deeper than anything that giving poor kids vouchers to attend to private schools can solve. At its root, our educational system, public and private, pushes children through standardized curricula in age cohorts, regardless of the pace that individuals are capable of progressing.
There’s another problem facing American education today: the corrosive influence of our popular culture. I’m not talking about the usual suspects such as entertainment media drenched in sex, violence and vulgarity — as bad as that is. I’m talking about terrible nutrition, inadequate sleep and the debilitating effects of electronic media upon brain development. I explore these cultural epidemics in today’s column, “Brain Games,” based on an interview with Dr. Susan Hardwicke, founder of kSero Corporation, which operates a cognitive development center in western Henrico County.
The context of the article is Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s push for universal pre-K education. The logic behind the program, estimated to cost $300 million a year, is that ensuring children a year of quality pre-K education will improve their academic performance in later years, reduce the number of high school drop-outs, and yield financial rewards in the out years through a lower incidence of welfare, crime, drug abuse and other costly social pathologies.
I don’t have a problem with applying life cycle analysis to public policy, although I have yet to see numbers demonstrating a financial pay-off of pre-K to taxpayers, much less an analysis that takes into account the time value of money and the 10- to 20-year delay in generating a financial return.
What I suggest is that Virginia’s school children — and I’m not just talking about “at risk” kids — are facing more immediate problems. Nutrition is a disgrace. Childhood obesity, with an accompanying risk of diabetes, is becoming routine. The same nutritional regime that causes obesity also impairs brain development, and it increases behavioral problems — sugar rushes followed by sugar crashes — that make it difficult for children to concentrate and apply themselves in class.
Likewise, many children aren’t getting enough sleep. The temptations are omnipresent: for pre-teens, logging long hours on the computer, interacting with friends through instant messaging; for teens, partying into the night. Parents are increasingly unable or unwilling to enforce sleep discipline among their children. Yet sleep is necessary for the brain to consolidate learning. Lack of sleep also makes kids tired and less alert at school.
Finally, kids are overdosing on television, computer games and other electronic media, which are especially harmful to brain development in young children.
Here’s my question: If our concern is cognitive development, could $300 million be more effectively spent on educating children and parents about nutrition, sleep and electronic stimuli? Wouldn’t changing the self-destructive aspects of popular culture have a greater, and more immediate impact than teaching pre-schoolers to recite their A,B,Cs, which they’ll be learning in Kindergarten anyway?
(Disclaimer: I serve on the board of directors of kSero Corporation.)