Geography

An article in the NZ Herald this month (September 2002) told how a survey of nearly 3,000 school children found “that many children have a limited
knowledge of New Zealand facts and history. Only 33 per cent of Year 4 pupils (aged 8-9) and 59 per cent of Year 8s (aged 12-13) could pinpoint their country on a world map.”

Well, we’ve not had that problem! Maybe that’s because first of all I love geography and maps myself and am always looking something up.

But when we once fostered and home educated an eight-year-old who knew little, we found a fun way to make him look like an Einstein. A trip to the library secured a couple of those great National Geographic maps of continents.  He taped South America on the big window and taped a blank sheet of newsprint over the top. It was fun tracing the continent with a bold felt pen because it didn’t involve books or reading or sitting at a desk. He learned all about bays & peninsulas & river mouths & islands in the process. Then he traced the national borders and put big dots for the capital cities.

The next part was hard, but made more tolerable because I sat with him the whole time helping him with encouraging words: writing out the names of each of the countries in the continent on some card. I made it interesting by telling what little I knew about each of the countries as he wrote them out, and found that my memory had some really cute little snippets stored away once I started searching for them. Cutting the names into individual cards was an enjoyable task.

Then his job was to match each card to the correct country he had outlined on his map, now stretched out on the table, using the National Geographic map as a guide. We would do what he remembered several times a day and would add new ones as he was able. After he’d mastered about four countries, he discovered he knew more than most adults, and this motivated him greatly. Soon he knew all 13 South American countries from memory. Every adult who arrived would be met with an invitation to look at his map…..and then be handed the 13 innocent-looking cards and challenged to place them correctly! None could do it!

Let me tell you, this was really impressive to all the friends and neighbours skeptical about home education, and made a visit by the ERO officer really plain sailing, when in fact the little guy’s maths and writing skills simply weren’t there. And as a result each of our other children chose a different continent, and soon each one was an expert in a different part of the world. So when we started reading Operation World to learn of the state of Christianity in different countries, our children’s appetite for more geographical information had already been sharpened.

There are some great interactive geography games you can download from the internet….for free! Check it out at the Owl & Mouse Educational Software site:  www.yourchildlearns.com/owlmouse.htm

Blank map printouts are available at:                               www.enchantedlearning.com/label/geography.shtml

From Keystone Magazine
September 2002 , Vol. VIII No. 5
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz

To order Keystone Magazine do one of the following:

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post cheque or visa number to PO Box 9064, Palmerston North, New Zealand

fax: 06 357-4389

phone: 06 357-4399

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The Four Parenting Styles

by Craig Smith

Dr Diana Baumrind, Research Psychologist with the Institute of Human Development at the University of California (Berkeley) and others describe in very useful terms four basic parenting styles. These each involve combinations of acceptance / responsiveness / support on the one hand, and demands / controls / monitoring on the other.

The authoritarian style, where monitoring is high and support low, gives complete authority to the parent, who dictates how the children will behave. It tends to be less effective in the teenage years, because there is no negotiation. It relies totally on the recipient recognising the greater authority of the parent.¹ It is a restrictive, punitive style, allows little verbal exchange, and can be associated with social incompetence in children: they are anxious about social comparison, fail to initiate activity and have poor communication skills.²

The best meaning home educating parents in the world can fall into a pattern of authoritarian parenting because of feeling pressured to perform. A strict adherence to a packaged curriculum, demanding a minimum number of pages to be done each day, can cause parents to feel they need to keep the children working and performing at all times, especially when combined with unrealistic expectations in other areas such as educational outings, lessons of various kinds or even social commitments or fastidious housekeeping. Such folks may have lost sight of the prime advantage and opportunity of home education: to enable your children to interact with you all day, rather than with a book. Vast amounts of knowledge and wisdom as well as important attitudes and values are communicated most efficiently when you feel comfortable just sitting for an hour talking with the children about whatever subject comes up.

The indulgent or permissive style sees parents who are highly involved with their children, but who place few demands or controls on them: support is high and monitoring low. Children have great freedom, and few or no boundaries. Indulgent parenting is also associated with children’s social incompetence, especially a lack of self-control. Children may always expect to get their own way. Some parents deliberately rear their children in this way because they believe the combination of warm involvement with few restraints will produce a creative, confident child.² While young people need more from their own parents, the indulgent style can be a very useful one for a step-parent.¹

Probably few Christian home educators would be in this group since Christianity is a faith of discipleship which means self-discipline and submitting to higher authorities. However, with today’s negative worldly attitudes toward work and responsibility, parents may unwittingly be letting their children down in the area of discipline because they are so interested, committed to and involved in their children’s activities. It is the Christian parent’s duty before God to shoulder the hard and at times unpleasant task of training and disciplining their children to abandon the ways of folly which are bound up in the heart (Proverbs 22:15) and to walk according to God’s word.

The neglectful parenting style, where both monitoring and support are low, where parents are very uninvolved in the child’s life, perhaps absorbed in their own troubles, and children may be left to bring themselves up, is also associated with social incompetence in children, especially a lack of self-control.² There is no discipline of the children, and no interest in them either. This is the most harmful. The children rightfully feel neglected because no one notices when they are in over their heads with no lifeline to haul them back.¹

This is the caricature of a home educator our enemies like to portray. Such neglectful parents, of course, are the least likely to want their children hanging around them all day when the schools will occupy them for at least six hours a day, and often more, plus probably feed them into the bargain.

The authoritative parenting style, where monitoring and support are high, encourages children to be independent but still places limits and controls on their actions. Extensive verbal give-and-take is allowed, and parents are warm and nurturant toward the child. Such children are generally socially competent, self-reliant nd socially responsible.²

This is what home education, tutoring, mentoring is all about. Parents know they have the goods to pass on to their children and are confident in their ability — as well as committed to their duty before God — to do so. I Thessalonians  2:9-12 talks of the hard work, the good example and the lofty goal the Apostle Paul had for the Thessalonians as he nurtured them first as babes, encouraged them as peers and finally charged them as mature Christians to carry on faithfully in his absence. It is our job to do likewise with the next generation.

Notes:

1. From NZ Herald, 31 July 2002, Suzanne Innes-Kent, relationships consultant, author and broadcaster, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storyprint.cfm?storyID=2346957

2. From Life-Span Development, John W. Santrock, University of Texas, 1997, Brown & Benchmark.

From Keystone Magazine
September 2002 , Vol. VIII No. 5
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz

To order Keystone Magazine do one of the following:

send email to sales@hef.org.nz with visa number

post cheque or visa number to PO Box 9064, Palmerston North, New Zealand

fax: 06 357-4389

phone: 06 357-4399

Trademe (fees added):  http://www.trademe.co.nz/Members/Listings.aspx?member=2366144

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Their Future Relies on Us

by Craig Smith

“American Indian families were broken by the federal government’s reservation policy. When tribes were forced onto the reservations, to prevent them from leaving to hunt for food, they were, in the early years, supplied with food, blankets, etc., to make them dependent on the federal government. Their children were sent to far away boarding schools to Americanize them and to break the link to Indian life. If a father refused and hid his children, he was arrested and chained to a rock near the agency building until he agreed to surrender his children. Indian character was shattered by two devices: welfarism, and public or statist education — exactly what is being done to the non-Indian population now.”¹

As heads of households and fathers to our children, we must not be tempted to think this isn’t true of us here in New Zealand. “Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall,” warns I Corinthians 10:12. The context of that verse, what the word “therefore” is there for, is how our spiritual forefathers, those whose eyes beheld the curses fall upon Egypt, the Red Sea being divided, who ate the manna day after day; how these privileged people were still drawn aside into idolatry and immorality and thanklessness and were destroyed by God for it.

Consider the situation among Christians in the USA:

The Nehemiah Institute has been testing the world view of students in Christian schools, churches, home schools and other Christian ministries for 15 years. They use the PEERS Test which examines a person’s values and beliefs in the areas of Politics, Education, Economics, Religion and Society. Results from each category are classified into one of four major worldview philosophies: Christian Theism, Moderate Christian, Secular Humanism or Socialism.

Since the mid-1980s when it was common to find Christian students in both Christian and state schools scoring in the Moderate Christian range, average worldview understanding among these students has dropped steadily every year. Between 1988 and 2000, the scores of Christian school students dropped by over 30%. The scores of students from evangelical Christian families who were in the state schools declined by 36.8%! That is to say, teenagers from the more committed Christian families, but who attend secular schools, now typically score in the lower part of the Secular Humanist range: as far as a test can judge such things, they appear to have lost the Faith.

Nehemiah Institute also tested individuals who responded to ads in the Humanist Magazine and the New Age Magazine and found they typically scored in the range from –20 to –80. A score of –20, then, could be considered the threshold of a hard-core socialist (i.e., anti-Christian) world view. At the present rate, Christian students in state schools will start to have average scores of –20 by the year 2014, and those in Christian schools will be lost to the enemy, at least as far as their thinking goes, by the year 2018. That is only one school-generation away; that is referring to children being born today.²

The one piece of good news from all this is that some Christian schools, those using the Principle Approach or Classical Christian, and home educators, have not been declining over those years, but if anything, their scores are getting slightly better! Some believe these people are the true remnant of the Lord, but their numbers are very small.

Do you see your responsibility men? Home educated youngsters — your children — are among the few who, by God’s grace, appear to be raised in a consistent Biblical manner, are compromised the least, are the most faithful in outlook and understanding.  What are the implications? They and you will certainly be targeted by the enemy and may well be the most qualified to provide spiritual leadership in the coming decades.  Noah Webster wrote in the early 1800s:

“All government originates in families, and if neglected there, it will hardly exist in society…The foundation of all free government and of all social order must be laid in families and in the discipline of youth…The education of youth, [is] an employment of more consequence than making laws and preaching the gospel, because it lays the foundation on which both the law and gospel rest for success.”

We home educators have already escaped the dangers of our children being captured by the state schooling system. Welfarism is one to watch: its history in NZ is somewhat different than that in the USA, but the dangers are the same: looking at the Home Schooling Allowance, for example, it is at present totally without strings. Yet should we allow ourselves to become either financially or psychologically dependent upon it, the state could then lead us wherever they wanted us to go by placing conditions upon our qualifying for it.

So now we need to get down to the business of discipling our children to become loyal, faithful, useful, eager and fearless soldiers of the cross.

How do masters normally pass on their specialist skills and knowledge? They find suitable apprentices. Then they mentor them. We have suitable apprentices: the children the Lord sovereignly gave to us. Now the hard part: ensuring that we qualify as masters of the faith we have been entrusted to pass to the next generation, and learning how to mentor.

I would be the last to claim the title of “master” of the Christian life. No way. But I can assume I am way ahead of my children. And as long as I am doing what I can to grow as a Christian, I can assume I will be a few steps ahead of my children and therefore have much to impart to them. Personally, II Corinthians 3:18 has always helped me to keep on striving ahead: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into His likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord Who is the Spirit.” I want to conform to His likeness; I want to share that glory; I want to see that evidence of the Holy Spirit’s working in my life over and over again over time; I see that it requires constant change, and I acknowledge that change is not comfortable or stress-free; I further see that I must constantly behold His glory in order to be changed, which I take to mean I must attend to the spiritual disciplines of Scripture reading, study, meditation, memorisation and application; prayer; fellowship; be under the preaching of the Word and a godly church eldership and other things like serving others and personal piety. By the grace of our wonderful Saviour, all these things are a constant joy and delight, not a burdensome duty imposed by some heavenly killjoy. Anyway, it seems that some such personal programme for joyful, enthusiastic growth and maturity as a Christian is needful first of all to fit me for Biblically mentoring my children.

You see, these disciplines are not just important for our growth as men: part of mentoring our children is passing on to them the same disciplines as well as our attitudes toward these disciplines. And we want to pass them on so successfully that our children will just naturally do the same to their children who will do the same to the next generation. This is thoroughly Biblical: “You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.” (II Timothy 2:1-2.) Note the characteristic of “faithful” here. We must be faithful in all things, for this character quality, like most of them, is caught by our children from us. If we don’t have it, neither will they. If they don’t have it, this whole mentoring exercise breaks down before it even starts. Faithfulness to our children, our wives and marriages, our careers and to our Master’s call means we are not pursuing selfish ambitions. Neither do we allow our children to get the idea that “doing your own thing” is part of life as a Christian. Faithfulness also means paying attention to the “inconsequential details”: “He who is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much.” (Luke 16:10.)

As fathers and as mentors of our children, we take advantage of the unique father-son, father-daughter relationship, and exploit it to the max. This means quality time together. And of course, that means quantity time together, for there simply is no other way to achieve quality time apart from quantity time. It works the same in our relationship with the Lord: good things just cannot be rushed. Make commitments to spend certain parts of your day or week with each child: Charmagne gets Wednesday mornings from 6 to 7; Jeremiah has a claim on Saturdays, 1pm to 2 (for example). The children will love this special attention and long for it all week as the high-point. So have expectations or assignments to place on them to remind that you are expecting growth, work, discipline in response to your input. Be realistic in what you expect, and it is always best to be able to in-spect what you ex-pect: rather than just ask Jimmy to pray for his siblings, give him a prayer diary and show how to write specific requests, leaving a place to write specific answers as the Lord gives them. Rather than just ask Jenny to tidy the woodworking bench you both will use next time, mention that you want the old sawdust and shavings swept up and the chisels all laid out in order. Mentoring is two way: you are looking for faithfulness and commitment from them as well as from yourself.

Plan the times together, the more planning the better. Remember you are endeavouring to do a lot here: pass on wisdom and knowledge, important life-lessons, attitudes, values, character traits. The more varied your activities together, the more opportunities to see different strengths and weaknesses: doing a 500 piece puzzle or building a model airplane may allow you to observe patience or a knack for detail; privately plan a talk or allow an urgent fence repair job you can do together to supplant the bicycle ride you had scheduled, as this will enable you to see  — and perhaps give counsel — on how they handle disappointment. Use your times together to plan events and acts of service for the rest of the family.

“Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.” (Proverbs 27:17.) Expect your children to be observant and tell you of faults they may see in your performance. Teach them how to do this tactfully, for they will surely find faults and blurt them out as soon as they are spied! This calls for patience and humility. They can also review you on your memorised verses just as well as you can review them.

Note well the wisdom of I Thessalonians 2:11-12, “For you know how, like a father with his children, we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to lead a life worthy of God, Who calls you into His own kingdom and glory.” A three-stage progression is pictured and said to be standard practice of fathers with children: to exhort, or call them when they are young to attain to what you have; to encourage, as they are older, which is what peers and colleagues do to each other; to charge, which is what an elder does to a younger as he is sent out into the world to be independent, leaving the elder behind.

Our ultimate aim is to raise godly men and women who will transfer their dependence (completely) and loyalty (their utmost) from yourself to the Lord Jesus Christ, and who will give their lives to the reproduction of the Most Holy Christian faith in their children after them.

Notes:

1. Rousas J. Rushdoony, missionary to the Indians and author of many books; Chalcedon Report, April 2000, p. 25.

2. Dan Smithwick, “One School-Generation to Go, and Then the End”, Chalcedon Report, September 2001, p. 7-8.

From Keystone Magazine
September 2002 , Vol. VIII No. 5
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz

To order Keystone Magazine do one of the following:

send email to sales@hef.org.nz with visa number

post cheque or visa number to PO Box 9064, Palmerston North, New Zealand

fax: 06 357-4389

phone: 06 357-4399

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(Here is one we can throw at our opposition!)

Who is Guarding the San Bernardino Strait?

Let me tell you of the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

Though largely forgotten it was the greatest naval battle in U.S. history. It started as a high stakes gamble by the Japanese, one that almost succeeded, due to the temporary diversions of two of the US Navy’s best fighting admirals. A military disaster of great magnitude was prevented only by the heroism of a handful of U.S. skippers who saw the sudden danger and knew what had to be done, even though it meant confronting and being totally outnumbered and outgunned by the might of the Japanese navy. They sailed into the fray with little hope of surviving because they knew the price of inaction or retreat was far greater than losing their own lives and their ships.

In October 1944, General Douglas MacArthur began to fulfill his promise of “I shall return,” to the people of Philippines. The campaign to liberate the Philippines opened with the successful invasion of the island of Leyte by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps.

The Japanese then sent a small fleet to the north near Luzon, luring Admiral “Bull” Halsey’s main task force away from his responsibility of guarding the northern entrance to Leyte Gulf, a passage called the San Bernardino Strait. Admiral Thomas Kinkaid was responsible for protecting the Americans who had landed on Leyte Islanf by guarding Suriago Strait, the southern entrance to Leyte Gulf. Each thought the other was guarding the vital northern entrance to Leyte Gulf and the vulnerable landing beaches. This confusion led to Kinkaid’s famous message to Halsey, “Who is guarding the San Bernardino Strait?”

On the morning of October 25, 1944, the main Japanese fleet under Admiral Kurita suddenly emerged in Leyte Gulf from the San Bernardino Strait and found no significant American opposition covering the exposed landing beaches. Thousands of American soldiers and marines, along with unarmed transport and supply vessels, now lay unguarded. The only thing between the Japanese and the landing area was a surprised and considerably weaker screen of American destroyers, destroyer escorts, and small carriers, now suddenly facing the superior might of a Japanese fleet of battleships and cruisers.

It should have been no contest. But realizing the gravity of the moment and heedless of their own peril, the smaller American force immediately went into a full scale attack against the vastly superior Japanese. Their unexpected heroism fooled the Japanese into thinking they faced a greater force and had blundered into a trap. The battle inflicted severe losses on the weak American screen, but the Japanese veered off, sparing the landing forces from destruction.

Admirals Kinkaid and Halsey were by no means military incompetents. Halsey in fact is rightly regarded as one of America’s outstanding leaders in World War II. Yet their combined strategic errors and failure to coordinate their actions almost led to a serious defeat.

So it is with many of our larger Christian ministries. They seldom talk to one another or coordinate their efforts. Sometimes they act as competitors rather than allies. Frequently they fight battles they cannot win and even if won, would not be of significant impact. Our ministries concentrate on remediation, not prevention. Even the struggle against abortion and homosexuality, important as they may be, are struggles against the symptoms of a Christ-rejecting culture.

Our best ministries are chasing diversions, leaving the San Bernardino Strait unguarded; that is, Christian children by the thousands are totally naked and exposed to the rabidly secular, anti-Christian teaching in the public schools. Just as Kinkaid and Halsey misjudged the intentions of their enemies and were tricked into making serious strategic errors, so today many Christian leaders are off in pursuit of lesser enemies while a major enemy force, the secular humanist left, is allowed free access to our children six hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year. What’s worse is that we Christians are paying our worst enemies to inculcate our own children with nonChristian propaganda through our taxes. And who is left to guard the children? Only a few Christian school and home schooling organisations, and a handful of teachers and parents. This is all that is left to face the leviathan government school system, the liberal educational establishment and their allies in most political parties.

These brave few are charging into the teeth of the enemy while many of our best Christian ministries and denominations either remain unaware of what’s going on in the schools or are unwilling to face the problem. They are pursing diversions and leaving the most vital battle areas unprotected: the future soldiers of Christ, whose minds are already being trained by the enemy.

It is difficult to convince Christian leaders and pastors of the imminent danger. Some will not take the time to study this issue and become informed, for to do so might compel them to leave their comfort zone. Too many pastors seem content to allow the secular humanists to indoctrinate their children during the week while they urge their members to engage in peripheral battles on Sundays.

Those who understand the absolute necessity of the Christian community’s recommitting itself to Christian education have no choice but to take on the battleships and heavy cruisers of the humanist establishment on the one hand and simultaneously cope with the flak from our own people on the other. Unbelievably our own church leaders are telling us to go ahead and let our children enter the enemy’s training ground, the schools, for there our children can witness for the truth. The church leaders won’t do intellectual, moral and spiritual battle with the humanist education establishment themselves, but they expect our seven and eight year olds to do so! At best this is ignorance. At worst it is irresponsible cowardice.

Folks, it is simply not possible to save the public school system. We must come out of that corrupt system, just as the children of Israel left Egypt for the Promised Land, and establish Christian schools that are thoroughly Christian, not just cheap copies of the state system with a few Bible verses sprinkled around. Far better still is to bring them home (an institution the Lord definitely established, something I can’t say about schools) and teach them ourselves. Jesus Christ did not sacrifice Himself so that we could copy the world’s systems, but to be a peculiar people of His own possession, thinking His thoughts after Him. You can know for sure that God did not pour out His wrath upon Egypt and part the Red Sea and lead the people out of there with a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day so that the Israelites could have the fun of packing a lunch for their little ones each day to send them back down that same road to Egypt to go to school! Neither should we render unto Caesar our children who belong to Christ.

(This is a re-write by Craig Smith of a 1997 article by E. Ray Moore, Jr., Th.M., Executive Director of Exodus 2000 found at http://www.christianity.com/partner/Article_Display_Page/0,,PTID21938|CHID122759|CII D364225,00.html)

From Keystone Magazine
July 2002 , Vol. VIII No. 4
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz

To order Keystone Magazine do one of the following:

send email to sales@hef.org.nz with visa number

post cheque or visa number to PO Box 9064, Palmerston North, New Zealand

fax: 06 357-4389

phone: 06 357-4399

Trademe (fees added):  http://www.trademe.co.nz/Members/Listings.aspx?member=2366144

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Parents, not TV,

Must Be the First and Most Important Influence

in Their Child’s Developing Brain

by Craig Smith¹

Both parent-child interaction and the child’s own experiences during the formative years profoundly affect two foundationally important aspects of the child’s future prospects: the development of the child’s brain and the degree to which that child will function to his potential. Most parents seem to know this on an instinctive level, and automatically talk to their infants in motherese, a higher-pitched voice than normal². They do this all day, even though the infant only gurgles and coos in response. All peoples world-wide talk to infants in this higher-pitched voice, and indeed it is recognized that infants’ brains are pre-wired to take in and de-code sounds until they learn the language – or languages – being spoken. Much of the research reporting these findings has been contained in scientific journals that parents would not customarily read. But in 1996 and 1997, Newsweek³ magazine and then Time⁴ magazine brought the findings of pediatric neurology to the popular level.

It must be noted that in 12 pages of coverage in the Time and Newsweek articles, television was never mentioned as benefiting early childhood development. Rather, the waking hours babies spend in front of a TV robs them of the time for parent-child interaction and their own play time. These two activities are crucial to the development of intelligence and imagination. The development time lost to a TV allowed to dominate a family’s time from birth through age five cannot be made up in later years. It is crucial for parents to understand this. Certain aspects of brain development only occur during certain ages, and a child who to some degree misses out on the appropriate stimuli during that period may be somewhat disadvantaged from then on.

Exploit the One-on-One Opportunities

Switch off the tube; scoop baby up for cuddles, smiles, talk and play. Sing to baby, put on classical music tapes and CDs. Play peek-a-boo, number games, hide and seek. Take baby for a tour around the back yard introducing him to everything there: the colours, the smells, the textures and contours; have baby reach out and touch leaves, spider webs, branches, bricks, boards and puddles. Infants love to be held and carried and talked to. They listen. Make this a nightly habit and your child will forever listen to you.

One could list such beneficial activities for pages. TV, however, would not appear on this list as a useful activity for young children. The difference is that the non-TV activities exploit the most valuable opportunities home educators and parents of young infants have: that of parent-child interaction and of allowing the child to explore his own environment under safe supervision. Playing with toys stimulates brain development. Repeated experiences, whether alone or with a parent, help “wire” the child’s brain. Advocates in this area believe TV should not be a part of a child’s environment until age five.⁵

Thinking Skills & Imagination

A crucial element within the skill of thinking is moving from the known to the unknown; that is, working out how to use in new situations knowledge and understanding gained in the past. Real life situations, of which home education is fully composed, requires this constantly. TV does not. In The Development of Children, Michael and Sheila Cole report on the work of G. Solomon who found that children who have been raised to do their learning from TV have lower than normal expectations about the amount of mental effort required to learn from written texts. That is, they reckon it should be just as effortless to read books or listen to a teacher’s lesson as it is to absorb stuff from the TV, and they are frustrated when they find it is not so. These children also tend to read less and perform relatively poorly in school. Indeed, research shows a direct relationship in preschoolers between amount of TV viewing and academics and social skills: The more preschoolers watch TV, the less well they do academically and the less well-socialised they are in the first grade. ⁶

Jerome & Dorothy Singer conducted field studies on children to see if TV can stimulate imaginative play. They subjected four groups of children to different types of classroom situations; two incorporated TV into the sessions, one was a control with no TV, and the last had no TV but an adult present to stimulate imaginative play. The greatest increase in imaginative play occurred within the last group.⁷

A child must learn to move the eyes back and forth across the page, while holding the head still, in order to read. While watching television, the eyes are fixed on the screen as well as the head being in a fixed position. Many children watch TV for four or more hours a day, learning that information automatically comes into their senses as long as the eyes and ears are all in a fixed position, focussed straight ahead. Otherwise you might miss something. The half-brother of our adopted sons has exactly this problem. From day one this now 12-year-old was plonked in front of a TV as a form of baby sitter. Today, take him for a ride in a car, and he cannot see the animals in the paddocks on either side of the road, for your eyes have to shift laterally to see them. Take him to the zoo, and he cannot see the monkeys in the trees just above his line of sight. When he reads, he laboriously moves his whole head from left to right, rather than his eyes alone.

Overstimulation

Werner Halpern writes about the potential over-stimulation of young children that may result from watching TV. This over-stimulation may tax their still-developing neurological systems, and that may result in a short attention span and hyperactivity.⁸ There appears to be evidence that the approximately seven minute length of featured TV programming between the ads may condition a child to a seven minute attention span. The professional story teller Odds Bodkin, performs before some 10,000 people a year, most of them children. After about seven minutes, he says, restlessness sets in as their inner clocks anticipate a commercial break.⁹

The constant high levels of sounds and rapidly-changing images can condition a child to expect similar levels of stimulation in other circumstances. You probably don’t fancy turning your home education endeavours into a show that rivals TV programmes in this way. Your children will be expected to speak, to listen attentively and respond appropriately, to work some problems on their own occasionally, to read and to write. Since none of these contain the same level of attention-grabbing effects of TV’s dual stimuli of sound and image, TV-educated can become easily bored and then restless. Anecdotal information suggests that one of the main reasons university professors are introducing power-point and other multimedia (sound and image) segments into lectures is to retain the attention of the TV-raised student. A chalk-on-the-blackboard lecture is less likely to keep students attentive.

Home educators are perfectly placed to give their developing infants and children a wide range of sensory experiences under immediate, loving supervision that is also interpreting, commenting and explaining the experiences. Interaction with a living and loving parent is infinitely superior to the one way traffic of a pre-recorded couldn’t-give-a-hoot TV show, no matter how educational it is.  Once the child has learned to read and listen actively with comprehension and discernment, able to sift fact from opinion, objective reporting from propaganda, then he may profitably watch selected educational TV shows and videos.

Notes:

1. Based on two articles at www.limitv.org

2. Dunn, J., & Kendrick, C. (1982), Siblings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

3. Newsweek, “Your Child’s Brain,” February 19, 1996, pp. 55-62.

4. Time, “Fertile Minds,” February 3, 1997, pp. 49-56.

5. www.limitv.org

6. Burton, Sydney G., James M. Calonico and Dennis R. McSeveney, “Effects of Preschool Television Watching on First-Grade Children,” Journal of Communication, Summer 1979, pp. 164-170.

7. Singer, Jerome L. & Singer, Dorothy G., “Can TV Stimulate Imaginative Play?” Journal of Communication, Summer 1976, pp. 74-80.

8. Halpern, Werner L., “Turned-on Toddlers,” Journal of Communication, Autumn 1975, pp. 66-70.

9. Graham, Ellen, “Going Tubeless: Some Families Flourish Without TV,” The Wall Street Journal, February 10, 1994.

From Keystone Magazine
July 2002 , Vol. VIII No. 4
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