To be Free

Welcome back to the Cactus Blog. I was thinking in the shower (I seem to do a lot of my most productive thinking there…) about several articles I’ve read recently in different publications and making a mental commentary I thought I’d share with the Cactus readers:

It all starts with an article I read titled ‘The Hazards of the Couch’ (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/the-hazards-of-the-couch/?src=me&ref=health) out of a blog linked to the New York Times. The article summarises the results of several medical studies about the unhealthy effects of prolonged hours spent in front of a screen. It concludes that even people who exercise regularly offset the benefits of exercising by spending time in front of a television or computer screen in activities which I describe as vegetative and the article describes as dormant states for the brain. This dormant state is transferred to the rest of the body, slowing the metabolism down and making us addictively lethargic.

On the other hand, intellectually stimulating sedentary activities like reading, doing a crossword or a puzzle, also stimulate the rate of activity of the rest of our body and actually burn calories. According to Sharon Begley in her article ‘Can you build a better brain?’ (http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/03/can-you-build-a-better-brain.html): ‘taking up a new cognitively demanding activity...is more likely to boost processing speed, strengthen synapses and expand our functional networks.’ So the more smart-building activities we practice, the smarter we become, and apparently we burn some fat too...

This, of course, leads me to education, because one of the big controversies of the week is due to the article from the Wall Street Journal ‘Why Chinese Mothers are Superior?’ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html). Written by Amy Chua, professor at Yale Law School, she very eloquently and not without doses of humour and hyperbole, advocates a style of parenting which pushes children to develop their cognitive ability, expecting them to succeed in school and extra-curricular activities in a proactive way. Needless to say, Western-style parents (after the WSJ’s own denomination) are in uproar. Not just in New York but across the Atlantic too, you only have to type ‘Any Chua’ into the search engine of the New York Times or The Guardian to be bombarded with a wealth of opinions on the subject.

I am the result of a style of parenting closer to that of the ‘Tiger Mother’, although not so extreme, and as a teacher in my adult life, I cannot but advocate it: promoting intelligence breeds intelligence. We are all familiar with the debate about private schools vs. state schools, but children in private schools not only do better because they have better teachers and facilities, but because they are expected and motivated to. To quote ‘Can you Build a Better Brain’ again: ‘being told that you belong to a group that does well on a test tends to let you do better’. So children are expected to do well but also encouraged to do so by the fact that most of their peers will too.

Promoting cognitive-enhancing for children is fine, I hear you say. They have the time, but what about us adults? How do we stimulate our own intelligence? We don’t have the time! For us it’s all about work, the gym, housework, emails, car maintenance, banking, tax, and a very long etcetera. We’re overwhelmed by our mundane daily activities and never seem to get around to what we really want to do. I found an uplifting article about managing our time in the Evening Standard Magazine (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/article-23914187-have-the-time-of-your-life.do). It’s all about having a plan, apparently; prioritising our activities in terms of what we want to do instead of what we have to do, and almost always what we really want to do turns up to be brain-food too. It’s about being proactive and assertive about our lives and not just responding; not wasting our time: ‘the point of time management is not just to improve efficiency but to avoid disappointment and regret’.

I’m going to go and try to take control of my life now...


Guillermina Chivite for Cactus Music School

Why Creativity is Necessary

And always has been. Creativity is not only about art, literature and music, but about producing something new and useful. As in every generation before us, we are faced with new problems that seem unsolvable: climate change and the development of renewable energy sources to a large scale, a financial crisis the cause of which is deeply ingrained in the economic system of our own creation, finding ways to alleviate hunger and disease, and a very long etcetera.

According to Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in their article for Newsweek (‘The Creativity Crisis’, July 2010 issue) ‘creativity scores had been rising…until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward’. What does this mean? Well, to me it means there are less people in the world with the capacity to approach these problems and help find solutions. The driving force of progress in every step of our history is the many individuals who, through their independent or collective innovation cure us of disease, improve our technology, inspire us to rebel against oppression and generally move us forward. Bronson and Merryman continue: ‘The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1500 CEOs identified creativity as the no. 1 leadership competency of the future.’

If activities which promote creativity, like art and music, are not included and given rightful importance not only in the classroom but also at home, we will soon find ourselves in a Brave New World in which the class divide will no longer be as important as the ‘brain divide’. In a poll I read today in El País (www.elpais.com, 11^th Oct 2010) parents described activities they did with their children and ranked them in terms of how long they spent doing them: the first eight include taking them to school, eating and watching TV; not until item nine we find a creative activity like ‘reading a story’. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that people who practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better and that the habit gradually changes the neurological pattern.

Does this mean that, by not promoting creative thinking, we are hindering human evolution?

Guillermina Chivite for Cactus Music School

It's Education Season

Yes, it's education season and not a day goes by without a TV programme or an article in the paper that doesn't indulge in education-bashing. There are items for every possible audience: 

Three boys go to a private school: Britain's Youngest Boarders

A tour of stateschools: Unequal Opportunities with John Humphreys

DIY: Start Your Own School

What surprises me about all these documentaries and articles I've been through is that they are all negative and they all talk about education in an abstract way, like it's metaphysics. There's very little said about the effect different approaches on education have on the children, on what should and shouldn't be taught and how school is a mirror of society.

We are so worried about test scores and ofsted reports that we forget to ask ourselves whether the children are learning. Are we encouraging them to learn, to be curious, to help each other out? 

And of course, there's no talk about music. From our earliest recorded history, music has been a key part in education: In Pythagoras' school of thought, music was taught alongside mathematics. Many medical studies show that learning music at any age, but especially between the ages of five and ten, stimulates the activation of parts of the brain that wouldn't otherwise be used, develops spacial awareness, lateral thinking, social skills and mathematical reasoning. 

Why, then, is it so overlooked? I think, partly, because it is hard to teach well. Unlike maths or science, music has an intangibility that makes it difficult to standardise, and that makes bureocrats unhappy. So music teachers are left to their own devices, often with no support and very small budgets.

Music is possibly the most ubiquitous of man-made things (although the iPhone's getting close), yet it is tragically misunderstood. Surely we can find it in ourselves to change this?

We have arrived!

Cactus has finally got a blog... we hope you will find lots of fascinating things here very soon!

Hannah, Lucy & Mina x