Category Archives: Musings

Creating Healthy Environments for Our Children

How can we create healthy environments for our children to thrive in today’s society? Hear what Dr. Bruce Perry has to say….

Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. is an American psychiatrist, currently the Senior Fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy in Houston, Texas and an Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois.

Montessori Builds Innovators

Few of us know adults who attended Montessori schools and often wonder what the long term benefits might be.

In his article for the Harvard Business Review, Andrew McAfee, co-director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy in the MIT Sloan School of Management, asserts that Montessori builds innovators:

There are strident disagreements these days over every aspect of American educational policy, except for one. Everyone thinks it would be great if we could better teach students how to innovate.

So shouldn’t we be paying a great deal of attention to the educational method that produced, among others, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Jeff Bezos, Jimmy Wales, Peter Drucker, Julia Child, David Blaine, and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs? They were all students in Montessori schools. According to a Wall Street Journal article by Peter Sims, there’s a “Montessori Mafia” among the creative elite. So maybe there’s something to the method Italian physician Maria Montessori came up with around the turn of the 20th century.

Read more here.

 

Why a Leading Professor of New Media Banned Technology Use In Class

Clay Shirky,  a professor of media studies at New York University, has banned the use of technology in his classes. Shirky holds a joint appointment as arts professor at NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts, and as a Distinguished Writer in Residence in the journalism institute. A leading voice on the effect technology, Shirky has been writing extensively about the Internet for nearly a decade, and admits that he is a “pretty unlikely candidate for Internet censor.”  So why the ban now? Read more here .