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Cynthia Chen

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Reforming the education system to incorporate new findings about children

As a student myself, I am learning about many new research findings on how children learn and grow, leading me to wonder why this new knowledge isn't being incorporated into our current education system. I will give an example of two ideas that I believe would be beneficial to our education.

The first finding that I believe should be incorporated into how our educational system works is that certain age groups need a certain amount of sleep. For example, teenagers from 10-17 need 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep and adults need 7-9 hours. Here I am trying to functional at 100% on 4 hours of sleep, and I know I could be so much more productive if I got enough rest. This knowledge is so well known, why do schools not give us time and realistic goals to have us get this healthy amount?

The second is the idea of the Eight Types of Intelligence including Linguistic, Logical, Kinesthetic, Spatial, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and Natural. I just wonder how many kinestheticly intelligent children are diagnosed with things like ADHD when they just aren't made to sit still for 8 hours a day.

My idea is just to incorporate findings such as these to make education more effective and beneficial for the children and our future.

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    Maxwell McNamara

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    Nov 18 2012: Cynthia, I believe your initial idea is great. I agree that education needs to be tailored by the educator to best fit the needs of the students. I think your examples are lacking a little steam, but again, you have the right idea. The amount of sleep per night for children and adults I think is much more dependent on the time management skills and discipline of each individual student. I am a full time student, with a full time job, married, with a child on the way, and I still manage to get 8-10 hours of sleep a night. Secondly, I agree that the diagnosis of ADD/ADHD is given out way to easily without looking at the reasons behind a child's behavior. There are so many other factors that are involved with a child's behavior (discipline, authority, environment, etc.) that could promote behavior that is analogous to ADD/ADHD but is really just the result of other factors.

    Great topic, maybe there are other reasons and examples as to how we can best tailor and modify the education system to best fit the needs of the students.

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