Education: February 2009 Archives
This article about the link between gestures and future vocabulary is interesting, but fatally flawed.
Vocabulary size tallies strongly with a child's academic success, so it's striking that the lexical gap between rich and poor appears when children are still toddlers and can continue throughout their school life. What is it about a family's socioeconomic status that so strongly affects their child's linguistic fate at such an early age?
That's not striking to me. It seems very likely that socioeconomic status and "linguistic fate" are both effects of the same underlying cause-that-shall-not-be-named: smarter genes.
(HT: NW.)
Fewer kids means fewer teachers, so why aren't teachers' unions pro-life? This data is as-of 1995:
In this sense, abortion-on-demand already has produced a negative economic effect. In his book, "The Cost of Abortion," researcher Lawrence Roberge correlates the legalization of abortion with a slowdown in the production and sales of child-related items. He also estimates that the loss of millions of children to abortion thus far has precluded creation of between 950,000 to 1.2 million teaching jobs.
Considering how fiercely teachers' unions fight to protect their members, it's strange that they dropped the ball on this one.
