Belly Dance Tutorial

Teaching Children About Liberty – #SolutionsWatch

Published: July 13, 2021

I am often asked if there are good resources out there for introducing children to the ideas of liberty, economics, self-ownership and other important topics. One book series that I have begun reading with my own children and that I can recommend is The Tuttle Twins. This series of books recounts the adventures of an intellectually precocious pair of twins learning about important philosophical and economic concepts. Today we talk to the series’ author, Connor Boyack, about the books, how they can help you to open up important conversations with your children, and what’s in store for the Tuttle Twins in the future.

SHOW NOTES AND MP3: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=41960

TuttleTwins.com

Communicating This Info to Others – #SolutionsWatch

Libertas Institute

Connor Boyack’s blog

Economics in One Image

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Social classes and the huge economic disparity between them are made by design, through the efforts of the criminal ruling elites in the past few decades!

- Why you ask? -

Because ignorant and apathetic citizens are much easier to fool, sheepishly control and exploit, than the educated citizens with a strong sense of self and reason, common sense and worldly awareness.

Must wakeup and help your children learn, using love, affection and healthy foods, tools almost everyone possesses, or forever be an ignorant-class slave!

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Lifelines for Poor Children - Our educational programs do not start early enough

- By JAMES J. HECKMAN - September 14, 2013 - The New York Times

What’s missing in the current debate over economic inequality is enough serious discussion about investing in effective early childhood development from birth to age 5. This is not a big government boondoggle policy that would require a huge redistribution of wealth. Acting on it would, however, require us to rethink long-held notions of how we develop productive people and promote shared prosperity.

Everyone knows that education boosts productivity and enlarges opportunities, so it is natural that proposals for reducing inequality emphasize effective education for all. But these proposals are too timid. They ignore a powerful body of research in the economics of human development that tells us which skills matter for producing successful lives. They ignore the role of families in producing the relevant skills They also ignore or play down the critical gap in skills between advantaged and disadvantaged children that emerges long before they enter school.

While education is a great equalizer of opportunity when done right, American policy is going about it all wrong: current programs don’t start early enough, nor do they produce the skills that matter most for personal and societal prosperity.

The cognitive skills prized by the American educational establishment and measured by achievement tests are only part of what is required for success in life. Character skills are equally important determinants of wages, education, health and many other significant aspects of flourishing lives. Self-control, openness, the ability to engage with others, to plan and to persist — these are the attributes that get people in the door and on the job, and lead to productive lives. Cognitive and character skills work together as dynamic complements; they are inseparable. Skills beget skills. More motivated children learn more. Those who are more informed usually make wiser decisions.

These established findings should lead to a major reorientation of policies for human development. Because skill begets skill, the opportunity for education should begin at birth — and not depend on the accident of birth.

The family into which a child is born plays a powerful role in determining lifetime opportunities. This is hardly news, but it bears repeating: some kids win the lottery at birth, far too many don’t — and most people have a hard time catching up over the rest of their lives. Children raised in disadvantaged environments are not only much less likely to succeed in school or in society, but they are also much less likely to be healthy adults. A variety of studies show that factors determined before the end of high school contribute to roughly half of lifetime earnings inequality. This is where our blind spot lies: success nominally attributed to the beneficial effects of education, especially graduating from college, is in truth largely a result of factors determined long before children even enter school.

Improving the early environments of disadvantaged children is a promising way to reduce inequality, but conventional wisdom is to level the playing field with cash transfers, tuition assistance and raising the minimum wage. High-quality early childhood programs are great economic and social equalizers — they supplement the family lives of disadvantaged children by teaching consistent parenting and by giving children the mentoring, encouragement and support available to functioning middle-class families. Children in these programs develop foundational skills on par with those of more affluent children and create a stronger family structure for themselves. Caring parents and early stimulation are essential ingredients of successful early childhood environments.

Critics say that early childhood education is expensive and that it is not effective. They are right about the cost, but terribly wrong about the large return on the investment. Quality early childhood programs for disadvantaged children more than pay for themselves in better education, health and economic outcomes.

Proof comes in the form of a long-term cost-benefit analysis of effective early childhood programs. The Perry Preschool project was an intensive two-year voluntary program administered between 1962 and 1967 to disadvantaged 3- and 4-year-old, low-I.Q. African-American children in Ypslanti, Mich. The curriculum emphasized the development of self-control, perseverance and social skills in conjunction with basic cognitive skills. It also worked with the mothers to foster attachment, develop parenting skills and deepen their interactions with their children. The participants were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups, with the outcomes evaluated over a period of four decades.

Perry did not produce lasting gains in the I.Q.’s of its participants, but it did boost character skills that produced better education, economic and life outcomes. The economic rate of return from Perry is in the range of 6 percent to 10 percent per year per dollar invested, based on greater productivity and savings in expenditures on remediation, criminal justice and social dependency. This compares favorably to the estimated 6.9 percent annual rate of return of the United States stock market from the end of World War II to the 2008 meltdown. And yes, these estimates account for the costs of raising taxes and any resulting loss of economic activity.

A similar long-term early childhood study, the Carolina Abecedarian Project, better known as ABC, gave cognitive stimulation, training in self-control and social skills, and parental education starting in the first few months of life. The children were also provided with health checkups and health care. Four groups of individuals born between 1972 and 1977 were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups, and their progress has been monitored so far through studies conducted at ages 12, 15, 21 and 30. This program had lasting effects on I.Q., parenting practices and child attachment, leading to higher educational attainment and more skilled employment among those in the treatment group.

Most dramatic were ABC’s effects on lifelong health. Now, over 30 years later, those treated in ABC have lower blood pressure, lower abdominal obesity, less hypertension and less likelihood of metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular conditions as adults. This evidence clearly shows the power of quality early childhood programs for producing flourishing people with healthier lives, which increases productivity and lowers health care costs.

Why aren’t we moving forward and changing our ways by making investments in life-changing early childhood development for disadvantaged children? Two things: unfounded doubt and fear of doing things differently.

Our educational programs don’t start early enough.

Doubters say that high-quality programs like Perry and ABC cannot be replicated and scaled up. However private groups, states and municipalities have used these models to custom-build their own programs, and they are seeing substantial results and cost savings. What’s not working is taking away funding for these programs in the face of budget cuts. Also holding back progress are those who claim that Perry and ABC are experiments with samples too small to accurately predict widespread impact and return on investment. This is a nonsensical argument. Their relatively small sample sizes actually speak for — not against — the strength of their findings. Dramatic differences between treatment and control-group outcomes are usually not found in small sample experiments, yet the differences in Perry and ABC are big and consistent in rigorous analyses of these data.

These unfounded doubts feed our fear of taking new and more effective approaches. American public policy throws money at programs that don’t produce results as good or better than what is obtained from early childhood education.

What doesn’t work? Investing in smaller class sizes is not as effective as making sure each child has the foundational skills to do well inside the classroom, regardless of its size. Because skill begets skill, it’s common sense that adult literacy programs and many job-training programs are too little, too late. It is much more effective and cost efficient to create instead of remediate.

This is not to say that we should abandon all remediation programs; only that our focus on fixing downstream problems should not preclude enlightened upstream solutions.

Fortunately, the public knows that something is wrong and senses that early childhood development might be the solution. A recent public opinion poll commissioned by the First Five Years Fund found that 68 percent of voters think that only half or even fewer children begin kindergarten with the knowledge and skills they need to do their best in school. Eighty-nine percent say it is important to make early education and child care more affordable for working families to give their children a strong start, and a similar number want the federal government to help states build better preschools and make them more accessible to low- and middle-income children.

President Obama has proposed an early childhood initiative that combines family visitation, infant health and development, early learning, quality child care and more effective preschooling at ages 4 and 5. This is an encouraging shift in American policy, one that could significantly reduce inequality if it remained true to the evidence of what works — not to the politics of what is convenient.

Our choice in these difficult economic times is not just whether to spend or cut, but whether to choose knowledge over conventional wisdom. Will we put money in programs that pay off? Quality early childhood programs for disadvantaged children are not “entitlements” or bottomless wells of social spending. They foster human flourishing and they improve our economic productivity in the process. There is no trade-off between equity and efficiency, as there is for other social programs. Early investment in the lives of disadvantaged children will help reduce inequality, in both the short and the long run.

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James J. Heckman is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a Nobel Laureate in Economics.

Battushig Myanganbayar - The Boy Genius of Ulan Bator

- By LAURA PAPPANO - September 13, 2013 - The New York Times

Days before I was to meet Battushig Myanganbayar at his home in Mongolia, he sent me an e-mail with a modest request: Would I bring him a pair of tiny XBee wireless antennas? Electronic parts are scarce in Mongolia (he used components from old elevators for some of his projects), and packages ordered online take weeks to show up.

When I arrived, antennas in hand, at his apartment in the middle-class neighborhood of Khan Uul, in Ulan Bator, Battushig, 16, led me down a steep incline into the building’s underground garage to show me what they were for. Many children in the city play in their apartment buildings’ driveways, but this one seemed oriented in a particularly dangerous way. Battushig worried about his 10-year-old sister and her friends being hit by an exiting car. Standing in the concrete space, its aqua walls nicked, he pointed overhead to a white box containing a sensor from which he had run wires to a siren with a flashing red light outside in the building’s driveway. His Garage Siren gave his sister and the other children time to get out of the way when a car was coming.

Battushig, playing the role of the car, moved into the sensor’s path to show me how it worked, but it was clear he was not entirely satisfied with his design. “The use of the long wires is very inconvenient for my users,” he said, almost apologetically, clasping his hands together in emphasis. He realized that contractors would be reluctant to install the siren in other buildings if they had to deal with cumbersome wiring, so he was developing a wireless version. Thus, the antennas.

Battushig has the round cheeks of a young boy, but he is not your typical teenager. He hasn’t read Harry Potter (“What will I learn from that?”) and doesn’t like listening to music (when a friend saw him wearing headphones, he couldn’t believe it; it turned out Battushig was preparing for the SAT). His projects are what make him happy. “In electrical engineering, there is no limit,” he said. “It is like playing with toys.” He unveiled Garage Siren in August 2012, posting instructions and a demonstration video on YouTube. The project impressed officials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — where Battushig planned to apply for college — but at that point they were already aware of his abilities. Two months earlier, Battushig, then 15, became one of 340 students out of 150,000 to earn a perfect score in Circuits and Electronics, a sophomore-level class at M.I.T. and the first Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC — a college course filmed and broadcast free or nearly free to anyone with an Internet connection — offered by the university.

How does a student from a country in which a third of the population is nomadic, living in round white felt tents called gers on the vast steppe, ace an M.I.T. course even though nothing like this is typically taught in Mongolian schools? The answer has to do with Battushig’s extraordinary abilities, of course, but also with the ambitions of his high-school principal. Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin, the principal of the Sant School, was the first Mongolian to graduate from M.I.T., in 2009, and he has tried since then to bring science and technology labs to his students. “My vision,” he told me, “is to have more skilled engineers to develop Mongolia. To do that, everything has to start from the beginning.” In the past decade, Mongolia, which had limited landlines, invested heavily in its information technology infrastructure and now has an extensive 3G network. Most homes in Ulan Bator have Internet connections, and almost everyone, including nomads, has at least one cellphone. Even on the steppe, with only sheep in sight, you can get a signal.

Zurgaanjin had students watch the Circuits and Electronics MOOC lectures at home, just like thousands around the world, but he wanted to supplement them with real-world labs. Tony Kim, a college friend working on his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford, agreed to visit Mongolia for 10 weeks and guide students through the labs using real equipment. Kim brought three suitcases of electronics supplies, immediately making his classroom one of the best-equipped labs in the entire country. Because the class was not approved by the ministry of education, students had to take it in addition to their regular courses. Battushig persuaded his parents to upgrade the Internet speed at their home from 1 megabit per second to 3 (the average in the United States is 8.6) to make it easier to watch the lectures.

Battushig was one of 20 students, ranging in age from 13 to 17, to enroll in the class. About half dropped out. The course is difficult in any setting — M.I.T. sophomores often pull all-nighters — and the Mongolian students were taking it in a second language. Battushig, however, thrived. “I can’t compare it to a regular class,” he said. “I had never done that kind of thing before. It was really a watershed moment for me.” To help his classmates, he made videos in Mongolian that offered pointers and explanations of difficult concepts and posted them on YouTube. Kim, who had taught similar classes at M.I.T., told me, “If Battushig, at the age of 15, were a student at M.I.T., he would be one of the top students — if not the top.”

In the past year and a half, more than 100 schools, including Harvard, Caltech and the University of Texas, have invested millions of dollars in MOOCs. Many in higher education believe that these courses can make a quality education more affordable and accessible to far more students and eventually provide additional revenue streams for the universities that offer them. Critics, though, argue that MOOCs threaten the economic survival of nonelite colleges and are an inadequate replacement for the teaching and support of live professors. Anant Agarwal, a professor of Circuits and Electronics and the president of edX, a MOOC platform started last year by M.I.T. and Harvard, said that seeing Kim and Zurgaanjin combine his online lectures with in-person teaching spurred edX to help organize 20 such “blended” classes. “It was extraordinarily creative,” he said. “It changed the way I think.”

Battushig’s success also showed that schools could use MOOCs to find exceptional students all over the globe. After the course, Kim and Zurgaanjin suggested that Battushig apply to M.I.T., and he has just started his freshman year — one of 88 international students in a freshman class of 1,116. Stuart Schmill, the dean of admissions, said Battushig’s perfect score proved that he could handle the work. Schmill also said that although M.I.T. already seeks students from around the world, many come via special programs organized by charities or international schools. (Zurgaanjin attended the United World College in Wales before applying to M.I.T.) “The MOOCs may well offer the opportunity for us to get more students from remote areas who haven’t been in these magnet cultures,” Schmill said.

Battushig, who is now 17, settled into his German-themed dorm last month, a single in Desmond House. He has begun classes, including introductory courses in electronics, solid-state chemistry and biology, and had his photo taken with the renowned physics professor Walter Lewin (which he posted on Facebook). He joined photography and tennis clubs — and, he said, discovered that “I’m really a great player at billiards.” He is heeding his mother’s warning not to overindulge on pizza (he has a self-imposed limit of two slices a week). Battushig may be embracing student life, but as his father told me months earlier when we sat down to a family lunch of Korean-style kimbap, rice-noodle salad and cooked sheep: “He is thinking, all the time, how to solve problems. He has so many ideas. He often says to me, ‘I want to make good things for humans.’ If he does good things for humans, he does a great thing for us.”

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is an education journalist and the writer in residence at Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College. She is the author of several books, including “Inside School Turnarounds.”

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