Music and Education

I have a three-month-old son, and I work in education. You would think I would accept whatever help I could get to make kids smarter.

Not quite.

Some products claim to make kids smart. One popular product line is Baby Einstein, but there are many others trying to fill the baby education niche market.

Here's the problem - educational videos and software are not designed to effectively improve the intelligence of children; rather, they are designed to look good to adults who purchase them. Parents, especially new ones, are a sucker-rich environment for sellers of educational products. We feel guilty if we aren't giving our kids the extra edge to get ahead in life.

Guess what? Fostering a happy home environment, reading and conversing with our kids, and turning off the TV will benefit them much more than a video designed to cram facts into their little noggins.

Consider Einstein. Yes, he was an excellent thinker. But was he a human calculator? No, he had assistants work many of the calculations for him. This was in the age before computers, so it was a common practice. Einstein didn't grasp everything at once, and he was not forced to learn.

Einstein knew how to connect known facts and concepts in order to extrapolate into the unknown. This is the essence of creativity - walking to the edge of that which is known, and extending it beyond its current ending point by combining truths from various spheres of knowledge. Does your educational software teach kids how to do that? Probably not.

Teach your kids how to learn and how to make connections. Save the twenty bucks on the DVD and take them out for ice cream instead. Time with you is the real magic bullet.