Does anyone remember which famous dead white male actually did learn to read this way?

Just don’t try this in public, or at least not in front of your employer.

Apparently, even now, in modern America, there are kids who arrive in school who have never colored a picture, played with clay, played in the sand, held a book, been to a parade, listened to music, gone to a zoo or museum…….

It’s hard to believe, since none of these things need a lot of resources (I know, because we do them all with our kids…)
But teachers assure me there are lots of kids like this and it’s not hard to imagine that they’d lack the skills normally acquired by taking walks and coloring and going neat places.(My husband, ever the realist, points out: “When you spend 3000 on the latest TV and 100.month on cable and 200/month on games for your Xbox360, there’s not alot left over to buy the kids crayons on 30,000 a year……)

The research also suggests that action game playing might be a useful tool to rehabilitate visually impaired patients or to train soldiers for combat.

“It is certainly good training for people in situations where they need to detect things in their visual environment at any time in any location, like ground troops going through uncharted territory,” said Daphne Bavelier, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester.

Brian, it would help if you actually read the reference before you dismissed it. Google “hand eye coordination video games” and you will see a large number of references on this topic.

I remember from many years ago my mother commenting that young children may or may not be able to interpret a picture. If a picture shows a house and a dog, don’t assume the child sees a house and a dog. Find out. Ask leading questions. The child might just possibly be surprised to learn there is a house and a dog in that picture. Of course a lot depends on the age of the child. Here’s an experiment I discovered myself, not so many years ago. Take a new magazine. Turn it upside down and look through it cover to cover, paying attention mostly to the pictures. Then do it again the next day, and maybe a day after that. Then, after getting familiar with the magazine upside down, look through it right side up. You may find it surprising what you did not see looking at it upside down.

Interpreting a picture has nothing to do with perceiving depth in space, of course, but the point is that the normal brain develops many skills in the course of growing up. Some of these skills may be invisible to us, unless and until we know how to look for them. The normal brain also, I think, develops many compensations that can mask deficits. This makes it hard to discover those deficits. An example of this, and a very common one, is when parents discover their child needs glasses, though they had no clue before going to an optometrist.

So I would predict in the future we will hear a lot more about this sort of thing. If we learn to look for deficits in new ways, we will definitely find them now and then. When we find them, we will want to do something. Some of this sort of thing will be bogus in one way or another, I would think, but not all of it will be.

You don’t seem to understand your own references.  They do not support the claim you imply.

http://tinyurl.com/lnacj

I use the same hand-eye coordination to play video games as I use for surgery,” said Dr. James “Butch” Rosser, 49, who demonstrated the results of his study Tuesday at Beth Israel Medical Center.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4685909/

Engineer-Poet, I guess you better inform them that they don’t know what they are talking about.

So how do they manage to play all those video games if they can’t focus on moving objects?

A bunch of pixels on a TV screen isn’t an object.  It requires no change of focus, no decoding of depth cues.

Many school directors, principals, etc., do indeed get an education in how research is conducted and presented and also how to be a wise consumer of research. I have taught it to many, many, many of these folks over 30 years. Mostly, they ignore the education that they receive about research in favor of their own personalized knowledge, which is the type of knowledge that largely drives educational methodologies.

So how do they manage to play all those video games if they can’t focus on moving objects?