RSS
As we’ve all heard 30 million times by now, the Hart-Risley study proved that the cause of The Gap in white-black test scores is that African-Americans are a notoriously quiet, taciturn, reticent, reserved, button-lipped race who listen only to Bach’s non-choral works and their favorite comedian is Marcel Marceau, and thus black toddlers hear 30 million words fewer than white toddlers.
But now it turns out that Science has proven it’s not the quantity, but the quality of the words. Apparently, you need the kind of quality you get when, say, the mother has a high IQ herself. And let’s not be sexist: it no doubt helps if the father has a high IQ as well.
SCIENCE
Quality of Words, Not Quantity, Is Crucial to Language Skills, Study Finds
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA OCT. 16, 2014It has been nearly 20 years since a landmark education study found that by age 3, children from low-income families have heard 30 million fewer words than more affluent children, putting them at an educational disadvantage before they even began school. The findings led to increased calls for publicly funded prekindergarten programs and dozens of campaigns urging parents to get chatty with their children.
Now, a growing body of research is challenging the notion that merely exposing poor children to more language is enough to overcome the deficits they face. The quality of the communication between children and their parents and caregivers, the researchers say, is of much greater importance than the number of words a child hears.
A study presented on Thursday at a White House conference on “bridging the word gap” found that among 2-year-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words — the use of shared symbols (“Look, a dog!”); rituals (“Want a bottle after your bath?”); and conversational fluency (“Yes, that is a bus!”) — were a far better predictor of language skills at age 3 than any other factor, including the quantity of words a child heard.
“It’s not just about shoving words in,” said Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and lead author of the study. “It’s about having these fluid conversations around shared rituals and objects, like pretending to have morning coffee together or using the banana as a phone. That is the stuff from which language is made.”
In a related finding, published in April, researchers who observed 11- and 14-month-old children in their homes found that the prevalence of one-on-one interactions and frequent use of parentese — the slow, high-pitched voice commonly used for talking to babies — were reliable predictors of language ability at age 2. The total number of words had no correlation with future ability.
Seriously, isn’t one logical implication of this line of thought that educated mothers should be stay at home mothers rather than hire Mayan-speaking Guatemalan ladies to mind their children while they work? But that never seems to come up …
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
wow, if this keeps up they’ll discover that parents who live with, interact with, feed, care for, change, shelter, sing to, play with, take for walks, bathe, and otherwise nurture their toddlers are REALLY bridging the word gap. Science marches on!
Steve,
How about mentioning Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought. In it he discusses language in terms of conceptual semantics. Those blessed with larger and higher quality vocabularies having a more complex system of conceptual semantics wired into their brains.
But hey that might mean talking about thinks like IQ and heredity.
On second thought never mind.
Seriously, isn’t one logical implication of this line of thought that educated mothers should be stay at home mothers rather than hire Mayan-speaking Guatemalan ladies to mind their children while they work? But that never seems to come up …
The obvious implication is that we need highly educated ladies to look after educated* mothers’ children. Those women’s studies majors need jobs too, you know.
It’ll be funny when there is a generation of children who are prepared to resist the patriarchy, but who have never met an adult man in their life.
*(and also not so educated)
If I do say so myself I think I made that point here in comments. I just picture some babymomma yammering on the phone in ebonics with her little one watching, soaking it up. These guys kept talking about “how many” different words a child hears–vocabulary; not how much talking goes on, which is all the “verbal stimulation” an infant needs.
In fact, since babies initially only respond to sound, tone and facial expression–they don’t know what words mean–the reality is, if black people are actually as much more talkative and social as they appear to be compared to whites, black babies start out in a much “richer” verbal environment that whites. Of course it goes downhill fast once things start to mean something.
Social scientists of course operate on the fallacy that anything done by or to blacks contributes to the Gap and other inadequacies, when in fact any given small component of their behavior, as distinguished from non-blacks, might actually work in their favor. They just fall short overall.
I suspect there’s so much bias out there researchers simply start with a given black behavior and then try to reverse-engineer their way back to its source in white racism and its contribution to black inadequacy.
I found that article to be racist, speciesist and non-inclusive. They don’t even *mention* how parrots and chimpanzees suffer from a HUGE language deficit their ENTIRE LIVES. Some parrots only develop a vocabulary of a few hundred words by the time they reach adulthood. Many chimps never even learn to speak AT ALL. That is a FACT. Please check my blog: Language At Negative 9 Months.com
Maybe children of parents with larger vocabularies have higher IQs because their parents have higher IQs and IQ is largely hereditable.
Just kidding; just an attempt at concern trolling. I hate those guys, but I'd like to try it out.
Answer: concern trolling is easy. Fuck those guys.
I find that agreeing with that argument a bit of a reach. It is not for a want of need that there exist wet-nurses and governesses. My grown children have suffered not a whit of inarticulateness despite having an Honduran nurse.
I certainly never suffered from the excellent cornbread and fried chicken of our Negro cook when I was young.
But we don't, apparently, see that need. Which would imply it's because it's genetic. But we can't mention that need or else we might accidentally notice the genetics...
Is the term “low-income” a codeword for black? What if mommy and daddy (or baby daddy) don’t themselves have a big vocabulary and thus don’t know any big fifty-cent words? Will the government hire and send in women-it’s always women, isn’t it- with advanced degrees in things like Queer Studies to sit and talk to the young ones while mommy hits the clubs?
Muthaf*&ah" is a big word. If the blacks I see riding public transportation are indicative, their kids should have that one mastered by 2 or so.
I learned a lot from TV and educational computer programs when I was 3 to 9 years old.
Some particular TV examples:
1. Mr. Wizard was a superb children’s show focusing on science. It didn’t just teach particular facts, but also abstract concepts like natural laws and the scientific method, and involved cool experimental results, even a few explosions, with the science explained carefully by the grandfatherly Bob Herbert.
2. The old Nickelodeon cartoon The Mysterious Cities of Gold presented a positive, traditional view of the life, times, and culture of early Spanish explorers, told from the perspective of a young Spanish boy. The story lines were really compelling too. I remember for a while when I was in elementary school I set my alarm clock early so I could watch it every morning at 6:30am.
3. Sesame Street, more than just the directly didactic segments, featured adults, children, and puppets speaking in an invariably slow, clear, and measured voice.
4. 321 Contact was a great math-education show on PBS, aimed at around the level of an intelligent 8 year old. The last portion of each episode was called “Mathnet” and presented an age-appropriate story each week of two detectives who use applied math to solve crime. Besides its educational content, it also imparts an extremely positive view of white police officers, a great antidote to much of popular culture.
I recommend all four of these to parents over most of the garbage cartoons aimed at children now, including the current inferior educational programming.
* I think you're confusing 3-2-1 Contact with Square One, the math-centered program whose last portion was Mathnet ("The story you're about to hear is a fib. But it's short.") Both programs were awesome educational tools, and remarkably entertaining as well.
* Both Square One and 3-2-1 Contact have had most of their master tapes destroyed (rather like the early seasons of Doctor Who) and are thought to be lost forever.
You know, we might make better progress if you didn’t say such hateful things. The iSteve community has such value to add to the current discourse, and for so many commenters to pollute the conversation makes it so less likely that anyone will hear our message.
Just kidding; just an attempt at concern trolling. I hate those guys, but I’d like to try it out.
Answer: concern trolling is easy. Fuck those guys.
I’ve always wanted to laugh at this notion that black mothers don’t talk enough to or around their children.
They do talk enough, it’s just that they only ever use two words. One of them is “mother.”
I suspect there's so much bias out there researchers simply start with a given black behavior and then try to reverse-engineer their way back to its source in white racism and its contribution to black inadequacy.Replies: @e
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t a bunch of linguists run to the keyboard to tell us just how rich is Rachel (of the Zimmerman fame) Jeantel’s language?
Someone later asks a Kane confidant why Kane went to so much trouble over it. The guy says something like "well, when the scandal broke the headlines read Kane Involved With 'Singer'. He was determined to remove those quotation marks."
Many of America’s young would be better off raised by dogs.
Worked ok for Romulus and Remus…
Modern educated urban Yank women have it backwards how they devote themselves their precious pups cum ersatz-babies.
Wow, what a great finding.
Do you suppose it applies to math too? Not the quantity of numbers but the quality of how they’re used in relation to one another?
Damn! All this time I thought I was doing great math with…
5555 + 7777 x 88888 – 889966544567788 + 887654567787898 + 6654323 x 776567787 = 0000000000.
http://youtu.be/EheLN-MDzrA
the prevalence of one-on-one interactions and frequent use of parentese — the slow, high-pitched voice commonly used for talking to babies — were reliable predictors of language ability at age 2.
I think we my be on to something here: black people don’t have sufficiently high-pitched voices and their children’s intellectual development suffers as a result.
I’m tossing this out there for anyone who wants to apply for some grant money.
My colleague had done anthropological fieldwork in Africa for at least several years. He later told me that the rising pitch, the yelling, and the speeded-up, inarticulate vocalizations we'd just heard were always a sign in Africa that trouble was to break out and he'd noticed the same thing among the Black underclass in this country. I've since observed for myself the same phenomenon several times in situations involving the Black underclass in this country. It seems to be race-specific. I've never observed anything quite like it among those of European or Asian descent. In my experience a rising pitch in situations involving the Black underclass is a powerful signal that bad things are about to happen.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
“Seriously, isn’t one logical implication of this line of thought that educated mothers should be stay at home mothers …”
What a vicious, sexist, misogynistic thing to say!
Staying at home and taking care of children would make educated mothers seem like … ugh … WOMEN, and no self-respecting modern feminist could stand for that.
So there will never be an acceptable answer to why the gap never closes. At what point does this create a crisis? If one must never say that human groups have different potentials while group differences remain intractable, there will come a point where these two things hit head on.
I suspect that Blacks will themselves insist on a re-segregation of schools. In that way the new afrocentric public schools could fail in their own Afro-way without all the humbug of equal performance on a White scale. It won’t be called failure. It would bee called “difference.” African Americans will be thought of as having a unique and unbridgeable kind of intellect. And of course this uniquely different kind of mind will be welcome in all venues.
As long as affirmative action holds sway in employment, Blacks need never be confronted with their own deficiencies. And we can carry them along economically as a regrettable but unavoidable cost.
I’ve wondered about black trends in church attendance and if that has something to do with blacks’ deficient vocabularies. For generations black Protestant preachers used the same King James Bibles as their white counterparts, and understanding its Jacobean English comes close to having to learn a second language with that bible’s currently uncommon English words and grammar.
Do today’s blacks go to church less and therefore receive less exposure to this difficult dialect? Or do their preachers use dumb-down Idiocracy bibles? Or do the preachers still use the traditional bible, but they have had to dumb down their teaching and sermons?
“Maybe children of parents with larger vocabularies have higher IQs because their parents have higher IQs and IQ is largely hereditable.” There’s always someone who comes along and spoils things.
Eek, Witch!
You must be exceptionally ignorant. The famous scientist Lewontin already showed us decades ago that while IQ could be heritable on an individual level, group differences are always caused by environmental differences. The other famous biologist Stephen Jay Gould even proved that there’s no such thing as IQ at all, and that Cyril Burt was racist. Racist bigots like you are going to be extinct within a generation. Whites are already a minority in the next generation. I can only hope you have no children so that they won’t inherit your bigotry.
I think Greg Cochran’s blog post greatly summarized this whole thing last year.
He turned me into a newt!
It’s not the quality of the words, it’s the passion employed in uttering them. Like this: “F*** you motha******!”
One rarely sees low-income black parents using baby-talk, reciting nursery rhymes, singing songs or playing games like patty-cake with their children. At least not in public. It is my experience that — other than dressing them up in designer infant clothes– ghetto baby mamas’ main interaction with their children is loudly threatening to beat them.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t a bunch of linguists run to the keyboard to tell us just how rich is Rachel (of the Zimmerman fame) Jeantel’s language?”
I understand Italian way better than I understand Rachel Jeantel’s version of the “English language”.
“…the prevalence of one-on-one interactions and frequent use of parentese — the slow, high-pitched voice commonly used for talking to babies — were reliable predictors of language ability at age 2.”
One-on-one interactions, yes. As for “parentese,” my wife and I have never stooped to addressing our children as though they were idiots, and I don’t understand why people do that: we did no referring to oneself in the third person (“Mama loves bananas”), no goofy pitch, no oversimplification of abstract notions, no dumbed-down diction. The approach seems to have worked well.
The idea that children won’t learn unsimplified language is moronic.
They will learn from unsimplified langauge, but they respond more to high pitches, and to 'funny' actions, and so forth. This is one reason why people do this. They LIKE the reactions that the infants give them. It's engaging. And because the parent likes the reaction they get from the child, they're more likely to continue in that interaction.
There's nothing wrong with engaging in 'baby-talk' with a baby. As the research shows, its beneficial, though not in the way some may think. Don't mock people because they do it. Do that enough and they may do away with the interactions entirely.
Maybe parents interact in more complex ways with children who are already developing faster than their piers based on the parents own expectations.
It is not for a want of need that there exist wet-nurses and governesses. My grown children have suffered not a whit of inarticulateness despite having an Honduran nurse.
I certainly never suffered from the excellent cornbread and fried chicken of our Negro cook when I was young.
Are you, like, 150 years old? Do you possess the elixir of immortality?
I certainly never suffered from the excellent cornbread and fried chicken of our Negro cook when I was young.
Are you, like, 150 years old? Do you possess the elixir of immortality?Replies: @advancedatheist
White Neoreactionaries should distinguish themselves by learning to speak in older forms of English.
I think we my be on to something here: black people don't have sufficiently high-pitched voices and their children's intellectual development suffers as a result.
I'm tossing this out there for anyone who wants to apply for some grant money.Replies: @Jus' Sayin'...
This reminds me of an incident from my mis-spent youth: A fellow faculty member and I were conversing while some distance off an argument had started between some of our college’s students and Black, under-class trespassers from a near-by slum. My colleague and I were both ignoring the situation which had been becoming more and more common on the campus. I had barely registered that the pitch and loudness of the trespassers’ speech had risen sharply when my colleague abruptly rushed away in order to separate our students from the trespassers, tell the students to get the hell out of there, and then tell the underclass kids that the police had been called.
My colleague had done anthropological fieldwork in Africa for at least several years. He later told me that the rising pitch, the yelling, and the speeded-up, inarticulate vocalizations we’d just heard were always a sign in Africa that trouble was to break out and he’d noticed the same thing among the Black underclass in this country. I’ve since observed for myself the same phenomenon several times in situations involving the Black underclass in this country. It seems to be race-specific. I’ve never observed anything quite like it among those of European or Asian descent. In my experience a rising pitch in situations involving the Black underclass is a powerful signal that bad things are about to happen.
This sounds absurd.
Do today's blacks go to church less and therefore receive less exposure to this difficult dialect? Or do their preachers use dumb-down Idiocracy bibles? Or do the preachers still use the traditional bible, but they have had to dumb down their teaching and sermons?Replies: @HA
“I’ve wondered about black trends in church attendance and if that has something to do with blacks’ deficient vocabularies.”
I met a gentleman who gave up an unsatisfying career in advertising to teach grade schoolers in Chicago’s South Side. He claimed he can easily tell whether one of his students is a church-goer, as they are the only ones who have mastered the very useful skill of sitting still in one place for 55 minutes.
It seems that whatever one considers to be the basics, there are even more basic skills that are prerequisites.
Quantity over quality is a very American mentality. Of course the quality of words matters more, but we needed Science to tell us so.
Steve, regarding this:
The reason that these mothers are working is not feminist indoctrination, generally. Not the married ones at least. Feminism is the ideological mask over the reality that two incomes are generally needed to live in a good neighborhood. In my metro a decent 3 bed, 50 year old house in an nice area (where the schools are still about half black) costs 500,000$. Few people are able to earn on one salary enough to support such a mortgage. The wife earns 60k in HR or similar added to husband salary of 80k, and there you have a 500k house.
“When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.” Amen.
Amen.
You *do* understand his question is tongue in cheek? Or at least meant to point out that *if* you took this idea of words seriously and it were true regardless of the genetic makeup of the children, then OF COURSE you would need the high IQ mothers to stay home.
But we don’t, apparently, see that need. Which would imply it’s because it’s genetic. But we can’t mention that need or else we might accidentally notice the genetics…
Peoples et. al (1995) already found that, even after controlling for the education level of the mother, there is a 15 point white-black difference in average IQ at age 3.
My colleague had done anthropological fieldwork in Africa for at least several years. He later told me that the rising pitch, the yelling, and the speeded-up, inarticulate vocalizations we'd just heard were always a sign in Africa that trouble was to break out and he'd noticed the same thing among the Black underclass in this country. I've since observed for myself the same phenomenon several times in situations involving the Black underclass in this country. It seems to be race-specific. I've never observed anything quite like it among those of European or Asian descent. In my experience a rising pitch in situations involving the Black underclass is a powerful signal that bad things are about to happen.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Freddie Prinze pointed this out 40 years ago in his standup act.
30,000,000 words in 3 years equals 27,397 words per day, or 1,957 words per waking hour, or 326 words per waking minute of the child’s life. Those numbers are preposterous on their face, as was the “study” that claimed those findings.
300 words per minute is achievable by professional auctioneers and hockey play-by-play announcers.
On second thought, it is also frequently achieved by rich white women in New York yapping on their cell phones in crowded public spaces. So maybe the numbers aren’t as preposterous as I originally thought.
Maybe you should move to a more refined and cultured city, like DC, where rich white women leave the loud public yapping on cell phones to the Negroes?
“Freddie Prinze pointed this out 40 years ago in his standup act.”
40 years ago would be 1974. I take it Freddie Prinze was not called out for being “racist”, because America in 1974 was not an extremely politically correct time period. In 1974 “Undocumented Workers” were still called Illegal Aliens by the mainstream media and there was no such thing as that b.s known as “White Privilege”. The mainstream media still referred to World War T as cross dressers.
“30,000,000 words in 3 years equals 27,397 words per day, or 1,957 words per waking hour, or 326 words per waking minute of the child’s life. ”
There are 60 minutes in an hour, not 6.
There are 60 minutes in an hour, not 6.Replies: @Officious intermeddler
Oops. Still preposterous, though.
It’s pure nonsense of course.
All observers of blacks, including Charles Darwin have remarked on the extreme loquaciousness of blacks.
Hell, blacks have even founded a rather horrid genre of ‘music’ . which, incidentally has outlasted all genres of ‘pop music’ by many decades, on their extreme loquacity.
If ‘rap’ is not baby noises set to a drum beat, I do not know what it is.
I’m guessing that this study – like so many studies on which such tropes are based – did not control for heritability.
That is to say that kids are not merely blank slates etched on by their environments; they inherit their genes from their parents too.
As for “parentese,” my wife and I have never stooped to addressing our children as though they were idiots, and I don’t understand why people do that: we did no referring to oneself in the third person (“Mama loves bananas”), no goofy pitch, no oversimplification of abstract notions, no dumbed-down diction. The approach seems to have worked well.
And I suppose your dogs read and initialed all your memos about household behavioral policies, too.
Must be nice.
On second thought, it is also frequently achieved by rich white women in New York yapping on their cell phones in crowded public spaces.
Maybe you should move to a more refined and cultured city, like DC, where rich white women leave the loud public yapping on cell phones to the Negroes?
“Quiet, taciturn, reticent, reserved.” Have you ever actually met a black person!!!
Only to morons. This is Science! and is accepted by all intelligent people. Only skinheads and bigoted racists question Science! because they are creationists or something.
That is to say that kids are not merely blank slates etched on by their environments; they inherit their genes from their parents too.Replies: @Realist
This is exactly right. I think that at least 80% of IQ and other attributes are genetic.
“Is the term “low-income” a codeword for black? What if mommy and daddy (or baby daddy) don’t themselves have a big vocabulary and thus don’t know any big fifty-cent words? Will the government hire and send in women-it’s always women, isn’t it- with advanced degrees in things like Queer Studies to sit and talk to the young ones while mommy hits the clubs?”
Muthaf*&ah” is a big word. If the blacks I see riding public transportation are indicative, their kids should have that one mastered by 2 or so.
One-on-one interactions, yes. As for "parentese," my wife and I have never stooped to addressing our children as though they were idiots, and I don't understand why people do that: we did no referring to oneself in the third person ("Mama loves bananas"), no goofy pitch, no oversimplification of abstract notions, no dumbed-down diction. The approach seems to have worked well.
The idea that children won't learn unsimplified language is moronic.Replies: @Half Canadian
“The idea that children won’t learn unsimplified language is moronic.”
They will learn from unsimplified langauge, but they respond more to high pitches, and to ‘funny’ actions, and so forth. This is one reason why people do this. They LIKE the reactions that the infants give them. It’s engaging. And because the parent likes the reaction they get from the child, they’re more likely to continue in that interaction.
There’s nothing wrong with engaging in ‘baby-talk’ with a baby. As the research shows, its beneficial, though not in the way some may think. Don’t mock people because they do it. Do that enough and they may do away with the interactions entirely.
Rachel graduated school this year and is, still, working with tutors to improve her speech. And she got another makeover. All of which I assume someone is paying for. Reminds me of Citizen Kane. After Kane is embroiled in scandal with a club singer who becomes his wife he forces her to undergo intensive training to make a real opera singer out of her, but she doesn’t have the voice.
Someone later asks a Kane confidant why Kane went to so much trouble over it. The guy says something like “well, when the scandal broke the headlines read Kane Involved With ‘Singer’. He was determined to remove those quotation marks.”
“Quiet, taciturn, reticent, reserved.” Have you ever actually met a black person!!!
It’s called irony. Have you never met a white person?
This black/white racial divide in America can’t and won’t ever be bridged.
They keep pumping out these studies year after year, but no one is willing to deal with the reality that Africans have lower IQ and they are not suited to monogamy. Without white cultural dominance, they revert to a low investment African family structure
No matter how hard liberals try, they can’t raise black peoples’ children for them. They want so desperately to help, but they ultimately just enable more disfunction. It’s a problem without a solution.
At some point there needs to be a separation, I think this is what most people prefer, and it’s in everyone’s best interest. it’s how this will come about that is the real question.
Whites made a cosmically tragic blunder when they allowed African slave labour into the country…it may well prove to be America’s downfall.
Dave, what are you, some kind of Nazi?
This all reminds me of the time I took my nephew to the local park. There was a black woman aged 50 or so with a small child. As he was playing she kept op this constant stream of observations and admonitions. The thing that surprised me a bit was about one of every three words was some variant of “fuck”, as in “Motherfucker, I fuckin’ told you that fuckin’ fuck-ass fuckin’ sand is fuckin’ dirty. Why the fuck can’t you fuckin’ listen when I’m fuckin’ talkin’?” To a kid who was maybe three or four.
Once you strain out all the filler you realize the crap to content ratio in her speech was amazingly high.
The funny thing is she wasn’t even angry. It’s just how she talks.
“Whites made a cosmically tragic blunder when they allowed African slave labour into the country…it may well prove to be America’s downfall.”
There is a small potential upside, though. America has learned, by truly and honestly trying to solve this problem and spending probably a trillion dollars to do so, that they did make a tragic blunder. If they hadn’t, and Americans had never lived around relatively large numbers of the more intractable blacks, can you imagine how gullible and naive Americans would be about racial issues?
We need a race to build a bridge over the 21st century Word Gap.
Some particular TV examples:
1. Mr. Wizard was a superb children's show focusing on science. It didn't just teach particular facts, but also abstract concepts like natural laws and the scientific method, and involved cool experimental results, even a few explosions, with the science explained carefully by the grandfatherly Bob Herbert.
2. The old Nickelodeon cartoon The Mysterious Cities of Gold presented a positive, traditional view of the life, times, and culture of early Spanish explorers, told from the perspective of a young Spanish boy. The story lines were really compelling too. I remember for a while when I was in elementary school I set my alarm clock early so I could watch it every morning at 6:30am.
3. Sesame Street, more than just the directly didactic segments, featured adults, children, and puppets speaking in an invariably slow, clear, and measured voice.
4. 321 Contact was a great math-education show on PBS, aimed at around the level of an intelligent 8 year old. The last portion of each episode was called "Mathnet" and presented an age-appropriate story each week of two detectives who use applied math to solve crime. Besides its educational content, it also imparts an extremely positive view of white police officers, a great antidote to much of popular culture.
I recommend all four of these to parents over most of the garbage cartoons aimed at children now, including the current inferior educational programming.Replies: @Melendwyr
I second your recommendation of 3-2-1 Contact. But, some additional notes:
* I think you’re confusing 3-2-1 Contact with Square One, the math-centered program whose last portion was Mathnet (“The story you’re about to hear is a fib. But it’s short.”) Both programs were awesome educational tools, and remarkably entertaining as well.
* Both Square One and 3-2-1 Contact have had most of their master tapes destroyed (rather like the early seasons of Doctor Who) and are thought to be lost forever.
Not as preposterous as what the NYT said last year:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/10/destination-8-months-and-29-days-before.html
In other words (if we presume the least possible value for “millions”, i.e., two million), each day, squeezed into the 12 or 13 waking hours, or 700 to 800 waking minutes, there are more than 1800 more episodes or events in which the children of wealthier professionals hear words. Two-plus episodes or events every minute?