Gates, Zuckerberg Team Up to Explore Kids' Brain Functions
By Carole Hornsby Haynes, Ph.D. May 15, 2018
Billionaire tech moguls Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are teaming up to inflict more damage on the unsuspecting American public.
The Bill and Melinda Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative want to pool their cool billions to explore kids' brain functions and math and writing – key areas of classroom learning that are crucial for academic success. They're focusing on children who have difficulty in learning.
Priscilla Chan is a pediatrician. Let's hope she knows how successful the old-fashioned cursive writing is for brain enhancement.
Gates and Zuckberg have already inflicted immeasurable damage on the American public but they are not content. There must be more they can do.
Bill Gates has finally admitted that, after the Gates Foundation outlay of more than $400 million to force American public schools to accept Common Core, there has been no improvement in education.
He fails to mention the $4 trillion burden that he and friend Obama have inflicted on the American public in their zeal to make Common Core a national curriculum. The standards deliberately dumb down students, make complicated processes out of fairly simple math problems, and have a decidedly pro-Islam, anti-Christian, and anti-American bias.
Announcing in 2005 that “America's high schools are obsolete,” Gates set about to break down larger schools into smaller ones, only to abandon that experiment when it failed.
Then swinging in the opposite direction, he stated publicly in a 2011 Washington Post op-ed that we should identify the top 25 percent of teachers in the nation and increase their class size by four or five students. Surely overworked teachers would be jumping with joy to help with that experiment.
Gates bailed out on that failed experiment also.
He experimented with teacher effectiveness using pay for success programs – that bombed, too.
He funded Common Core Curriculum Standards which he announced would “...unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching. For the first time, there will be a large base of customers eager to buy products that can help every kid learn and every teacher get better….”
A large number of customers eagerly buying red wagon loads of tech products from Microsoft.
Rather than suggest a return to traditional teaching methods, Gates is now off on another tangent to fix students – Next Generation Science Standards – deemed by academic reviewers to be even more inferior than Common Core.
Is this Common Core 102?
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook the social media giant, and his wife Priscilla Chan have introduced a digital learning program into schools that allows students to “take charge of their own learning” – code for students teaching themselves – while relegating teachers to the back burner as facilitators. The program uses education software developed by the Chan Zuckerberg initiative.
Facebook is under fire for its addictive social media platform and its new messenger app for children as young as six.
Given Zuckerberg's penchant for changing the world and how people think as well as the purposely designed addictive nature of Facebook, we can assume that philosophy has influenced the Chan Zuckerberg software.
Ideas being considered by the Gates and Zuckerberg joint project include the use of games and technology simulations to support teachers and family and tracking student progress among certain vulnerable children such as those with disabilities or those learning English as a second language.
The project's leaders say that technology is not the primary focus but do recognize the role it can play.
Since Gates and Zuckberg are considering the use of games – presumably video games – they should consider that there has been absolutely no evidence or research that shows video games can lead to increased learning.
In fact, ed tech executives know the games are addictive and can collect massive amounts of very lucrative data about the child’s behavior and interactions.
Microsoft has introduced a highly popular video game, Minecraft, into thousands of classrooms. With more than 100 million registered users, Minecraft is the best-selling computer game ever. According to Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, renowned addiction expert, the game is in “every way -- clinically and neurologically -- an addicting drug.”
What can possibly go wrong with this Gates/Zuckerberg project?