Kurt Fischer of Harvard University is working to improve education through applying knowledge gained through biology.

Kurt Fischer and his colleagues looked at the revolution in brain scanning, genetics, and other biological technologies and decided that most teachers and students weren[base ']t getting much benefit from them.

Brain scans are now available to watch what[base ']s going on when someone is learning [~] or not learning. Finding genes that are involved in leaning disabilities is a hot area. Why, they asked, aren[base ']t the powers of such technologies helping teachers in classrooms?

"There[base ']s a long history of biology being excluded from education," says Fischer, Charles Warland Bigelow Professor of Education and Human Development. "Not in the teaching sense, but in understanding learning. We are not taking full advantage of how information from neuroscience and genetics can be used to motivate kids to learn, and how to deal with learning problems such as dyslexia and attention deficits."

At first, the idea didn[base ']t go over too well at Harvard. Other faculty members feared that biology could be used to unfairly classify children and to stigmatize slow learners.

Fischer and his team, including Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education Howard Gardner, put together a program that they called "Mind, Brain, and Education." But resistance was so keen, they jokingly spoke of it among themselves as "Mind [~] blank [~] and Education."

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5:11:51 PM