brain gym brain gym activities classroom

#Brain gym brain gym activities classroom how to

From crackpot conspiracy theories to fairytale nutritional advice, from alternative medicine to energy yawns - we just can't get enough of that musky, mudlike taste. Everywhere you look, we're down on our knees, gleefully lapping up neckful after neckful of steaming, cloddish bullshit in all its forms.

#Brain gym brain gym activities classroom how to

If we mistrust the real world so much that we're prepared to fill the next generation's heads with a load of gibbering crap about 'brain buttons', why stop there? Why not spice up maths by telling kids the number five was born in Greece and invented biscuits? Replace history lessons with screenings of the Star Wars trilogy? Teach them how to whistle in French? Let's just issue the kids with blinkers.īecause we, the adults, don't just gleefully pull the wool over our own eyes - we knit permanent blindfolds.

Alongside Brain Gym guides and wallcharts, it stocks titles such as Awakening the Child Heart and Resonance Kinesiology, which, apparently, 'holds information on how to move forward with truth, without the overlays of people's beliefs and ideas about what is best for themselves and others'. That's nothing: I read tarot cards for fish.Īnd check out the linked bookshop, Body Balance Books. Look at the accredited practitioners of the art: top of their list of qualified Brain Gym 'instructor/consultants' is a woman who is apparently also a 'chiropractor for humans and animals'. It's a festival of pseudoscientific chuckles where impressive phrases such as 'educational kinesiology' and 'sensorimotor program' rub shoulders with bald admissions that 'we are not yet at the stage where we have any scientific evidence for what happens in the brain through the use of Brain Gym'. Wander round Brain Gym's UK website for a few minutes. And also to the British Neuroscience Association, the Physiological Society and the charity Sense About Science, who have written to every local education authority in the land to complain about Brain Gym's misrepresentation of, um, reality. processed foods do not contain water.'Īll of which sounds like hooey to me. Other Brain Gym material contains the startling claim that 'all liquids are processed in the body as food, and do not serve the body's water needs. Brain Gym can also 'connect the circuits of the brain', 'clear blockages' and activate 'emotional centering'. Because while Brain Gym's coochy-coo exercises may well be fun or relaxing, what they're definitely good at is increasing the flow of bullshit into children's heads.įor instance, according to the Brain Gym teacher's manual, performing the 'brain button' exercise increases the flow of 'electromagnetic energy' and helps the brain send messages from the right hemisphere to the left. Perhaps the Department for Children, Schools and Families confused fantasy with reality the day it endorsed Brain Gym.

(Incidentally, if anyone disagrees with this assessment and wants to write in defending homeopathy, please address your letters to myself c/o the Kingdom of Narnia.) Not because of the sickening cutesy-poo language, nor because I'm opposed to the nation's kids being forced to exercise (make them box at gunpoint if you want) but because I care about the difference between fantasy and reality, both of which are great in isolation, but, like chalk and cheese or church and state, are best kept separate.Ĭonfuse fantasy with reality and you might find yourself doing crazy things, like trying to wave hello to Ian Beale each time you see him on the telly, or buying homeopathic remedies - both of which are equally boneheaded pursuits.

Throughout the report I was grinding my teeth and shaking my head - a movement I call a 'dismay churn'.