College Education

An article – I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told – in this week’s Economist, emphasises just how important it is to relieve poverty if we are to achieve equality of opportunity in education.

Three years ago, Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children. Apparently "those who had spent their whole lives in poverty could hold an average of 8.5 items in their memory at any time. Those brought up in a middle-class family could manage 9.4, and those whose economic and social experiences had been mixed were in the middle."

According to the article "working memory is crucial for comprehending languages, for reading and for solving problems."

Since Farah’s work was published, Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University have been studying the phenomenon in more detail. Their recent report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that the reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that children’s brains develop.

As The Economist summarises so clearly: "Children with stressed lives, then, find it harder to learn."

We’ve known for quite a while that stress was an inhibitor to learning in the short term. It is a shock now to find out that it could cause permanent damage to the capacity to learn.

Source: Clive Shepherd