The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themselves by James Tooley

The Beautiful Tree is a great book for anyone interested in effective models of education in international development. The main thesis is that there are private schools for poor children in the slums of almost every developing country that are out performing their government sponsored competitors. Throughout the book, Tooley meets with development experts and influential politicians who all share one common belief: private schools are only for the wealthy. Tooley makes a great argument for why the private schools are often better: because if parents are unhappy with their children's education, they take their kids and their money elsewhere.

Tooley also exposes the inefficiency of the IMF, and argues that government-sponsored schools are a western model that doesn't even work perfectly in the west, and that this model is imperialistic. He backs his argument with historical records of private schools that existed well before the IMF was ever created. I think that he gets a little heavy handed with his argument that western school systems are imperialistic, but he also does an excellent job testing kids in both government and private schools and he shows that the kids in private schools learn better than their peers. He also provides lengthy data that the kids in  private school are mostly gender mixed and that their parents earn paltry sums, but value education. The private schools are very cheap.. most are less than $10 for a school year in the slums of Hyderabad, India.

Conclusion:
A good read, I would recommend it!

Consolidation: Proust was a Neuroscientist : part 1

Half of the reason why I started this blog is because I realized that I keep forgetting really awesome information because I don't take the time to assimilate it and write it down in my own words. Ergo, I plan to write simple summaries of the things I learn in my reading endeavors this summer.

Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer
Cool facts:

• In 1968, Dr. Motoo Kimura discovered that the rate of genetic change in species undergoing natural selection was 100 times the rate predicted by the equation of evolution.
• Why do identical twins have different personalities? Firstoff, the process of going from DNA to a complete structure doesn't happen the same way twice. This is why your left thumbprint differes from your right. It also explains why different parts of identical twins' brains will light up on the same task, and the brains will actually have different structures.
  
• Fred Gage discovered little pieces of junk DNA that jumps around the genome called retrotransposons. These scraps insert themselves into 80 percent of our brain cells, arbitrarily altering the cells' genetic program. The chaos contributes to our individuality.
• MSG specifically adds the flavor "umami," a Japanese word meaning "deliciousness." It is not dangerous for one's health.
  
• Odor receptors encompass over 3% of the human genome.
• Philsopher Henri Bergson's speech at Columbia University cause NYC's first traffic jam in 1913.
• Every time a rat recalls information, it must reform the idea and recode it, otherwise the memory shall be forever lost. Rats injected with a protein-blocker at memory retrieval lost long-term conditioned fear responses.
• It takes 3 months to die of sleep deprivation. Extreme insomnia, mad cow disease, and excellent memory skills are all caused by prions, or pieces of protein that can change form and function on their own.
  
• van Gogh drank kerosene, turpentine and absinthe on a regular basis.
  
• 10 times more fibers connect the cortex to the eye than the bundle that connect the eye to the cortex (all via the LGN).