The contemporary emphasis in our schools on academic excellence is silencing the natural curiosity, imagination and creativity of teachers and children. Academic learning rewards children for learning what is already known, it encourages reproductive thinking. Such thinking is important; we really don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

The question as to how much of the IQ is attributable to genetics and how much to experience has been endlessly debated by psychologists. It is far from an academic exercise. If the IQ is entirely inherited, for example, then there is little we can do improve the lot of the poor, or some racial groups who score low on Intelligence Tests. On the other hand if the IQ is malleable then intervention is well worth the effort.

In a recent New York Times article, Alison Gopnik (Gopnik 2009) summarizes several research studies that reveal a number of unexpected capacities of infants and young children. In these studies, young infants and children were found to have sophisticated and powerful learning abilities.

In one of my recent blog posts on Infant Stimulation I mentioned a book in which the authors promised parents that they could raise their child’s IQ by thirty points. To achieve this goal, parents had only to follow the program of activities described in their book. This bogus claim, which many parents take seriously, merits a blog on intelligence and, on infant intelligence in particular. Let’s start with a definition.

The Mozart effect is a phrase introduced by Alfred A. Tomatis to describe the purported increase in brain development that occurs when children under the age of three years listen to Mozart. Two researchers Gordon Shaw and Francis Rauscher at the University of California Irvine have been the most ardent promoters of this idea. In one of their studies, preschool children were divided into three groups. One group received private piano/keyboard and singing lessons. Another group received computer lessons. A third group had no lessons at all.