How did I become a lecturer in one of the most prestigious medical universities in Japan when I failed all of my school examinations, and left school at 17 virtually illiterate?
The story of my life reflects much of what is wrong with education today, as it did when I was a child.
The answer to the above question is presented in the accompanying five books, which are summarized in this website.
The writing of these books, and the 20 years of scientific research that went behind them, was given impetus when I overheard a teacher remark how stupid the children were in his class.
The children I interrupted him, were not stupid. It was simply that they did not understand what he meant.
The teacher responded by telling me there was nothing wrong with the way he taught, and that his students were more or less born the way he marked and graded them. The problem is that this teacher, and so many, many I meet, did not really know why his students had trouble to learn, and so why they varied so much in their ability.
It was to explain what intelligence is, how it develops, and why it is not what we think it is, and so how students really learn that.
I devoted so many years of my life to produce these now seven books. These books tell the true story of how a student in school struggles to learn, why we must teach with a higher understanding of how their mind and brain work together, and so why our global school systems are failing to prepare the young of today for the world of their future.
Accordingly
our failing and the danger in this, is that we do not realise how the ways we educate children today are actually based on a modified political design that is 100 years out of date. It is because of this design, and the mind-set it created, that we believe each child thinks and learns their own way, which we mistakenly assume comes from the genes they inherited. This belief, however, enables school still today to economically place 50 or more students in one classroom with one teacher, and then not to be blamed for the difficulty those students have to learn. Despite what we may individually think, the design of the school operation is based on a reasoning that the trained and qualified teacher is generally beyond reproach and the learning of the student is up to their personal effort and natural ability.
It is to explain to all educationalists, parents and politicians
Why we are wrong to think that a student’s ability is rooted in a genetic factor of intelligence, and that their real ability is simply based on factors of language and emotion, that I have dedicated the past 30 years of my life to change the way school works. It is only once the effect of realising this is understood that school will seriously alter its syllabus to include new subjects.
Where did my work in education begin?
Some years later, and as I came to reflect upon why I had failed so badly in school and yet did so incredibly well when I went back to school, I started to dedicate my life to helping all children to think and to learn better in school. My purpose in doing this was not just so they would get better grades and a better opportunity in life, but much more because I realised school needs to create a new higher-reasoning model citizen, instead of the model it still produces today based on a 19th Century design.
My story
“The most important books I have ever read about a child’s intelligence.”
The world of our children will not be the same as ours. Yet, we are not preparing them for this.
Today, Roy Andersen is globally recognised as an expert in education
He is an expert in intelligence and is the inventor of “The Brain Environment Complex Theory,” which presents a new concept to what intelligence is and how children learn. He travels the world to explain why school fails today and why and how each school can raise the performance of its students, but more importantly why we need to prepare our children with higher skills for the very different world they must live and work in. Our failing in this will deprive them of the higher language skills they will need to maintain democracy in a world dominated by artificial intelligence.
Through his great experience in teaching he has developed “The Andersen Attitude Method of Teaching,” which is widely accepted as a simple but highly effective means for the normal teacher to dramatically improve the learning and grades of all of their students.
