I share my story with you, for you to share with your students who feel they are failing in their education. I hope my story may give them some great hope in their studies and life.
“ Roy Andersen has been devoutly committed to improving education for 40 years.
Roy has experience of numerous and diverse work situations, and has travelled to over 40 countries and lived in five. He is deeply interested in how children learn, and equally concerned with the striking changes of this century, which he believes will redesign not only our thoughts upon people and work but also our social patterns. Both of which, he believes, are totally ignored by educational planners in their preparation of the future citizen. In general terms, he is interested in the stabilization mechanics of a civilization: The geographical, cultural, economic, military and social forces that give each people their identity. How our identity has been shaped by past technologies and how it may be shaped by futuristic ones.
At school, Roy did very badly and completely failed all his final examinations. He left school at 17 with no qualifications and was destined to spend the rest of his life as a factory worker. However, after a real life experience, three years later he went back into education and this time passed far higher examinations, all with distinction. He went on to a marine college and was recognized as the top student, qualifying with near 100% passes in all his examinations. He then sailed around the world as a naval officer. For many years, these differences in his academic ability at 17 and at 25 puzzled him. Yet, it was only in moving to Denmark that a chance arose for him set aside all other considerations and in reflecting upon his own experiences, try to understand how children learn and how they could be better taught.
To this end, he embarked upon academic studies in genetics, neuro-psychology, bio-chemistry, social anthropology, social and cultural behavioral skills, intellectual, mental, nervous and muscular disorders, principles of learning, the management and teaching of education, the planning and employment of human resource, political science and molecular technology. The culmination of these efforts are represented in the 14 books he has written about how children learn and how education works.
Roy has been a teacher for over 30 years in Europe and Asia. In the later case, he taught widely from infants to scientists, as well as working as a lecturer in a renowned medical university in Japan for 9 years, where he also ran his own educational institution. Since 1995, he has lectured widely on his theories and findings to explain how school works on social language, but presents its operation through a concept of intelligence.
Roy is a qualified teacher in the Feuerstein Cognitive Training System, a teacher to blind children and a specialist in Conductive Education for children with neuro-muscular problems. He is a specialist in dyslexia and teacher to children and adults with learning problems.
He lectures and has written articles on: Pre-natal Development, Infant and Child Learning, Educational Systems and Procedures, The Importance of Feedback in Learning, The Child, The Teacher and Their Systems, Human Resource in Society and The Effect of Technology on Social and Educational Polices. In 1998, his first book “Can Children Learn Better?” was published by Ungtryk in Denmark. “The Illusion of Education”, “The Hidden Secrets of Intelligence Revealed”, “The Brain Environment Complex’ and “Preparing Education to Serve a New World: The Global Citizen,” are regarded by leading scholars to be among the best written about school, society and learning.
Roy is the originator of “The Brain Environment Complex” theory.
“The Brain Environment Complex” presents a totally new concept to what intelligence is, where it originates and how it develops. This is the first time since Spearman published his version of intelligence in 1904 that a credible alternative has been put forward to explain how the human being learns to interact with the world about them.
The work of Roy Andersen represents nearly half a century of a personal struggle to understand the purpose of the citizen in the society in which they live.
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I wanted to share a little of my life to help teachers understand that a student who appears to have difficulty to understand them in their class, as I once did, only needs their love and patience to see the world as they do, and so the information by which they judge them. No child is born stupid, but too many are thought to be so because they appear to have trouble keeping up with others. They only need love and somebody to show them how to open the door.
“If you want to open the student’s mind,
you must first open their heart.”