Date published: 2008/09/12
The BBC says:
Children taught how to do magic tricks instead of attending standard personal and social education lessons perform better socially, a psychologist says.
Magic requires self-discipline and an ability to empathise with your audience, Prof Richard Wiseman told the British Association Science Festival.
His team thinks it could help with bullying and aggressive behaviour.
He has tested it by teaching magic tricks to children aged 10 to 12 in Herefordshire.
"Social skills are quite a difficult thing to take on board," said Prof Wiseman, a psychologist based at the University of Hertfordshire, who began his working life as a professional magician.
Children are usually taught about these skills in personal, social and health education (PSHE) classes, but Prof Wiseman has been trying out a new approach - using magic to teach citizenship.
He says learning a trick requires self-discipline, and performing it demands that the magician thinks about how the trick looks from another person's perspective.
"Tricks develop self-esteem, confidence and empathy. These are all useful traits to teach children," he told the conference in Liverpool.
Prof Wiseman compared children's levels of self-esteem and sociability after these lessons with those when they had attended only the standard social education lessons - where self-reflection and moral tasks were the focus.
He found that children were significantly more sociable and confident after the magic lesson than after the standard PSHE lessons.
This kind of "miracle cure" approach to education is made by some person or other every few months and the BBC always laps it up. It's hardly surprising that any single non-standard lesson would result in just about any sensible measure you like improving in students because such a lesson is not as boring as any standard lesson is, which comes on top of all the other standard lessons students have to put up with. And these salesmen can always easily come up with pseudo-scientific reasons why this approach must be right ("a trick requires self-discipline", blah, blah, blah), but it proves nothing. Magic is not a magic bullet.
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