Brain Gym and bad science

Astonishing blogpost from the excellent Ben Goldacre:

Brain Gym is a schools program I’ve been writing on since 2003.

It’s a series of elaborate physical movements with silly pseudoscientific justifications: you wiggle your head back and forth because that gets more blood into your frontal lobes for clearer thinking; you contort your fingers together to improve some unnamed “energy flow”; they’re keen on drinking water, because “processed foods” – I’m quoting the Brain Gym Teacher’s Manual – “do not contain water.”

You pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for Brain Gym, and it’s still done in hundreds of state schools across the UK.

This week I got an email from a science teacher about a 13 year old pupil. Both have to remain anonymous.

This pupil wrote an article about Brain Gym for her school paper, explaining why it’s nonsense: the essay is respectful, straightforward, and factual.

But the school decided they couldn’t print it, because it would offend teachers in the junior school who use Brain Gym.

Goldacre's post also mentions Emily Rosa and Rhys Morgan, two more children who exposed bad science and were shouted down by adults.

With Brain Gym teaching children nonsense like "processed foods...do not contain water" and costing £127,579.45 for Scottish schools alone, it's time for the Education Secretary to ban this schools program.

Perhaps some of the furious middle class lefties wanting to stamp out private schools might look at calling for their local school to ban Brain Gym in order to raise standards in state schools.

And if we raise standards in state schools, less parents will use private schools.