Although Governor Miller may have had some very good intentions with the introduction of the program to supply parents of newborn children with CD’s or cassette tapes housing classical music, I do not believe that this was a very good decision on his part.
There may have been some evidence to support the Mozart effect at the time, but I do not believe that there was enough evidence given for Governor Miller to spend some of his budget on a theory that did not have a very large amount of evidence supporting it. Not only was this an issue, but even if there was fairly significant evidence supporting this theory, it did not mean that the parents would utilize the tapes or CD’s that they were sent. Therefor, may of the tapes and CD’s would go unused and the money spent on this project would most likely be more effective if it were spent elsewhere.
I completely agree with your post about how there is not a significant amount of evidence to support the Mozart effect, and that even if there was, there is no way to force the parents to play the music to see if it would actually work.
However, let’s just take a stab and say that there is some evidence to support the Mozart effect, and that all houses that are given the music to test it will be audio recorded, and if they don’t play the music they go to jail. Then, if the parents go to jail, the governor takes the children and has free will to experiment on them as he wishes. While this will hopefully never actually happen, if it does, how would the intelligence of the children be measured? Would Spearman’s general intelligence test be used to see if the children excel overall? Or would maybe Gardener’s multiple intelligence tests would be more suited for the testing to see which specific areas of intelligence the children excelled at. Even if this theory was to be tested effectively, determining how to measure the intelligence would be a completely different story.
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I agree with you when you say it was a bad idea to buy tapes based on the Mozart theory which had little evidence to support at the time. I’m not sure when he did this relative to his time in office. I feel like he bought the Mozart tapes as a political stunt to get more parents to vote for him in another election. If he really wanted to benefit children, he could’ve given the money to a failing education system in his state. Then they could hire more teachers for a year or upgrade their school’s technology.
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