The Samuelson Edu online curriculum trains cognitive skills through engaged educational activity. Students are led by the teacher’s voice and the teacher’s real-time work on the video screen to participate fully in the learning process through synchronized thought, action and feeling (aesthetics). The resulting whole-brain, dual hemisphere learning creates, through repetition, a stable cognitive platform upon which ever-more sophisticated skills-learning can occur.

Put more simply: a baby crawls before it walks. Walking is possible because crawling has already integrated movement, sight, and desire to reach what is seen. When this learning network is strengthened sufficiently through repeated crawling, a child walks naturally; in fact, he or she can’t be stopped from walking, as parents well know!

In education, likewise, growth of each new physical or mental skill depends upon solid ground beneath it; in other words, one doesn’t build on sand or wet cement!

For example, a successful sports team results from numerous skills, individually mastered, functioning supportively. A well-written essay likewise reflects a broad range of cognitive and language skills that must first be strong, and then can be used effectively to shape a piece of writing. Similar examples of a sequential learning process are obvious in math and science.

Today, education over-emphasizes, and even trains exclusively for, results, test scores, or “winning,” at the expense of the traditional patient training of individual skills (the results of this over-emphasis are most devastating in the language arts, because so many—practically all—cognitive skills are involved in language).

It’s as if the waving of a wand, or in our case the clicking of a mouse on an answer, or “strategies” to guess right answers, were enough to produce learning. One might learn random facts in this manner, but one cannot learn and stabilize cognitive skills this way.

Common sense and tradition tell us that only a patient and painstaking process of identifying individual parts, and understanding how they work individually and together, can lead to the stable, integrated outcomes, or “results,” we seek.

The Samuelson Edu curriculum strives to assist in this worthy process.