According to recent broadcasts, Humpty Dumpty was not irreparably damaged in his great fall and Little Miss Muffet has no particular fear of spiders.

The examples have been picked up in recent programmes on the network’s CBeebies children’s channel.

Last Friday’s edition of Something Special, aimed at children with special needs but popular with under-fives, included a version of Humpty Dumpty in which the lyrics were changed.

Instead of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men being unable to put him together again, they “made Humpty happy again”.

Tom Harris, the Labour MP for Glasgow South, who watched the show with his sons aged five and three, described the reworked version as “pathetic”.

He was also critical of a previous episode of Big Cook Little Cookin which Little Miss Muffet welcomes a spider that sits down beside her.

In his latest blog post, and with more than a hint of sarcasm, Mr Harris railed against what he sees as the excesses of political correctness. He wrote: “For goodness sake. Obviously children will find it far too violent, distressing and horrific that Humpty should not be put back together again. This is what happens when adults try to make these kinds of judgements.”

Mr Harris added: “So CBeebies rewrite well-known nursery rhymes and fairy tales so that Humpty Dumpty ‘is happy again’ rather than being left shattered and at the mercy of surgically incompetent horses. And Little Miss Muffet, the most famous arachnophobe in children’s literature, befriends the spider instead of getting her father to swish it with a newspaper.”

The BBC defended its decision to change the words, which it said was for “creative” reasons and not to sanitise the rhymes.

A spokesman pointed out that the nursery rhymes in their original form were maintained in full of the CCBeebies website.

She said: “We play nursery rhymes with their original lyrics all the time and the small change to Humpty Dumpty was done for no other reason that being creative and entertaining.”

Meanwhile, the children’s favourite Noddy will return later this month in his first official new book for more than 45 years.

But there will be no mention of the golliwogs, the black-faced wooden dolls that featured in his previous adventures, to avoid controversy.

The book Noddy and the Farmyard Muddlehas been written by Sophie Smallwood, 39, who is the granddaughter of Noddy’s creator, Enid Blyton.

She considered including the golliwogs, but decided against it because the characters now have racist connotations that did not exist when Noddy was first written in 1949.

Written by Paul Stokes, The Daily Telegraph, 19th October 2009

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More than 20 per cent of young parents claimed not to use them because they were not educational, even though experts said nursery rhymes played a vital role in a child’s development.

Professor Roger Beard, the head of primary education at the Institute of Education said they helped children learn about the rhythms of language.

“For instance Twinkle Twinkle Little Star has an enduring simplicity, which also allowing children and grown-ups to share in their wonderment about the night-time sky”, he said.

By Murray Wardrop, The Daily Telegraph

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For decades psychologists, teachers and employers have relied on IQ testing to assess people’s learning potential. The tests measure problem-solving ability and a person’s capacity for abstract reasoning.  Now, however, scientists are suggesting that short-term or working memory is a better and simpler measure of the skills modern youngsters will need in school and in their eventual careers.

Tracy Alloway, director of the centre for memory and learning at Stirling University, is to release the latest research suggesting that tests of children’s working memory helped predict their grades more accurately than IQ tests.
“Working memory measures our ability to process and remember short-term information. It’s about how well we juggle different thoughts and tasks,” she said.

“There is a great deal of variation between different individuals and it is becoming clear that it is a much better way of predicting academic attainment.”

Such findings are likely to prove controversial, especially as Alloway claims that testing working memory also avoids the cultural bias built into IQ tests.

Such bias has been blamed, for example, for the way different racial groups achieve significant variations in their average scores.

In her latest research Alloway gave working memory and IQ tests to 98 children aged 4.3 to 5.7 years in full-time preschool education.

Recently, six years on, she revisited the children, now aged 10 and 11, asking them to take a battery of tests to measure working memory and IQ.

She said:

“Critically, we find that working memory at the start of formal education is a more powerful predictor of subsequent academic success than IQ.”

Alloway’s research is due to be published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

Some link psychology’s new focus on short-term memory with the rise of the internet and other electronic databases which makes the ability to juggle facts and figures more important than remembering them for long periods.

Alloway believes there are other factors at work too. “Working memory assesses people’s ability to process information and keep track of complex tasks, so it is relevant to many aspects of modern lifestyles,” she said.
Other psychologists believe IQ tests still have a lot to offer. Robert Logie, professor of human cognitive neuroscience at Edinburgh University and an expert in working memory, said measuring IQ gave a far more complete view of a person’s all-round mental abilities.

He said: “There are many aspects to intelligence, and working memory is important but it is far from being the whole story.”

James Flynn, a New Zealand psychologist, has found that the IQ scores of populations in developed countries have been rising by three points a decade for the past century.

By Jonathan Leake, Sunday Times, 16th August 2009

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