Natural Law Party
PO Box 589, Orewa, Auckland
Tel: (09) 426 4563 Fax: (09) 426 1254 E-mail: nlp@natlaw.org.nz

MEDIA RELEASE

Orewa. November 20, 1999

Experience at over 300 schools around the world and at many universities has shown that the consciousness-based education that a Natural Law Party government would introduce delivers huge benefits to students and their teachers, says the leader of the party, Mr Bryan Lee.

"The published research on these benefits extends to well over 100 papers," Mr Lee said. "Identified benefits verified by this research include improved academic performance, increased intelligence, increased learning ability, improved memory, improved problem-solving ability, broader comprehension, increased alertness, improved school success, decreased examination anxiety, decreased dislike of school in children with learning problems and decreased dropout rate in economically deprived adolescents.

"These benefits can be delivered without changing current curricula," Mr Lee said. "All that is required is an additional lesson of about 10 minutes daily for each age group and a few minutes' daily practice of Transcendental Meditation.

"The results have been spectacular for tens of thousands of primary, secondary and tertiary students around the world."

Mr Lee said that the secret of this success lay in the holistic nature of consciousness-based education, as compared with the segmented nature of conventional education. There were physiological factors in brain functioning that conditioned both approaches.

Mr Lee quoted Professor Tony Nader, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, explaining how partial development of the brain, caused by prolonged study of fragmented fields of knowledge, could create lifelong imbalances.

"Professor Nader has pointed out that research studies have shown that for each type of activity there is one area of the brain that is enlivened and receives more blood flow," said Mr Lee.

"It has also been discovered that there are connections between neurons which build up depending on the experience. So when you only focus on specific areas of study, then there are connections built up in the brain that are specific to those activities. The problem is that you are not enlivening the other parts."

Mr Lee said that consciousness-based education used Transcendental Meditation to provide the experience of wholeness in brain functioning and unified field charts to give an intellectual understanding of wholeness.

"A unified field chart is a map of the discipline or subject of study which graphically displays the relationship between the parts of knowledge, the discipline as a whole and the consciousness of the unified field of all the laws of nature, which is the student's own consciousness."

ENDS

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