Learning Disabled or School Disabled?

According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, my grandson is one of about 6.4 million children who have been diagnosed with ADHD. The symptoms of ADHD include inattentiveness in school, distractibility, inability to sustain attention, difficulty finishing school work, difficulty shifting from task to task, procrastination, and fidgeting when seated. In other words, if you can’t sit still at a desk for hours and stay focused on constantly changing tasks that don’t interest you, there must be something wrong with you.

Not surprisingly, the journey toward diagnosis often begins in school, initiated by teachers’ observations, one of the main sources on which psychologists rely when making their assessments. Once diagnosed, children become the focus of massive efforts to fix them, primarily so that they can function in schools.

Evidently, 11 percent of 4- to 17-year-olds share this diagnosis (twice as many boys as girls), and another 7.6 percent have some other learning disability. The number of diagnoses continues to grow, as does the multibillion dollar industry that has sprung up to address them — psychologists offering assessments, special educators, special schools, tutoring businesses, drug treatments. Various estimates put the number of children with prescriptions for Ritalin or Adderall somewhere around 2.8 million, and no one knows how many take these drugs with no prescription.

All these LD “interventions” rest on the assumption that the child is broken, not the school. Schools might make a few grudging “accommodations,” but rarely does anyone question the basic structures, practices, or policies on which schools have been built for centuries. It’s never the schools that need to be fixed.

Over the past two decades or so, thanks to advances like fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), researchers have discovered a great deal about the brain and how people learn. For example, no two brains are exactly alike. How could they be — given the complexity of this organ? Given the trillions of possible neural connections? Given the infinite individual variations in the strengths and weaknesses of the regions of the brain and networks that connect them? Think of all the different faces in the world. These endless differences emerge from just ten variables: a mouth, two eyes, a nose, two ears, a skull, skin, pigmentation, and hair. What are the chances of something involving billions of variables producing anything identical?

People readily accept that individuals can be reliably differentiated from each other based on fingerprints and DNA. Yet regardless of all that researchers have learned about the brain, educators continue to cling to the belief that it makes sense to treat children as though their brains are (or should be) the same — identical motherboards fitted with identically stamped circuitry. We have built a system of schooling on the myth of the “normal” brain, the comfortable belief that normal people must all learn the same way, that education can be standardized –standardized curricula, standardized course loads, standardized requirements, standardized teaching methods and lessons, standardized tests, standardized expectations.

Alas, this model hasn’t worked out very well. Each brain is a complex web of billions of neural networks, each a unique tapestry woven from different experiences, genetic combinations, and chemistry. Children come to school with profiles of cognitive strengths and weaknesses as different from one another as their fingerprints. As a result, they understand and wrestle with problems in many different ways. They need flexible environments that help them find their own path to learning and, ultimately, to meaningful work.

Stories abound of people who were labeled in school and tormented for having some form of abnormal LD and who became successful in careers in which their “disability” proved to be an asset: dyslexics whose different perceptual abilities suited them to careers in astrophysics, biology, engineering, physics, the arts, and mathematics. My grandson loves the outdoors and animals. He can explore a tidal pool or stare at an iguana for hours, completely absorbed. In school, he is considered ADHD; outside, he is a budding naturalist.

Neural wiring can certainly go awry and cause profound disabilities, like depression, obsessive-compulsive disorders, severe autism, anxiety, addiction. The list is sad and endless and includes real learning disabilities, like debilitating ADHD and dyslexia. But the behavior that results from the mismatch between rigid school practice and variable brain function should not so readily be interpreted as symptoms of a learning disability. Distractibility, difficulty moving from task to task, fidgeting may well be signs of boredom and suggest a school disability.

Thirty-eight years as a teacher and administrator in various independent schools and 15 years studying research into learning and working with neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (University of Southern California) have shaped my jaded perception of our stubbornly traditional schools. Alas, they are a lot like Procrustes’ iron bed. In Greek myth, Procrustes invited weary travelers to spend the night, but they had to fit this iron bed — exactly. Those who were too short, he stretched, and those who were too tall, he chopped, and, though the results were a bloody mess, everyone eventually fit. Schools seem equally obsessed with ensuring that all young people fit one iron notion of education. The results have been a mess.

Many educators know that there is something wrong.  The recognition of “multiple intelligences” and different “learning styles” or “temperaments” has led to some “experiential education” and “differentiated instruction” (and, occasionally, to truly differentiated schools). But so far, these efforts seem little more than a bit of tinkering — like Procrustes offering a choice of blankets. The system itself and the entrenched, faulty assumptions about how people learn remain unchanged. Diagnoses of learning disabilities continue to increase, and standardization marches on, right over my grandson.

At some point, researchers and educators may work together to create a new system — one designed on principles about how people learn rather than on how teachers want to teach because that’s the way they were taught. Dr. Immordino-Yang provided a glimpse into such a world in her study of Nico and Brooke, two boys who had half their brain removed to control severe seizures. When he was 3, Nico lost his right hemisphere, and, when he was 11, Brooke lost his left hemisphere. Yet both boys were successful in school and their social life. Despite the absence of the “creative” right hemisphere, Nico enjoys art; and, despite his missing “linguistic” left hemisphere, Brooke loves to talk.

In “A Tale of Two Cases: Lessons For Education From the Study of Two Boys Living With Half Their Brains,” Immordino-Yang wrote, “. . . their families and teachers may have played a major role in their recoveries, through allowing these boys the freedom to actively engage in their own learning, without restricting them to preconceived notions about how they would function or recover after surgery.” The extreme circumstances of these two boys forced the adults working with them to abandon conventional assumptions about teaching and learning and respond to what the boys could do and what they seemed to need in order to move forward.

Schools do not readily abandon or even question the preconceived curricula, requirements, or outcomes that they expect of all students, let alone the assumptions about learning on which they rest. In fact, most of the “best” schools tend to wrap their traditional expectations in banners of “rigor,” reinforcing the notion that if some children can’t “measure up,” they must be disabled — unable to meet the higher standards of the normal population. As a starting point for creating schools that reflect new insights into how learning happens, the belief in a “normal” brain needs to give way to an understanding of brains as infinitely variable. Of course, that’s only a starting point. Like those who worked with Nico and Brooke, educators must take their lead from the needs of the learners and develop a richer understanding of how learning happens. Educators need to study the research so that they can fix their schools and reduce the number of school-disabled children. They owe it to their grandkids.

Reference:

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, “A Tale of Two Cases: Lessons For Education From the Study of Two Boys Living With Half Their Brains,” Mind, Brain and Education, volume 1, number 2.

Originally published in Independent School Magazine Blog (National Association of Independent Schools), March 9, 2015.

Alden Blodget is the author of Learning, Schooling and the Brain: New Research vs. Old Assumptions.