As I was testing perfect salad firmness of avocados in the organic section of the market last weekend, an old friend drew up next to me to squeeze oranges for ripeness. By “old” friend, I mean one of those mothers who vectored off into other circles when the kids hit middle school and stopped depending on us for play dates. As members of the work-at-home crowd of parents who showed up for all the volunteer jobs at the elementary school, we saw each other almost every day serving hot lunch or arguing construction budgets at school committee meetings or organizing foundation fundraising events. After I declined to run for the school committee, she won the seat and did a much better job than I could have, having just started a new job and spending three hours a night helping our son navigate the labyrinth of mainstream homework with learning disabilities. Squeezing fruit and vegetables somehow created a safe bridge for my old friend to confess the same frustrations of public school for her youngest child’s learning disabilities. There we were, two public school champions, taking the first step in the 12-step process of defecting to private schools: admitting the public schools failed for our children. The guilt was as pungent as the bin of brown bananas nearby.
When it became clear that not only would our son meet his academic potential in a private school setting but that he could do it without the struggle that strangled his self-confidence and made, by his own account, “every day an embarrassment” for him, choosing private over public school was easy. But our public school comrades hummed agreement in that curt way that makes their disapproval obvious. This is Marin, after all, so of course it looked to many of our modestly-comfortable or not-obscenely-wealthy friends like the privileged motivation of the typical indulged Marin family. There’s no reasoning with privileged people who compete for reverse status, especially when their children sail through the best public schools in the state without a hitch. So the transition to a private school in San Francisco wasn’t difficult. Not a day goes by, though, when I don’t think about privilege. We could never have chosen private school without investing a good chunk of our retirement savings in the years of tuition ahead of us. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about all the kids who need something more suited to their learning styles than the assembly-line, learn-to-the test version of education but whose families don’t have the savings accounts to afford it: The fifty percent of “juvenile delinquents tested and found to have undetected learning disabilities” (National Center for State Courts and Educations Testing Services); the more than sixty percent of adolescents in treatment for substance abuse who were found to have learning disabilities. (Hazeldon Foundation, Minnesota 1992). Not only can’t these kids pay for the education they need, there's no way they can buy the testing that reveals they learn differently -- not combatively or lazily or stupidly. Or the chelation therapies that will drain the heavy metals from their blood and ease the stranglehold on their brains. Or the diet and nutrition guidance that discovers allergies that give them brain fog. Or the MRIs that determine the precise attention deficit disorder and corresponding precise medication and therapy. To name a scant few.
We began our journey to determine our son’s learning differences just before President Bush promised no child would be left behind. But like all the rest that came before him since the post-industrial institutionalization of public school education, he was thinking to fix a broken system by means of that broken system. Think about it: learning support, IEPs, 501Ks, teachers’ aides, to name a few of the fixes available to children for whom the typical classroom fails to teach are just that --fixes like patches on worn elbows or seams taken in or let out of an ill fitting shirt. Unfortunately, the shirt and the pants and the jacket are all part of the emperor’s wardrobe. Public school is a system designed to meet the needs of only about half the students (if that) it serves – kids who can sit still in straight lines for hours on end staring at the lines in a book or lines of words on a distant chalkboard, and listen while taking more lines of notes in perfect outline format. Kids who can hold the question until the end of the lecture, remember it, and use the answer to verify the assignment that he completed in the meantime anyway. Who can divert spit balls and bird calls and pins dropping and the genius jumping ahead to the next problem all at the same time without losing her train of thought. Who learn by reading the text and succeed by acing the test. The other half of the student population has to figure out how to compromise their untapped intelligence, drop out, or go someplace where the shoes and the shirt fit. (Or where if they don’t, you can get in without them.) All for the price of a private four-year college education, which hopefully comes next by the way.
In the next four to eight years, we are hoping for the change we need in the way our government doles out health care and insurance, rethinks unemployment support, and reengineers the financial, automotive and environmental industries. It’s going to take a stab at education too, but like those other programs, the new emperor mustn’t try to fit into the old emperor’s clothes. The system must be designed from the ground up to teach all learners, not just the smart and easy ones. In the words of one private school's mission to meet the needs of all learning styles, the right system will ask "not how smart is the child, but how is the child smart?"
My friend was all smiles as she told me with breathy relief about finally, after several years and countless doctors and specialists and educational alternatives, finding her son the right learning environment. Her story resonated both joyfully and painfully. Her boy, who has a mild autism disorder and visual and auditory disabilities, goes to a private school half the time and sees a tutor the other half. “The brutality is over,” she said, referring to his (and ultimately their) struggle to learn in public school. “But the financial bleeding has just begun.” He’s lucky, that one, to be among the few children who actually need the privilege and get it. Oftentimes in a privileged environment, the ones who least need it get most of it and do less with it. Here’s hoping for change that meets the needs of students with different learning styles who will show meaningful results with a little more advantage.
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5 comments:
AMEN!!!!!!!!!!
It's important to note that many of the learning disabilities you mention here are so subtle that they look more like school struggles rather than disorders. In the same way a "right brain" learner fits the round hole of public school like a square peg, students with mild or treatable learning differences are not "special ed" children. They just need an environment that teaches to their learning style.
We know that the system was created (brilliantly if you think about it) to educate the masses, get the kids off the farms and into the sooty innards of the Industrial Revolution.
Think of Japan. They have a similar system and it worked well post-War when the Japanese took over manufacturing and electronics design. These are large-scale repeatable processes that the Japanese excelled at because of their education and their culture. When software became ascendant, the Japanese stuttered. Their economy hasn't been the same since 1990. The same thing will happen to the Chinese.
The Industrial Revolution died more than a generation ago, and it's time for a new system. The United States is the perfect petri dish to build a new system for the new 200 years because of our polygot society.
The biggest challenge, however, will be to figure out how to bring these multi-faceted educational approaches to a country of 300 million that, while it has lead the way in new technologies, still thinks on a mass scale--mass manufacturing, mass selling, mass marketing, mass consuming, mass educating.
Indeed, a new system is in order, and not one that returns girls to the drawing room or boys to pre-industrial age apprenticeships for predetermined trades. However, the idea of mentoring over learning factories is not lost on today's enlightened educators. Up until the nineteenth century, boys were mentored one-on-one by family and extended family. They engaged in verbal debate on issues of vital importance to the polis. According to Michael Gurian, family development and education expert, only until now have we begun to realize the possible flaws of industrial schooling -- beginning with what it lacks in human terms.
To Anonymous: In fact, aren't they all better described as learning styles rather than "disabilities" or "disorders?" The problem is, of course, without the medical label, access to support in even a broken system is non-existent.
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