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Music, Mathematics, Dyslexia: The Other Ways of Organizing Information
Copyright © Renée Fuller, 1999 |
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"It's a disease, it's pathological. We must treat it before it's too late."
The concerned parents heard the dictum with dread. They knew that on their triple planets the new testing and neuroscience discoveries had demonstrated that children with high test scores in music, mathematics, and content organization, frequently were school failures. The latest form of neuroimaging technique had shown that such children have a type of brain organization that is frequently associated with an inability in making phonological discriminations. As a consequence such children defaulted in learning to read, and had "defects in language processing." That was the frightening destiny that faced their beloved son. If they acted immediately, treatment could be started before it was too late. The drug "R" was favored by many experts. According to its proponents, this drug allowed children to concentrate on the minutiae that had to be learned in order to become literate. Other experts favored the drilling of phonological discriminations in an effort to reorganize brain functions. Perhaps then their son's neuroimaging would look more like that of successful reading students. The government had already spent billions of credits in an effort to help children with such learning pathologies. Each year there had to be an increase in spending because the number of needy children with learning disabilities was increasing at a frightening rate. Which treatment should the parents choose for their beloved son? They had to move fast before the damage was irreversible. But even with treatment, their son would carry the label "learning disabled" for the rest of his life. He would have problems in college, requiring special dispensations which students could now demand under the Disabilities Act. Even future employers would be required to take into account his disability. As parents they had to face the fact that their son was different. He could not be expected to perform like the more fortunate without the disability label. Furthermore, there was the likelihood that their son's children would in turn manifest this same disorder. The news they were facing was indeed grim. Did you think you were reading science fiction? Not according to the READER'S DIGEST, or SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, nor even the NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, and not according to many of our senators and congress people who have been pouring billions, yes billions of dollars, into this problem. And yet there was a time, not long ago, when neither millions of man-hours nor billions of the national treasury were spent on our "school disabled children." I remember that time well. Because I was one of those children, who would now be labeled acutely learning disabled yet on whom no one spent a dime. Instead what happened was what neuropsychologists Herbert Birch and Marion Blank discovered in the early 1970s. Dyslexic children from homes where there are books, and whose parents read to them, teach themselves to read in early adolescence. Drs. Birch and Blank explained their data with the hypothesis that during adolescence new abilities come into play that make it possible for "dyslexic" children to teach themselves to read. Which would fit with what I did - using the very abilities that "dyslexic" children are said to be superior in - the capacity to contextualize, i.e. the capacity to organize content information. It happened during my twelfth year. The excellent school I was attending discovered during routine testing that I was barely reading on the second grade level. The homeroom teacher took me aside, showed me the results and whispered, so that the other children wouldn't hear, "You must do something about this." And I did. That summer I took out of the library, one by one, all of the OZ books, and knowing the content of the first, slowly deciphered the hieroglyphs. The first book took me three weeks, eight hour a day. By the end of the summer it took me only two days to read an OZ book. I had learned something very important. How to make my brain understand and do whatever had to be done. It has been a realization and skill that has been my resource and rescue throughout my schooling - all the way through graduate school. It also formed the basis for the learning system I would eventually develop for people like myself who, as Dr. Shaywitz of Yale with her MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) studies pointed out, are superior at content organization but fail to learn to read. Knowing what I knew about myself, why couldn't superior content organization be used to take the place of rote learning? That is what I had done for myself at age twelve. And after becoming a psychologist, and researching cognitive development for more than a decade, it seemed logical that the additional scientific and clinical knowledge I had acquired might improve on the techniques I had used on myself at age twelve. The effect of the improvements turned out much more dramatic that I had ever thought possible. For it was not only the "learning disabled" but the retarded and even four-year olds who were immediately successful with a content-loaded system. Now, more than two decades later, this phonics system which simplifies letter recognition and word building to the level of the 2 to 3-year old, and embeds the rote learning in goofy science fiction adventures, hasn't found a single learning disabled student. Not only does everyone learn to read, but they get great delight in playing the written language game, writing stories of their own, even writing letters expressing their grievances. These students, from four to forty plus, are aware that they are participating in mankind's greatest invention - written communication. At the same time they have demonstrated dramatic language and thought developments. Where and when did the idea get started that children who are poor at rote learning, yet good at organizing information, frequently good in math, and even in music, have something wrong with them - have a learning disability? Actually, the concepts of learning disability, dyslexia, etc. are new to this century. And only in the last twenty years have the "learning disabilities and pathologies" been popularized. There is an odd contradiction here, one that does not fit our age of science. The concept of learning disability runs contrary to what we know about biology. The fact that biologic organisms vary one from another is basic not only to humans, but even to bacteria. Biologic variability is a powerful adaptation of all living things. Which is why bacteria have survived and prospered despite newer and better antibiotics. Amongst social mammals, having different talents, (which is one of the results of variability) means that there can be division of labor. As the population in a social group increases, variability expands the potential talent pool. We have all benefited from the multitude of different abilities that have blossomed in our modern industrial society with its thousands of different talent niches. How can such success be considered as something having gone wrong?! But can some of this variability be counterproductive or just wasted? Certainly Mozart's talents would have been wasted in the Kalahari Desert, as would Einstein's. And Hitler's talent for mesmerizing crowds was counterproductive since it plunged us into World War II. However, that does not mean that the differences in brain organization that produce the variations of abilities are themselves either a disability or pathological. People who lack the ability to compose music, and that means most of us, are not musically disabled - although we may sometimes feel like it - especially if we cannot even carry a tune. With all probability the part of the brain which is utilized by musicians is activated in the rest of us for alternative abilities. Confusing "disability" with what are simply differences in cognitive organization is analogous to claiming that blue eyed people are disabled because the majority of us have brown eyes. Biologic variability, which accounts for blue eyes, is very different from, for example, the disability caused by glaucoma. Glaucoma is a disease, and therefore pathological. Both blue eyes and glaucoma have a biological basis. But whereas blue eyes reflect variability, glaucoma means that something has gone wrong and represents a breakdown of biological function. Those of us who are mislabeled "learning disabled" do not have anything wrong with us. Our abilities are merely organized in a different way just as the pigment of the blue eyed people is organized in a different way from that of the brown eyed people. The distinction between variability and disability has wide-ranging implications on both a practical and theoretical level. On a practical level it means that poor rote learning which, as Dr. Shaywitz and others have pointed out, is characteristic of the learning disabled, need not impair the ability to learn reading or other academic endeavors. To the contrary. Instead these abilities can be taught by alternative routes that bring additional advantages to all learners. As previously described, the superior content organization of those of us who have been labeled learning disabled can be used to teach essential rote tasks. Some of us can even become academic stars! Nor should that be surprising. Many of the great cognitive innovations have been, and are, being made by the very people we are labeling "learning disabled." You ask what harm has the labeling done, aside from humiliating parents and children? Perhaps we should ask how many potential Einsteins, Churchills, or Michelangelos have been crippled by this label. How many of our best minds have been turned off from scholastic achievement, which is necessary for their later work, because the "experts" have convinced them of their disability? How much of our cream have these labels soured? Is that why the top performance in our best colleges is reputedly declining? On a theoretical level the concept "learning disability" etc. implies that something has gone wrong, that something is pathological, and therefore needs fixing. The usual assumption is that the neurological wiring is faulty. Therefore the treatments frequently involve attempts to rewire through additional rote drill, often accompanied by screams of frustration. To dampen the screams and chemically insure attention Ritalin is then prescribed. The alternative theory is that "learning disabilities" reflect variations in cognitive organization. Further that these differences have manifested themselves in the diversity of human talents, which have created human culture and laid the groundwork for our industrial society. This theory suggests that: Neuroimaging technologies, instead of showing us the causes of learning pathologies, give us an insight into how different neural organizations are responsible for our different abilities. For population biologists this interpretation explains why, as the number of abilities in a group of social animals increases so does their ability to survive and prosper. On a human level this interpretation leads to the realization that cognitive differences, rather than implying pathology, have given us the arts and the sciences. They have given us so much - from poetry to novels, from painting to music, from mathematics to physics, even computers. And that is just the beginning. Rather than being cursed by the variation in our abilities - on which, in a vain attempt to correct, we have spent millions of man-hours, billions of the national treasury, and trillions of hours in misery - these differences should be regarded as our blessing, to be utilized to their fullest potential. Our cognitive differences are wonderful gifts. They have made us who we are. |
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