INTRODUCTION
The author recognizes that the issues of learning and teaching styles are complex, and can be viewed through many different lenses. In acknowledging this, I draw on many different disciplines, from psychology to education to philosophy and neuroscience. Some of the better known paradigms are Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence Theory, Antony Gregorc’s Mind Styles Model, the application of Meyers-Briggs Personality Styles work to education largely through the work of Hanson, Silver and Strong, the neuron-developmental medical model proposed by Mel Levine, as well as many others. For the purposes of this work, I have chosen to focus on the simpler delineation of more language based, sequential styles that favor the use of the left side of the brain versus those more visual, non-sequential, gestalt oriented thinking styles characterized by the right side of the brain. Although an oversimplification, I have found through years of observation that this simple division is easily understood and accessible as a starting point to help readers focus on the issue of learning style.
The Politics of Ability
By Harvey Melnick
PREFACE
Much of what we explain to parents and tell children about the reasons why children succeed or fail in school is dead wrong. We constantly fail to distinguish between cause and effect when we point to motivation as a factor. Our reliance on deprecating labels, characterizations, mislabels, misdirection, and blaming the victim cannot go on forever. Our willingness to support a system which daily results in immeasurable harm being done to untold numbers of children, their self-esteem and future adult vocational choices, and to society as a whole, is unconscionable and must end.
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Too many capable children in our public schools are failing, failing to
academically perform at their ability level, failing to acquire the skills and knowledge that are the fundamental building blocks society wholeheartedly believe schools deliver, and which provide access to future opportunity. Unfortunately, they don’t.
The reasons for academic failure are unrelated to most explanations which schools offer to excuse their own ineffectiveness. Explanations tied to individual student motivation, family socio-economic status or stability, surging hormones, or the need for newer schools (versus the real need to replace crumbling schools) aren’t the source of the problem. The students aren’t the source of the problem, the system is.
More recent explanations tied to multiple intelligences begin to identify a facet of the problem, but the difficulty is broader than accepting that intelligence is more complex than our current practices encompass. Given the number of years that this research has been available, what has stopped all schools from mandating training in compensatory (not remedial) assistance to alternative learners?
Too many students are caught up in a system not designed or interested in meeting their unique learning needs, and end up being mislabeled regarding their ability and misdirected regarding their future potential, made to accept lifelong responsibility for their failure to academically perform (i.e. learn) in the manner or style which matches the curricular expectations of most local public schools educational value systems. Given that most learning styles are brain-based and congenital, why isn’t the freedom to access meaningful (i.e. effective) learning resources for all students (not just protected groups) as much of a civil rights violation as blocking access to voting or freedom of religion?
Many students are failing under the weight of an oppressive host of hidden pedagogical values and assumptions which underlie most fundamental teaching and learning organizational methods; what we call public education. They are failing and being denied access to invaluable future education and training resources because of how they learn. The issue is not “dumbing down” curricula to meet the needs of alternative learners (after all, we are not speaking of developmentally delayed or severely involved special education kids), but “smartening up” teachers so they are willing (and able) to meet the needs of students who require different presentation and mastery methods rather than demanding that all students meet the pre-determined, inequitable needs of the school system’s curricular committee or director.
These sacrosanct pedagogical values come matched with desired and required methods of learning and accepted methods of teaching. These educational routines are so narrowly constructed (constricted) as to predict failure in those unable to easily mirror or navigate the learning strategies of the majority [left brain] learner or maneuver the largely subjective learning and testing criteria which have come to concretely represent how education is measured in most of its environments.
Individuals learn differently from each other: few would argue otherwise. Yet every day in most classrooms across the country, significant numbers of children are instructed in a manner which results in their under-performing academically, both in comparison to their peers but most importantly, relative to their true ability levels as verified by objective professionally administered academic assessment. In essence, a very real, underlying reason why a significant cross-section of students fail (now subsumed under an enormous variety of mislabels) to perform at their ability level, is that the primary (and heavily over-utilized) educational approach to presenting information to be learned is incompatible with those students’ most effective learning strengths and strategies, their dominant learning style (acquiring, retaining, and communicating information).
This leaves those who learn differently from the Great Majority to compete at the edges of their ability level, applying minimally acquired skill sets (eg. reading slowly with excellent comprehension) and under-developed effective methods of compensating for their learning needs in an alien learning environment (never learning to take notes in lecture in order to complement dominant visual learning style and compensate for deficits in auditory learning), in a classroom environment which favors specific modes of presentation incompatible with their own. No wonder these “different learners” fail, drop out, under-perform, or seek alternative learning environments at an extraordinarily high rate in order to maintain any shred of self-esteem and personal competency!
America’s inflexible, One Size Fits All Educational Policy fails to meet or match individual learning needs, and leaves as a result of its inflexibility, a significant number of students who are casualties of education, blameless victims who have been discriminated against systematically/systemically, and denied access to educational information and tools which would make them aware of and if desired, compensate for their different learning needs. By not providing those who learn differently with the access to resources needed to succeed in school and later in life, we foreshadow their eventual mediocre failure to perform while simultaneously blaming them for it.
Too many assumptions regarding what constitutes intellect, the analytic, verbal quantifier of logic, and definitions of what skills underlie ability (expressive writing and reading, and math/science quantitative skills) have become institutionalized in our society’s consciousness and most certainly within our educational system. This has evolved to the point where we appear to actually believe that those assumptions reflect some definitive, acceptable and “indisputably real version of ability.” We as a society appear to accept these arbitrary trends and criteria as if they were standards born of a greater, “true” reality, when instead these accepted guidelines more probably than not are born of demographic (left-brained, right handed individuals comprise approximately 85-92% of the population) or systemic needs (most teachers and students are right-handed, left brain learners) and historical “coincidences” (left-handedness’ long history of being denied, purged, and held in contempt) which have nothing to do with how children learn than any objectively determined, accurate gauge of ability or intellect reflected in the accomplishments of people such as Michelangelo, Edison, or Einstein..
At any given time in history, different lenses have been used by which to view ability. There was a time when birthright was all powerful, individual ability largely
meaningless. Times when brute strength brought with it the rewards of the day, and other times, when skilled labor or excellence in the trades learned via apprenticeship were the paths to success. Today that door to further education and opportunity is only opened with advanced language, math and logic skills. Creative and intuitive skills, though immensely important, are relegated to lesser status than logic and quantification. Had the world truly worked like that, it would’ve ignored Einstein’s 1920’s Theory of Relativity until the Research Scientists “informed” them It Was True… 50+ years later!! Just as there were times when the skill of reading held no importance or hold on one’s ability to be successful, today reading is a key to advancement. How can you become almost any vocation in our society today without proceeding through the maze of tests and the stacks of required readings necessary to gain admittance, study and practice? Similarly, strength in math in high school does not (necessarily) presage an interest or ability in higher mathematics. One who does well in high school mathematics may have the potential to be an accountant, but it is the visual/visionary right-brain learner who hardly ever succeeds in high school math (unless their IQ serves to balance the playing field) who, with the proper motivation, support and earned success, may one day contribute significantly to fields which require an ability to “see” the solution to the problem. Yet that “earned success” is elusive due to inequities in how mathematics is taught and how it is expected to be learned!
Yet as recently as the turn of the 20th Century, a time when only a few could read most communication, such as signs of commerce, employed symbols or accurate, pictorial representations of what services the individual offered within their establishment. For example, rather than a sign highlighting the word, “haberdasher,” the sign instead would bear the picture of a hat or hats to advertise the business: the tide has changed dramatically.
The invention of the printing press and the movement of reading from a skill of the rich and the few to the skill of the many brought with it changes, both intended and unintended, in education as a vehicle for “acquiring information;” i.e. learning. No one necessarily thought that there existed students for whom learning and testing, which required reading as the basis for communication, would present an even more daunting challenge than learning experientially by apprenticeship. The failure to appreciate this simple difference continues to have enormous real world implications which are often consequences of the unintended type on those for whom the current educational system holds sway but for whom it was not intended. Of course, “unintended consequences” are in reality an effect of mislabeling a failure to properly identify complex systemic interactions, which are then trotted forth as examples of the unpredictability of cause and effect, when they are really the byproducts of systems ignorance and a failure to appreciate (and understand) their complexity.
A longer-term result of this mindless, insidious, century long (and counting) process of standardizing educational needs on the dominant learning style of the a majority population has been to decrease the presence of creative and intuitive problem-solvers available as societal resources, and the establishment of an ever-narrowing academic aristocracy of those who fit the “left-brain ability” profile we currently are using, that of a language and quantitative mathematics/logic based vision of academic excellence, served up in a cognitive, sequential, passive fashion to all who are hungry to learn, no matter what their actual learning style might better dictate.
It’s time to sound a clarion call and challenge our education system’s demonstrated reluctance to teach to different needs, to take responsibility for those who fail to thrive and prosper under their mandated care; those who are marginalized and
then predictably but somehow surprisingly “drop out” of an unfriendly learning environment. Science and math both represent two classic areas in which many right-brain learners fail to perform adequately. Why? Both of these subjects, especially at the Middle and High School level, are typically populated by cognitive, left-brained sequential/linear teachers and accompanying parallel curriculum. Their primary audience (left-brain, right handed learners) who constitute the majority of students, feed directly into their approaches, an educational folie a deux ! Unfortunately this approach does not meet the needs of approximately 20-30% of the student population… How can we afford to jettison so many potential achievers and societal resources?
The time is at hand to act on this betrayal of public trust: can you hear the clock ticking and the time to act running out? This problem feels more like a time bomb waiting to explode and shatter the apparently universally accepted illusions of ability and a level playing field we all have been led to believe exists in school. Let us demand that schools embrace individual differences rather than allowing schools to conform their teaching methods and evaluative criteria to the demographic imperative of “majority rule,” which is inaccurate constitutionally (physiologically) but an accurate representation of the manner by which our current system is and was constructed.
Let us act now, not as a concession to lowering or easing our left-brain academic heritage (!) or standards (a patent, self-serving misdirection at best), but to finally trash a set of teaching methods and learning standards that are objectively failing to provide required, meaningful learning experiences for significant numbers of children and adults.
We must become aware that we have superimposed a set of standards which are more a default acceptance of the learning needs of the majority at the exceptional expense of the minority learner, than they are a representative set of meaningful teaching standards and methods which suit all. It is time to bring about some needed change within an inequitable yet publicly mandated system of education. Let us demand that schools stop blaming the victim for their inability to navigate the very narrowly defined channels of method and ability which schools now comfortably and universally prescribe, and do our best to provide those who learn differently (but are by no means substandard
learners) with an education which fits their needs and not the needs of the system or the majority!
This means that all knowledge really doesn’t have to be transmitted orally in a lecture format or in expressive writing, and that experiential learning in the form of apprenticeships is as excellent a learning opportunity as sitting at desks lined up in a row. After all, it wasn’t until the early to mid-part of the 20th Century that most Medical and Law schools stopped offering paths to professional credentialing based upon apprenticeships. The question is, in rejecting this path of education, whose needs were being met, those of a society intent on competent help, or those professionals intent on institutionalizing a process which was at once self-affirming and familiar? Like reinforcing like? Significantly, language does not have to be the only means via which knowledge is communicated. It may, instead, serve as an adjunct as in experiential learning, but it does not have to serve as the primary vehicle for learning acquisition and demonstrating mastery.
Expanding one’s definition of acceptable practices in education, even though not left-brain based, means that activity can occur in the classroom and be constructive versus detrimental; all learning need not be passively acquired in an overly structured learning environment to be termed education.
One needs to understand the fundamental, learning-based reasons why children perform below their ability level, before one jumps to incorrect assumptions and ascribes or assigns academic under-performance either to issues outside the control of the school or instead blames the children and parents for their lack of motivation, interest or success.
When you ask a child to read something in a given time frame, not only do you challenge their ability to read, but their ability to focus, read at an effective level of comprehension for the level of required reading, utilize their short-term memory to retain the information, and still maintain their Reading Speed at a realistic rate: all come into play. Reading for comprehension versus reading within a designated time from are NOT the same task! Failure to satisfactorily perform this task does not mean that you cannot read, or that your reading comprehension is poor. It does indicate that there is a discrepancy between your Reading Speed and Comprehension, which can most probably be remedially corrected. Reading as a function of speed (time available for the task) is a real difficulty for many students, but often more accurately reflects issues of reading efficiency rather than reading literacy.
In mathematics, a failure to grasp concepts presented in a manner incongruent with how one best acquires information (no matter the specific style) leads not only to poor grades but a disinterest in pursuing further study. These individuals remain marginalized until they are lucky enough to be in the classroom of a master teacher who can approach their area of expertise from a number of perspectives which is inclusive versus exclusionary!
If you have trouble later accessing and utilizing information you hear in lectures classes for later learning, then most probably lecture classes aren’t very relevant or effective vehicles for learning, yet they dominate Middle through college class offerings. . If you read slowly but have excellent comprehension, reading to meet rigid timeframes isn’t the most efficient method for you to use to acquire new information, yet until very recently, most reading resources were unavailable on audiotape, or in digitized format available on a computer.
Similarly, just because you can solve a mathematics equation “in your head,” but you cannot show your work, does not mean that you “didn’t understand” the math!
It does mean that how you learn, how you are taught, and how your learning is measured may conflict with each other and usually will influence how others assess the effectiveness of how you were taught or how successfully you learned: i.e. how smart you are. And what the student learns is that “they don’t like math or science, “or“ they don’t like to read…” And from roots such as this the Myth of the Underachiever are born…
It is time to take action and question the very foundation of how we offer learning, i.e. why and how we teach what we teach, and how we as a society require learning be demonstrated. We must no longer allow educational failure to be mislabeled as a product of its own design, attributed to lack of ability or motivation. We need to
more closely question how we assess and value ability and how we define intelligence while neglecting those who demonstrate alternative learning needs.
Most importantly, we must immediately and consciously assess how all of these biases inherent in our educational system and society combine to deny individual
opportunity throughout society. One way that these biases are perpetuated is by limiting entry into advanced study programs by requiring that access be granted only after required formal testing procedures are administered. These tests as well as the process necessary to get to the point of taking the test are, as often as not, very narrowly conceived of in their representation and testing of intelligence and ability as a whole.
From the ACT’s to the SAT’s and SSAT’s, from the GRE’s., GMAT’s and LSAT’s to the MAT’s, all of these “admissions tests” essentially reflect competencies in language and mathematics, a continuum of ability designed to reward those who think in a similar manner and are facile in expressing themselves in the style in which these tests are constructed..
This evolutionary, insidious process by which admissions criteria have come to be defined has instead produced and continues to produce a paucity of creativity in many standard professions, while tracking creative individuals into stereotypical careers.
This can be easily seen in the manner in which Big Business has taken over the film making and music industries, or how corporate America has come to over-rely on cutting jobs or engaging in mergers as a strategy for improving profits. The quantitative criteria that business superimposes as a definition of success doesn’t necessarily fit these industries real need for innovative growth any more than the same business models fits the reorganization of schools to meet the learning needs of those who are disenfranchised or marginalized. Instead, the figural presence of the business paradigm as a panacea demonstrates most organization’s abject inability to generate original thinking or creative
solutions to their troubles within their own system. Another indicator is the litigious society in which we live, where we all have been brainwashed into believing that cause and effect defines reality, and that there is someone, somewhere responsible for every event which does not conform to our flawed but perceived notions of logic, ideas which have been superimposed and unilaterally accepted throughout most if not on all of society.
An excellent current analogy from the field of science may be drawn
between Newtonian Physics (The Laws of Motion) and Quantum Physics (The Theory of Relativity), where we have come to the understanding that what we see (and is “apparent” and observable (Newtonian laws) is not always a factually accurate reflection of reality (Quantum mechanics) on a more molecular level of observation.
It is also our observation that right brain learners are massively under-represented within what has increasingly come to thought of as “left-brain” or analytic, sequential, detail oriented fields of endeavor, such as accounting, law, medicine, clerical managers or high school math and science teaching. Similarly, right brain thinkers, many of whom are left-handed represent about 10% of the population, they represent about 30% of musicians. Unfortunately, they are also more highly represented in dead end clerical and service positions if casual observation is any indicator. We are tracking individuals into lifelong vocational roles based upon invalid assumptions regarding the relationship between how they learn and how their learning is or isn’t appropriate to that vocation based upon how we reward or reinforce performance within our traditional system of
education. This massive systemic assumption has then led to an over-representation of one type of learner in certain professions and a paucity of other types of learners.
Indeed, our standard of judgment regarding the efficacy of our educational system should rest upon not how we serve the majority learner who most easily fits into the standards that have been accepted and swallowed whole by society, but how we as a society meet the needs of those unwitting victims of alternative learning needs, who are forced to enter an educational system which is unprepared and apparently often unwilling to effectively meet their learning needs.
Be assured: if this insidious manipulation of what constitutes ability and self-fulfilling prophecy of what defines intelligence in our society isn’t soon addressed, there will continue to be significant casualties of education through no fault of their own. There also will be few people left available to provide the kinds of innovative perspectives which have resulted in the contributions of individuals like Einstein, and other great conceptual thinkers. who were born to think outside the box. For had they been born into today’s system of education, they too would have been labeled as different learners as they were during their own time, excluded from access to more advanced educational opportunities, and left to their own devices to succeed. The only difference now is that now the requirements are more rigid, the opportunities to circumvent the system less evident.
So we are left then with the question: What is ability? There are numerous definitions, some pertaining to performance within academic environments, others in regard to the skills and training necessary to succeed at a variety of vocations, still others that bespeak “talent.”
Over the ages ability has been defined as potential, and potential has been realized partially through education and training opportunities which assure access: access to a variety of resources and opportunities which allows one to achieve something in life we term success, however we may define that elusive goal.
Success has been defined many different ways over time, but in essence, success reflects levels of achievement as defined by the cultural standards and norms of the day.
If we look back in history, we can begin to piece together a relationship between accepted, stereotypical cultural beliefs regarding ability and one’s capacity to achieve success in that society or culture. Note for example, the special privileges of royalty, or the ignorant stereotypes society regularly perpetrates on anyone who exhibits differences from the majority, typically those of race, religion, national origin or gender: i.e. those with a minority representation in the total population. If we look a bit closer we easily come to the conclusion that many of these beliefs of an era or region, as they relate to ability, were more often than not myth rather than reality, and tied to maintaining power versus providing access and equal opportunity.
Across certain eras or geographic locations, membership in specific religious groups provided members with access to a greater array of rights and permissions than those who were not part of that religious belief system, such as in the early years of the Catholic Church relative to the demands of Protestants. Privileges and access to resources were granted solely upon membership in that dominant group. We see it today in the desire to break through the “glass ceiling” for women and minorities so they may achieve at a level commensurate with their ability and numbers.
Indeed, in most instances of these types of discrimination, as beliefs diversified, members of other belief systems began to note and protest the imbalanced playing field that a dominant, partisan definition of ability imposed on all citizens, regardless of their true competency.
In the history of the United States, we can see how the belief in racial superiority and inferiority served as a cornerstone for access to everything from owning land, having the right to vote or even marry without permission. If you were “white you were right,” if you were Black, “get back.” If you were African-American you were denied easy access to education, especially higher education. Indeed during the times of slavery, even learning to read and write was illegal for African-Americans, and later, in a less visible manner, access to better, “higher” education was and still is denied. Once a clear light was placed on this institutionalized racism, the result was a revolt against the prejudicial assumptions which provide the foundation for most racial beliefs, especially as it supported the concept of racial inferiority which served as the basis for denying equal access to education.
There are untold cultural stereotypes which have existed and continue to exist in which neighboring countries, religions, caste systems, ethnic groups etc. define themselves as superior in relation to other groups, primarily based upon ethnic and cultural differences. Often these biases are complicated by issues which cross over
ethnic or cultural differences to include religious differences, reflecting centuries old belief systems.
The Twentieth Century has seen its share of myths exploded as people have sought and eventually demanded equal access against the forces of power politics: the desire of people in power to maintain their power position at any cost.
Both the women’s Suffrage Movement and the Feminist Movement have illuminated the demand for equal access based upon gender equality and an increased awareness and consciousness of the biases that have been promulgated over centuries of male dominated cultural and political power politics.
As you can see, history points to the reality that ability is much more than an inherent ability, trait, or talent, and much less than an apparent birthright. In our own democracy, access to education is a civil right which is not granted, it is unalienable.
Framed in this context, we are currently faced with an additional civil rights challenge to simplistic definitions of ability and equal access based upon what educators define as l academic ability.
Even with much recent academic attention to multiple intelligences pioneered by the work of Howard Gardner and others, we still have not drawn the parallel between institutionalized lack of access to resources, in this case educational resources, versus equal access to success-generating opportunities based upon individual learning style. Given the quality and quantity of research information which has been accomplished, it is puzzling yet profoundly disconcerting that a civil rights movement to address this injustice has not occurred.
We are more than familiar with biases which precluded certain religions, ethnic groups, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and women from being allowed entrée to a variety of institutions which provide equal representation and educational opportunities. Yet we seem bewilderingly unaware that we have a created a similar, educationally biased system that continues to promulgate denial of access which cuts across all minority categories! Where there is no discernable, easily identified population to point to, we seem at a loss to launch a movement to champion their cause and the injustices being done to those who simply learn differently than the accepted majority.
Our current system of education practices and accomplishes similar exclusionary policies we have mentioned above, except in this context, the biases and exclusionary practices derive from an individual having a learning style or learning difference or need which contrasts with what our society or “learning culture” has somehow ignorantly validated and accepted as representing “academic ability.”
“Ability,” within the field of education, is a code word for the individual who is analytic and detail oriented, and therefore most likely to be college bound, who learns best in a linear or sequential fashion: education’s definition of a “left-brain” learning style. Although the term “IQ” is often thrown around as a basis for ability, (and it does have a relevant if unpopular, politically incorrect impact), we have become increasingly aware that as Gardner and others have pointed out, there are a number of variables or types of “intelligences” which may also contribute to success. However these are by no means equally addressed within our current school environment.
Using Gardner’s categories of intelligence, then those who society chooses to allow to succeed academically are those with strong, innate linguistic (language) abilities, since we couch all of or most of our teaching communication methods as a function of language. We also favor those with strong, innate logical/mathematical intelligence, and by so doing exclude a number of other equally capable groups of students who possess different sets of innate learning tools.
Yet a closer look at who does or doesn’t succeed within our current, narrowly defined system of education, reveals a systematic, deeply entrenched belief structure, which serves to marginalize and disenfranchise enormous numbers of individuals whose only mistake is having a learning style which differs from the majority.
No matter ho we categorize these differences in “style versus substance,” we can easily begin to see that as a child progresses from Kindergarten through High School, most school systems choose to validate, reinforce, and define ability based upon a “Left Brain” style of learning as defined above.
For example, early Elementary school is often “hands-on,” and by so doing meets most children’s learning needs. Upper Elementary school begins to ready a child for what is now termed Middle School, and one’s ability to read and express oneself in writing become more important in the daily routine. Creativity is valued but less than demonstrated ability to think logically and process information rapidly. Grammar supercedes creative writing, art and music are substantially diminished or eliminated
entirely. Middle and High School continues to reward the verbal child who is facile with language, can respond rapidly during classroom discussions, who can process information quickly enough to accomplish nightly homework, and who can reflect the values in math and science which more than other subject areas, tend to be taught using a typically unyielding, left-brain curricula and teaching approach.
Given these existing biases, it is no wonder that many students aren’t helped by going back to their teacher after school for “extra help.” Most teachers do not change their methods of teaching to match the learners needs, and in failing to do so, only frustrate the child or does little to assuage their anxiety, as he/she seeks to understand why he/she is not learning appropriately.
The impact of this subjective bias, based by the way, on the fact that a significant majority of students (approximately 85-90%) are right-handed, “left-brain” learners, has resulted in an enormous array of negative consequences for those who are right brained (and often left-handed) learners who possess, we should suppose, equal rights.
These negative consequences include influences on many students’ self-esteem and self-confidence, the denial of academic opportunities to succeed within standard schools, and the tracking of individuals into vocations with minimal future employment
Statistics tell us that approximately 7-15% of the population is left handed, many of whom will become right-brain learners. There are also, additionally, a significant number of right handed, right-brain learners, as well as those who fall under categories of attention deficit and learning disabled. In fact, many who are labeled Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Learning Disabled (LD) are also simply different learners, no smarter or dumber than the majority, who are labeled as disabled only by virtue of their participation in our educational system.
We could be talking about as many as 25-33% of all students if we include the variety of students whose learning needs are no longer typically met within traditional public schools!
Often the real world result of the education system’s One Size Fits All approach to teaching is to force academically under-performing students into alternative roles. It institutionalizes often unwelcome roles for children seeking individual recognition, something all children desire, roles within their class which then seem to take on a life of their own in defining that person, as if their behavior was their personality! These roles include that of the class clown, class bully, class jock, class social butterfly, and class nerd, to name a few negative stereotypes which are frequently represented in most classrooms.
The consequences of promoting such a narrow view of ability for those who do not fall within its definition can easily be summed up in the words “marginalized,” and “disenfranchised.” Indeed, those who learn differently from the majority have been increasingly pushed and punished into the periphery of our educational system in recent years, with schools choosing to manage their budgetary resources in favor of increased salaries and facilities and on the backs of these under-represented students. The result is that when budgets are cut, the first programs to go are Art and Music, as if all children, regardless of their career goals, wouldn’t benefit from exposure to and opportunities to work in mediums or “languages” different from their daily language, logic, or math regimen.
These “different learners,” not inferior learners, have suffered every injustice, from being “farmed out” to special education schools and labeled unmercifully, or just left to “fall through the cracks” in our current system, leaving just the preferred “core” of
left brain learners to benefit from our educational system. Indeed, parents are often led to believe and left with the impression that schools are doing these “non-traditional types” of students a favor. Unfortunately in reality, schools are much more a part of the problem than a source of the solution. Have we as a society really decided to segregate a whole range of our children who learn differently? Why do we then later complain and seek redress when there is a lack of representative diversity in most professional and vocations which require Higher Education? What about diversity of learning styles as a cornerstone of Equal Rights?
This situation in itself is not only a travesty of equal education and equal access to educational resources which underlies later success in life, it has permeated our very belief systems regarding what constitutes intelligence, individual potential, and ability.
The results are everywhere, yet somehow educational institutions and teachers have succeeded in selling a bill of goods to most parents and students, who with little to no support, stand ready to accept the victim role in a Blaming the Victim scenario that educators have perpetrated on the American public. This scenario encourages the assumption of responsibility due to the perspective that, “It is your [the student’s] fault that you do not learn or benefit from our teaching.”
For example, students who demonstrate a proficiency (or talent) in working with their hands but who academically under-perform in relation to their peers are encouraged (and eventually tracked) into pursuing non-academic options, artistic and dramatic careers for example, which hold little chance of making a competitive living wage comparable to those who are led into careers associated with college, graduate and professional fields of endeavor.
This in itself is reason enough to launch a civil rights movement aimed at bringing these disenfranchised learners’ individuals needs back into the educational spotlight, but the ramifications of this exclusionary policy hold far deeper societal implications and ramifications than most people imagine.
This creeping bias which defines academic ability in terms of a left-brain learning style has resulted in a warping of the very fabric upon which most people understand ability let alone academic ability. Indeed, ask most people how they define intellect, and you will largely get a laundry list which defines the left-brain learner. This list would value and reflect an individual with a detail orientation, analytic problem-solving, mathematically adept, someone who is logical and organized, timely and focused.
It has gotten to the point where we as a nation have come to believe that ideas are less important than the ability to edit those ideas, that attention to detail is a gift of intellect, and that creativity can be taught and can be systematized (creative orthopedics to help the creatively handicapped think “outside the box”). We are becoming a nation caught up in a Karaoke, Air Guitar, Lip Synching notion of musical ability. A Paint by Numbers representation of artistic creativity versus the faux or mock creativity these forms of expression really represents; i.e. as if there is some real underlying creativity involved in these processes.
Rarely do the terms “global thinker,” “creative or intuitive problem solver” enter into most individual’s descriptions of “real” ability. Instead, we are left with an over-valuing of quantitative and analytic approaches and logical problem-solving as the essence of ability. But in terms of future resources, do we need more accountants or do we desire to identify and nurture those mathematical futurists who can think outside the box? Who can visualize and contemplate their analysis in 3 (or 4) D…with their eyes closed!!! High School curricula in the mathematics and sciences have been formulated according to this dominant left-brain style of learning, and therefore curricula, teaching approaches, and teachers themselves have eventually evolved to meet this need. The effect of this bias has been to marginalize those who would desire to pursue higher education studies in math and science. But these non-traditional, alternative learners require a different approach in order to learn these same materials, but what they encounter are minimal learning resources directed at their need to acquire the information in a manner congruent with their optimal style of learning.
In fact, easily available research which employs the Meyer-Briggs Personality Scales indicates that teachers are overwhelmingly “SF’s:” individuals who base their interpretation of the world more upon their own senses- (S) and feelings- (F) based information. No wonder these teachers have great difficulty relating to and understanding students who base their world view on being an Introvert (I) or Intuitive (N) learner. An example of how these kinds of personality values clashes occurs is when a student who gets the correct answer but can’t explain or show steps is often punished for that intuitive ability which is translated into and attributed to an inability to “show one’s work.” How many future mathematicians have thrown down their pencils in frustration at neither being able to explain their work nor being given credit for their “analysis!”
The unwillingness or inability to teach to these different learners’ needs has resulted in a stereotyping of those who learn differently as less capable, especially when it comes to math and science. It is in the mathematics and sciences that we can most easily see that teaching methods and curricula are not only incompatible with a variety of learning needs, but that these methods contrast vividly with the well documented learning needs of individuals such as Einstein, Thomas Alva Edison, and Michelangelo. These and other early thinkers’ discoveries were rooted in their innate ability to “think outside the box,” and had they been victims of the educational policies which are
rampant today, one wonders whether people such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton’s revolutionary ideas would have found expression! Where within today’s academic system are individuals such as these given the opportunity to succeed?
This educational policy of exclusion has decreased opportunities for those who possess a right-brain learning style, or any way one might want to define their differences in terms of learning needs relative to the majority. It has also diminished their opportunity to compete effectively with those of equal or lesser intelligence. One can only speculate on how many meaningful inventions, discoveries or careers, perhaps in mathematics, medicine, law, or science, have been cut short and derailed/redirected into the stereotypical vocations of music, art, drama, “the trades” because those individuals possess right-brain “talents,” not “majority” smarts!
This in itself should be cause for a revolution in education, but the ramifications of this insidious branding of ability has resulted in any number of exclusionary practices which unfortunately transcend the halls of academia itself.
Let’s take a closer look.
If one examines in more detail the process by which students progress or succeed academically, one can begin to get a better sense of the subtle culling of “different learners” from the majority which occurs daily.
Although early elementary school does offer more opportunities for different learners, upper elementary school begins the process of validating and reinforcing only those who learn and perform in a certain style, the left-brain style (passive, sequential, linear, with an over-emphasized valuing of analysis at the expense of intuition).
Middle School takes this to the next “logical” step, all the while redefining ability. This message is delivered in a manner which results in individuals who perhaps were successful in Primary Schools but no longer perceive themselves to be academically capable. How? Middle School makes increased demands for: organization, written output, and deductive reasoning while at the same time decreasing exposure or relevance of music, art, and creative problem-solving.
High School is an enormous leap (backwards), and completes this devaluing process, at least for what we term Secondary Education. It accomplishes this dangerous marginalization by presenting learning materials in such a way as to discourage and eventually sabotage anyone other than left-brain learners from progressing successfully. Even subject areas such as English and History, which are often subjectively seen as areas of strength for right-brain learners due to the need to think either creatively or globally, can be transformed into citadels of left-brain ability merely by teaching or testing a certain way. Examples of this include Advanced Placement (AP) exams which are timed, and utilize multiple choice and essay components. Presenting information in a fact-based (versus context based), passive (versus experiential) , linear (versus global) manner, requiring memorization rather than demonstrated understanding, emphasizing certain subtopics (grammar versus creative writing) over other more engaging, or stimulating (for some) approaches, or requiring that learners demonstrate “mastery” only using certain testing approaches, are all examples of how a classroom can be turned into an environment which punishes some while rewarding others in the game of High Stakes Testing.
Entrance to college for most students is predicated on competitive exams, such as the SAT and ACT, geared toward the left-brain learner in presentation format (timed), multiple choice, and content (fact based).
Entrance to Graduate or Professional education is based upon a course of study which typically demands significant quantitative skills in order to progress, and once
again, most of these types of courses are taught in a manner which precludes the success of anyone who cannot easily learn in the manner in which the course is taught. This fait accompli results in discouraging anyone but the very brightest from contemplating careers in higher mathematics or science.
This is one reason for the proliferation of “test coaching” programs such as Kaplan and Princeton Review. While many educators prefer to smugly define the existence of these programs as unfair or inequitable, for many, it is their only opportunity to learn “how” to succeed and perform in line with their peers. These programs provide a “map” for those who learn differently for what is hailed as an objective source of competitive information, but which is to many, a strange, unfriendly, uncharted and incongruent testing environment. While it is advertised as true that a combination of high SAT scores and High School grades is the best predictor of college success, this criteria is, when you think about it, merely a self-fulfilling prophecy based upon how the deck is stacked.
There are any numbers of “entrance exams” which purport to separate out and identify those who will later be successful in Graduate or Professional School. The GRE, MAT (Miller Analogies Test), LSAT (Law), MCAT (Medicine) are all portals through which an individual must pass in order to gain entrance to these areas of advanced study. Yet these entrance exams test knowledge within very narrow definitions of presentation and by so doing exclude those who cannot, for whatever reason, meet those requirements.
What doesn’t appear to get communicated is that in establishing this lens through which ability is purportedly measured, those responsible for establishing these standards have set the parameters and defined the population a priori. In other words, when we frame specific problems established by asking certain questions we pre-select which answers (and which answerers) will be acceptable and labeled “correct.”
The most visible of those individuals who learn differently are those who can demonstrate that they have a “learning disability.” This in itself is a shame, as most learners have areas of ability and lesser ability (not disability): i.e. most learners exist along a continuum of strengths and weaknesses across both subject areas and methods/processes. This L.D. label then gains some learning disabled students the opportunity to increase their chances of competitive or equal access to institutions of higher learning based upon the exam being given, for example, in an extended format, one of a few accommodations granted. However it still requires that they demonstrate knowledge within the same narrow definitions and boundaries. And it still does not account for the many years of under-achievement and lowered expectations (and self-esteem) that repeated academic under-performance must create.
Yet even these accommodations are granted grudgingly. Left Brain learners rant and rave about how unfair or unrealistic these accommodations are, as if all vocational performance was based upon timeliness, another very left-brain trait which has emerged as a value in our educational system.
In truth, it is important to appreciate and realize that whether we are speaking of those labeled learning disabled, right-brain thinkers, attention deficit disorder, etc., that their learning needs or differences exist along a continuum from mild to severe. The fact is that schools create as many learning differences as they resolve through their very narrow definition and limited acceptance of different performance methodologies. Yet those whose learning needs fail to fall in the more severe range of disability are still doomed to be kept down within a system in which they are destined to under-perform. This occurs based upon the inherent early discrimination in acquiring skill sets fully, and the predominant and heavily weighted educational values presented as if they reflected some verifiable reality.
It is really only in the latter half of the 20th century that education and achievement have become so narrowly defined. What is wrong with this One Size Fits All approach since it represents the majority interest? The answer is simple: how one is asked to demonstrate mastery has an enormous effect on how one performs. Why should how one learns or how one can best express mastery be the primary determiner of mastery or acquisition of knowledge, as well as access to resources, resources without which a student cannot progress or succeed?
At the turn of the Twentieth Century, professions including those in medicine and law still provided an alternative path for students to study and acquire competency as apprentices. In order to practice in their desired field, they still had to meet the same standards and pass the same professional exams, which were based on demonstrated competencies in any number of areas as those studying within traditional schools of law or medicine.
The fact that apprentice approaches to learning have become almost extinct is taken as an indication that this type of apprentice approach was inferior to the more regimented and systematic paths we see today leading to the study of medicine and law.
But if one opens one’s eyes wide enough, one can see that what has occurred is simply the result of “like reinforcing like,” a systemic shift in process which has had significant impact on the “content” of learning for those left behind. That is, opportunities for advanced study at all levels have been co-opted by the majority who predominantly learn the same way. They have put in place processes and institutions of learning which reflect their own ideas of what learning represents. By so doing, those who learn differently have slowly been culled from access to these institutions. However in this instance, the discrimination regarding access is based upon learning style rather than religion, race, or gender.
For those who believe that the current approach of our educational institutions is both equitable and academically honest, one must understand that they too are victims of
the slow, insidious standardization of ability as a left-brain product, which has indeed
become the “de facto” standard of ability. The lens through which we view ability has
been defined so narrowly as to virtually exclude equally intelligent capable learners who cannot compete on this corrupted playing field we call education. However, it is quite apparent that the lens or perspective through which we view any subject most often defines and generates the questions we ask in a type of self0fulfilling prophecy re: he answers we receive
Perhaps one more example of our naïve understanding of ability will suffice. Let’s examine for a moment a “split” in IQ: a demonstrated imbalance or division between facility with Language (left-brain) versus Performance (right-brain) ability. In those whose Language ability is higher than their Performance ability, we are just beginning to recognize and appreciate the impact of what is termed a Non-Verbal Learning Disability. While individuals such as these may be able to succeed within traditional educational systems, becoming physicians, lawyers, or business people, they
may as often exhibit difficulty in acquiring social skills and adjusting interpersonally in contrast to their academic achievement. This is a direct effect of both their learning style strengths being in-line with the predominant teaching/learning methods employed in our
schools and a simultaneous reflection of innate learning deficits which tend to arise in acquiring social and interpersonal skills.
However, when one reverses that split, with Performance scoring higher than Language, one identifies an array of talented individuals across a variety of abilities (art, music, drama, traditional vocations) who regularly under-perform, flunk out, or find school boring and irrelevant, only to find success outside of the (very) narrow definitions of academic success they previously were forced to compete within.
So…ability itself is not really such a clear cut concept! In truth, the foundation of ability is not innate but both defined by and developed through access, access to institutions of learning and training. Yet this “access” is regularly denied to hundreds of
thousands of individuals yearly, based upon factors which have nothing to do with ability, as in the case of the numerous civil rights abuses mentioned previously
Upon closer examination, ability has any number of facets, yet somehow one “universal” if stereotypical definition has evolved and emerged as dominant, dominant to the point of pushing out and degrading most other perspectives, leaving these others with minimal opportunity to succeed according to their ability.
The political ramifications and effect of learning differently are indeed the disenfranchisement of millions of learners over time, the mislabeling and marginalizing of millions of people, and a society poorer for having driven out those learners whose creative ability might have made significant contributions to a wide variety of mathematic, scientific, business, and legal specialties.
Instead we are left with a paucity of creativity in many professions, as well as a relentless if unconscious quest to institutionalize one style of learning and approach to problem-solving at the expense of other equally meaningful approaches.
For example, the widely accepted and practiced “business model,” based on quantification and analysis, has become our model and standard of reference for both defining societal values and as the primary means of assessing achievement in the world around us. We seek not to cure disease because it is the goal of medicine but due to disease’s cost to society! Creative areas of show business, music and motion picture film making have come under the ownership of multinational corporations, who seek to standardize and predict their profit margins. In so doing, they remake and revisit past successes, all the while wondering what stops them from being “creative.”. When one sees organizations unable to develop creative approaches to their systemic problems (other than cost-cutting), it is a sign that there are few left who are able to
truly think creatively, what they like to term “thinking outside of the box,” and which they also believe they can simulate! The refusal or inability to acknowledge or identify the root of this problem challenges the very assumptions which underlie the rationales for which success and failures, in business or in school, occur.
Those assumptions as indicated are false, misinformed, misleading, and have led to unintended consequences which we have ignorantly mislabeled as student failure to perform or parental failure to care. And again, those unintended consequences are really a failure to understand systemic complexity, often leading to unpredictable consequences, not unintended ones…. In most instances, schools and educators have placed the responsibility at the feet of those who have been most offended, a societal example of Blaming the Victim
If we truly want our children to have the opportunity to be successful, then we need to begin our educational efforts by developing an educational system which cultivates all ways of learning and adapts itself to the strengths and needs of all students, rather than demanding that minority learners conform to the rigid teaching style of the current system.
We must better define each student’s best modes and means of learning at the entry point of kindergarten, and not continue to support and perpetuate an arbitrary or limiting system which ignores the learning needs (or learning style) of many capable individuals in favor of a One Size Fits All assumptive system of education.
In so doing we must also look at the larger consequences of such a limiting learning environment through which all children must pass. We must wake up to the reality that current educational and social values regarding ability are as often a cause of failure as they are a source of future success. Society needs to be aware that although there are many people who do well in school but not afterward (and visa versa), we as a society have tended to attribute these inconsistencies to a wide variety of variables (socio economic status, family, etc.) which are and are not under one’s control. Or, we advance the myth that academic under-performance is tied to individual effort or motivation. What utter nonsense! As if for many under-performing individuals, the fruits of failure are somehow more attractive than the rewards of achievement!!
The problem isn’t simply education or students who learn differently. The problem is a system which disposes of and punishes those who cannot learn (or cannot easily learn) within very narrowly constructed learning “opportunities” we currently define as education.
The issues and subsequent problems are “nested” in one another, but present enormous challenges to us as a society. The much larger societal problem is the deleterious long term impact that schools which ignore the needs of a significant few to meet the needs of the overwhelming majority have on society’s functioning as a whole. In a democracy we should be ashamed and aghast at not only what this implies but what it yields and it has yielded: significant numbers of marginalized, disenfranchised, and damaged individuals who are neither properly prepared to compete academically (right-brain learners) or creatively (left-brain learners), nor are they allowed and able to participate at their individual creative best in addressing and solving the problems of the 21st century.
Those who have the capacity and desire to envision the future are slowly being culled from our midst.
Let us Dare to dream…
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