Displaying an impressive knowledge of the brain, neuroscience, and education, the keynote speaker looked at the symptoms and diagnosed the many difficulties that result from impairments to various parts of the brain. For example, Johnny may be unable to write as a result of trouble in several different lobes: those needed for spatial-motor tasks or language production or working memory or generating ideas and organizing or sustaining attention. Our workshop leader took us through symptoms and diagnoses and suggested possible treatments.
Treatments included explicitly teaching the writing process, acting as a surrogate frontal lobe, building fluency by using “power writing,” trying different interventions — “Stop and List,” “Step Up to Writing,” “Go, Slow Down, Stop, Go Back.” Other workshop leaders offered suggestions for addressing other problems: motivation; moral, ethical, and civic development; creativity and skills for the 21st century; nurturing class cohesiveness and morale; self-directed learning, sustainability, uses of technology; overcoming math terrors; social-emotional behavior, control and development. The day was full and stimulating and rich in ideas for treating the endless variety of problems educators face all the time.
And yet I felt this uneasy dissatisfaction, a sense that something was missing. The feeling nagged at me most during all the talk about attention, for it was the prefrontal cortex, the office of the CEO, that interested our keynote speaker the most. At one point, he asked four people to come to the front of the room. He assigned each the role of a part of the brain, three lobes and the prefrontal cortex. He designated the PFC the conductor. At one point, he asked the conductor to stand with his back to the other lobes and pick his nose in a distracted sort of way, demonstrating the problems that arise when attention is impaired — and it was at this moment that I realized what was bothering me.
I remembered the research done by Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (and others) that suggests that, despite our dogged belief that we can separate our rational mind from the irritating interference of emotion, emotion and thinking are inseparable. She teaches that “we think in the service of emotional goals” and that “emotion is the rudder for thinking” (2007, 2008). Not surprisingly, we attend to and learn what is emotionally relevant; we learn and remember what matters to us.
As I sat watching the inattentive conductor ignore the signals coming to him from the other lobes, I realized that the problem might not always be with executive function, not necessarily the result of some lesion or glitch in the prefrontal cortex, but simply a complete lack of interest in what the other lobes had to say about something they were perceiving in the outside world. In other words, maybe lots of kids are really not interested in what teachers think is interesting; they find the stuff of schools emotionally irrelevant and, over time, over several years of deadening school experiences, perhaps inattention to school becomes hard wired. Who knows? Perhaps the dullness and meaninglessness of their experiences in the classroom even result in brain damage.
Suddenly, I was transported back to Vienna in 1846, when Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, working in a hospital maternity ward, realized that the hospital itself was responsible for the high mortality rate. Infants and mothers were contracting all sorts of deadly diseases, and doctors scrambled to diagnose and treat them. They were earnest and well-intentioned, hard-working and committed to saving lives, but they failed to recognize that the cause of the diseases was their own failure to wash their hands and adequately sterilize their instruments. In short, it was the practices of the hospitals that were responsible for the sickness and death.
Like those doctors, hard-working, caring teachers toiling in schools and workshops all over the country invest hours and energy in a Sisyphean task of treating problems that the schools may themselves create. Good teachers know that they need to hook students’ emotions and create an environment that nurtures motivation, so they greet their students each day with a handshake as the students enter the classroom. They suggest links between the study of Rome and the lives and interests of the students. They have students work in small groups, encourage them to paint or dance a response to literature, use more open-ended questions, allow students to select their own essay topics.
Yet, despite scattered and wonderful successes, these efforts seem doomed if the system itself is flawed, if the nature and practices and design of the system perpetuate learning problems. Our schools are built essentially on three foundations: (1) what interests adults — the books they love, the parts of history or science or math that excite them; (2) the knowledge and information that the testing industry and their “experts” decide to test; and (3) the subject matter valued by society or, increasingly, by business — the stuff that will keep us competitive with China and India, those “21st-century skills” to which we genuflect. The choices schools offer to students generally fail to match or develop their interests and curiosity, so coercion and cajolery become substitutes for genuine motivation. Control and conformity and standardization transform schools into prisons. The life of the mind (emotional thought) does not thrive in the sort of climate created by rigid rules and policy and requirements. As John Updike observed, “Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency.” People, especially young people, want the freedom to learn about things that matter to them, and their rebellion frequently is a giddy rejection of the tedium of not running in the halls and of studying what father knows best.
It seems to me that the best teachers know or at least sense that the problem is the schools. At a different workshop a year ago, following a discussion of Immordino-Yang’s theory about the connection between emotion and learning, a colleague chatted with a pre-K teacher. The pre-K teacher said, “Basically, emotion is what we start with every day; otherwise, we’re sunk. Three-year-olds are all emotion. My curriculum draws from the kids’ interests. We ask them, What are you curious about? And we follow those leads. Right now, they are studying flying things because a number of kids had expressed an interest in that.”
“I am so jealous,” the colleague responded. “When I tell my advanced photo students, juniors and seniors in high school, that for a whole semester they will be working on a project driven by their own interests, I mostly get I’m-not-sure-what-to-do looks. They have so little opportunity to think this way that they are not immediately in touch with ‘what they are curious about.’”
Teachers know that something happens to children as they move through the numbing years of schooling, but they don’t seem to consider the existence of a causal relationship between, for example, problems with attention and lack of curiosity. If only the amygdala could talk.
None of this is meant to suggest that all is failure. Many students emerge from schools healthy and successful, but the best of these often have stories about succeeding despite school. At one of the sessions at our workshop, the leader showed a video of his interview of George Coyne, president of the Vatican observatory. Coyne talked about the teacher who had launched him on his study of astronomy. Coyne described this teacher as “a professor who could really inspire, who could get beyond the rules.” In order to create the conditions for real learning, too many teachers have to get beyond the rules, operate outside normal school practices.
I keep wondering if we will ever change the system, if we will ever stop trying to treat only the immediate student problems of dyslexia, ADD, ADHD, lack of motivation, inability to write, lack of comprehension and look also at school itself to determine the extent to which it is the cause of or complicating factor in some of these problems. I am not suggesting that learning disabilities are not real, though in too many cases they may well be misdiagnoses. Nor am I suggesting that we don’t need to address real diseases. Left untreated, a staph infection can kill the patient. I’m suggesting that, while we continue to address the ways in which a lack of attention can prevent learning, we also need to acknowledge that, in addition to neurological causes, inattention can also result from emotional irrelevance — the elephant in the classroom.
I think what saddens me the most is the resistance to fundamental change — the persistent vegetative state of education. Educators are so comfortable with and accustomed to workshops that offer cures for “diseases” that they can’t imagine there might be other ways to look at these impediments to learning. People hate changing their behavior. Dr. Pauline Chen published an article in The New York Times about doctors and nurses who, despite the grudging acceptance of Semmelweis’s discovery, continue not to wash their hands before working with patients:
Over the last 30 years, despite countless efforts at change, poor hand hygiene has continued to contribute to the high rates of infections acquired in hospitals, clinics, and other health care settings. According to the World Health Organization, these infections affect as many as 1.7 million patients in the United States each year, racking up an annual cost of $6.5 billion and contributing to more than 90,000 deaths annually (Sept. 17, 2009).Schools may rival these figures in cost and annual intellectual deaths.
We can’t ignore cognitive impairment, but it seems to me we could reduce its incidence by expanding our workshops to include an honest, open-ended examination of the schools themselves. Instead of attacking the problems solely from the point of view of the schools and trying to fix the students, we might benefit from also looking at schools from the point of view of the students and trying to fix the schools.
References
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Antonio Damasio (2007), “We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education,” Mind, Brain, and Education, 1 (1), 3-10.Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (2008, July 10), “Emotions, Social Relationships, and the Brain: Implications for the Classroom,” ASCD Express, 3 (20).