"One out of every five children has a learning disorder." "Roughly 15% of American children have a developmental disability." "Over forty million Americans suffer from mental illness." The statistics are printed on the literature in doctors' offices, displayed in the administrative offices of schools, and emblazoned on public service billboards. The numbers, variable and malleable as they might be from one pharmaceutical or educational pamphlet to the other, are unified in their message: lots of people have learning disabilities, lots of people are mentally ill, and lots of people need drugs. Sometimes lots of people are all three at once.
As a teacher, and as a father, I think about this often.
I don't work with children, but with adults, teaching languages. I have a great gig. My work is all in very small classes, a half dozen students at most, or one-on-one. Most of them study with me not because they have to, but because they want to, usually for success at work. Compared to those of most teachers, even at the college level, my students on the average are very motivated. I usually use or design my own curricula, and incorporate many visual, tactile, and audial games. Of course, my work has its challenges when compared to some other forms of teaching: students balancing family and work with study, or studying for the first time in years (sometimes decades), or the restraints of corporate timelines.
Like any teacher, I see the differences in each student, the gifts, the struggles, even the disabilities. Most of my students are highly educated (not all) and skilled at what they do; some of them struggle to learn a foreign language. Well, actually, all of them do. Learning another language is difficult. What I should say is, some of them struggle more than others. And, as I said, they're motivated adults, so I can trust the picture I'm seeing.
I'm far from an expert (words one never wishes to utter, always followed by a "but..."), but like many teachers one can't help forming field impressions (not to say diagnoses, Lord keep me). The difference for me, unlike for many teachers, is that any "condition" a student might have is only relevant to me in the classroom. I can have no effect on it whatsoever outside. These are grown-ups who have been grown-upping for some time, so I wouldn't want to have such an effect, but I couldn't even if I wanted to. For me, it can only ever be a classroom problem. So-and-so struggles with such-and-such. And that's that. Work around it. Try to overcome. That is not how it goes down in most public school settings.
Now I understand that compared to public school teachers I have many advantages when it comes to dealing with learning disabilities. But let's consider briefly how our public education system works, and what the numbers that we are accepting might mean.
I have written elsewhere that government schools can at their best only ever hope to produce good citizens, which most parents should consider a paltry goal. Parents should want their child's education to make them good humans.
What concerns us here is what these schools, and what this education system, must be in order to make citizens and workers who graduate on time: a processing plant. A factory. Our confusion of what it means to be a person and what it means to be a citizen is lamentable, and has led us to accept the processes our public schools use.
Learning disabilities are some of the few disabilities we're allowed to talk about openly as disabilities. This is because, unlike lacking the use of one's legs, a student with a learning disability robs the process of energy and time it should be using more efficiently. Failure to be neatly boxed, failure to be nicely socialized, is the last mentionable disability.
One in five children is said to have a learning disability. This number comes from the American Academy of Pediatrics, and it is one of many numbers, sometimes contradictory or fuzzy in their definitions, that we accept.
But let's think about what that means. One in five people has arthritis. One in five people confesses to peeing in the pool. One in five Americans is irreligious. One in five men has recently drunk more in one day than he ought. One in five Americans lives paycheck to paycheck. One of five Americans work from home. One in five women thinks being complimented on her purse is the best. One in five of us only writes checks once or twice a year.
It doesn't take a lot to be normal, even if you're a minority. Scotland has the greatest percentage of redheads in the world, at only 13%. No one would say being a redhead in Scotland is abnormal. In fact, if you want to dress up as a Scot you'll probably wear a red wig 'neath your tam o'shanter.
Ladies and gentlemen, one in five of us is quite normal. One in five women aged 30 is 5'7" or taller.
I admit that epidemics are possible. That a society can be overwhelmed by a problem so pervasive that everyone is impacted by it in some way. But I cannot emphasize this enough: one out of five anything means that its normal. If I told you one out of five apples was golden would you think the golden apples were the weird ones? No, you'd think golden apples were normal too.
But examine our education complex. It is unreliable. It is rigid. It churns out a bad product. It is through them, and their processes, that learning disabilities are being defined. The medical establishment quite naturally uses one principal lens in its diagnoses: how well the children do in school. Learning disabilities have been defined so far up that one in five is now being diagnosed as not fitting into school processes. That, simply put, is too much. It is, in fact, downright sinister.
Perhaps it should occur to us that the problem is not the people being processed, but the process itself.
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