Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think, And What We Can

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Part Three: ATTENTION, LIFESTYLES, AND LEARNING DISABILITIES

CHAPTER 7: Learning Disabilities: Neural Wiring Goes to School

"How can I teach these kids? They can't pay attention!" An insistent whine of complaint rises and gathers like a sinister haze over classrooms from preschool through college. Rather than serving as a warning, however, it has become a smoke screen for teachers and parents who belabor the young for failing to learn, and for politicians and professors who take potshots at the schools. While the adult community sanctimoniously bewails erosion of academic rigor and achievement, however, it perpetuates the practices that are shortening children's attention spans and rendering their brains unfit to engage in sustained verbal inquiry. Meanwhile, the schools, inundated with students who can't listen, remember, follow sequences of directions, read anything they consider "boring," or solve even elementary problems, have resorted to classifying increasing numbers of students as educationally sick.

"Learning disabilities," both formally diagnosed and unofficially suspected, are now blamed for a large proportion of learning casualties, from "underachievers" to school dropouts. The vast majority involve problems with skills of listening, language, and/or attention. Yet even "normal" students show increasing difficulty keeping their brains focused long enough to learn in traditional ways. Is something wrong with the kids? With their teachers? Or with the "fit" between the brains they bring to school and our expectations for them?

Attention, learning abilities, and learning disabilities are predicated on motivational and cognitive development in the brains of the learners. Each baby brain comes into the world uniquely fitted out for various forms of academic pursuit, but its pedagogical prognosis is largely determined by the ongoing mental traffic that trains it how to think and learn. For children, habits of the mind soon become structures of the brain -- and they absorb their habits, either directly or indirectly -- from the adult culture that surrounds them. For many, the habits of the mind that they take with them to school predispose them for trouble.

To understand the growing number of educational casualties today, we must face some often unrecognized realities about the brain-culture partnership. Particularly troublesome are some new factors that fuel the anomalous category of "learning disability," for which children are treated with educational prescriptions, and its frequent companion, "attention deficit disorder," for which many receive brain-altering drugs. Here are some questions that we need to address in these three chapters:

1. What is the real meaning of the term "learning disability" and why are there now so many in our schools?

2. Do children inherit learning problems -- or are they caused by the environments in which they grow up?

3. What is an "attention deficit"? Why do increasing numbers of children seem to have them?

4. Should children receive drugs because they can't pay attention in school?

5. What are the physical foundations of attention and how can they be damaged by toxic and noisy environments or sedentary lifestyles?

6. What is the role of the home in preventing attention and learning problems?

7. What does attention have to do with our current crisis in "problem solving"?

A RISING TIDE OF DISABILITY

The problem of getting students to sit still, pay attention in class, and reflect thoughtfully on the task at hand figures prominently, along with reading difficulty, in an astonishing "epidemic" of "learning disability" in otherwise able children. Since the 1970s when the label, popularly referred to as "LD," became an accepted designation for problems not attributed to intelligence, physical, or emotional status, this loosely defined diagnostic category has grown geometrically. It now includes some children who might previously have been categorized as mentally deficient or emotionally disturbed as well as a large number who are having trouble in school for reasons that are often unclear.

Many students with specific difficulties in learning never make it into the maze of psycho-educational testing that leads to official diagnosis, but the number who do is rapidly becoming unmanageable. In the United States from 1976 to 1985, there was a 135% jump in diagnosed cases of learning disability from 796,596 to 1,868,447. [1] By 1988, Dr. Margaret C. Wang, a noted learning-disability educator, observed that up to 15,000 children nationwide per week were being referred for assessment. She warned that a "second system" of children with special learning needs was developing within the regular educational system. [2] This "second system," incidentally, is not an economic dumping ground; the diagnosis of "learning disability" has been a predominantly middle-class phenomenon.

Dr. Wang points out that up to 80% of American schoolchildren could now be diagnosed as learning disabled by one or more of the methods used, which may vary even between adjacent school districts. It is impossible to determine how much of the avalanche of new referrals is attributable to teachers' growing reliance on this method of extruding troublesome youngsters from classrooms. The only clear fact that can be derived from these statistics is that there is a serious misfit between large numbers of children and their schools.

"ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER"

In a great proportion of diagnosed cases, a subcategory of learning disability variously named "hyperactivity" or, more currently, "attention deficit disorder -- with or without hyperactivity" is implicated, even when the primary difficulty lies in a specific academic territory such as reading. All "attention deficit disorder" cases have trouble focusing and maintaining attention appropriately; the term "hyperactivity" implies that the child's body, as well as mind, is bouncing off walls. One of the most invariable school symptoms of any form of attention disorder is difficulty listening attentively and remembering what the teacher says.

The exact relationship between "ADHD" (attention deficit with or without hyperactivity disorder) and other forms of "LD" is unclear, but experts estimate a 50% to 90% overlap between the two categories. [3] The impossibility of finding clear data is a frustrating testimony to the imprecision of educational diagnosis, but unquestionably, one of the main reasons the "LD" category is growing so large is because of a dramatic increase in the number of children with "attention disorders."

Flaky Kids and Pharmaceuticals

Currently in the United States, anywhere from one and one-half million to four and one-half million schoolchildren, mainly boys, bear the official diagnosis of ADHD. Incredibly, in some classrooms, more than 50% of students have been diagnosed as hyperactive, a fact rendered less surprising by a recent report that pointed out that one-third of all American boys meet some of the criteria. [4] Teachers say, however, that the identified cases represent only the most serious and unmanageable ones in an increasingly inattentive population of students. Girls are also more inattentive these days, but partially because they do not tend to cut up as much in class, they are referred for diagnosis less often.

In other parts of the world the incidence of ADHD is seen as being much lower, but rising numbers of cases have recently been reported from countries as widely separated as Finland and the People's Republic of China, to name just two examples. [5, 6] A West German pediatrician specializing in the disorder recently published a study of a thousand children whom he had treated for attention disorders, many from upper-middle-class families. [7]

One controversial aspect of this problem is an increasing use of stimulant drugs to enable these children's brains to behave more attentively. As of this writing, an estimated 6% of American schoolchildren are being given a prescription drug, most commonly Ritalin, to render them sufficiently manageable to do their work in school. In some communities, where certain pediatricians have "specialized" in "hyperactivity"/attention deficits, the percentage is much higher. Some parents are also choosing to augment the prescribed daily dosage to counteract the drug's "rebound" effect and enable their offspring to manage themselves acceptably at home. A 1988 article in Education Week entitled "Debate Grows on Classroom's 'Magic Pill'" pointed out that the production of Ritalin in the United States doubled between 1985 and 1987. [8] In the next chapter we will take an in-depth look at this whole issue. For now, let us explore the more general range of "learning disabilities."

"LD": MISFITTED BRAINS

Different Wiring Systems

I find that parents, and even teachers, are often confused by the term "learning disability." Contrary to what many have been led to believe, most children diagnosed as "LD" have not suffered any identifiable kind of brain "damage" either before or after birth. Moreover, they may be highly intelligent. Some nervous systems come into the world jumpy, clumsy, or otherwise ill-equipped for learning, but many children who wear the label "LD" do not have anything noticeably the matter with them. Even in neurological examination they may seem to be essentially "normal" children who function well in most settings -- except for the classroom. It is especially hard for adults to understand why such a child should have difficulty with specific aspects of learning such as reading, math, memory, and paying attention.

Also contrary to popular belief, once a diagnosis is arrived at, professionals cannot simply "fix" the child just because they have put a label on the problem. Unfortunately, understanding of the vagaries of the learning brain is so tenuous that most treatment is still based more on "what works" than on a clear-cut neurological rationale.

The main reason diagnosis and treatment are so difficult is that all kids' brains are unique -- the LD child's is just too unique for the school to handle. Even though all our brains are cut from the "Homo sapiens" template, each responds individually to different types of tasks, and each is potentially better at making synaptic connections for some kinds of learning than for others. The basic neuronal wiring diagram is determined both by the genetic blueprint and the environment in the womb; the postnatal environment helps determine how the connections get hooked up -- according to how the child uses them. By definition, a specific "learning disability" occurs only when the child takes that special brain into a learning situation, batters his neuron assemblies against a certain kind of demand -- and fails. In an extreme example, let us imagine that a child with a brain specifically ill-equipped for reading went to school in a society where all information was conveyed pictorially or by storytelling. The "learning disability" would never materialize!

Even in preschool years, a child's mental life and motivation interact with basic brain structure to shape specific talents for learning. By the time children enter school, each has a singular pattern of abilities, disabilities, and interests. Some children's patterns fit neatly into the classroom; others' talents show up more clearly on the playground, in the art or music room, in interpersonal politics, or when someone needs a friend. But these skills don't earn stars on the spelling chart -- or many A's on the report card.

Some LD youngsters have wiring systems that must struggle harder with learning because of general difficulty with one or several of the following: memory, coordination of hands and eyes, rapid comprehension of new situations, language, visual-spatial reasoning, abstract thinking, or ability to focus attention quickly and appropriately. Even a problem that appears to be quite generalized, however, such as a memory problem, may actually show up only in particular (task specific) types of learning situations. Many times, when students come to me to complain about a "memory problem," it turns out they are really talking about verbal memory for things they read or hear; they may be terrific at remembering where Dad mislaid his car keys or how to put a Rubik's Cube together. The real "problem" is that brain systems are wired up better for some types of memory than for others, and the weak ones don't show up until they are called on to perform.

Sometimes I reflect ruefully, when I watch children trundled off to the "resource room" for tutoring in reading or spelling, that I, too, might have been LD. Like many who later chose teaching as a career, I was lucky that my brain's native abilities and my language-rich environment combined to fit me out quite nicely for my first-grade classroom. If at age six, however, I had suddenly been dropped into a society of visual artists, with a curriculum that consisted of drawing pictures and designing architectural blueprints instead of reading and spelling, I would shortly have been consigned to the "disabled" list. Wallowing messily in failed expectations, I would have waited for the weekly visit of the special reading teacher and my brief taste of success -- that is, if the verbal "frills" hadn't already been cut from the school budget. Many children who face the opposite problem in our language-centered schools pine for the "frills" of art or music class but have little opportunity to be recognized for their talents. Are these students' brains "damaged" -- or just disabled relative to that particular curriculum?

Should we change the curriculum? Must we alter teaching methods and the pace of instruction to accommodate growing numbers of "different" brains? These questions are increasingly being forced on teachers, who, even in the "best" schools, are discovering that giving students more of the usual types of instruction does not backfill the gaps. Meanwhile, the society clamors for higher standards -- and our graduates can't compete in world markets.

Perhaps the American popular culture ought to take a hard look at its own curriculum. Because the kind of "coaching" provided by early environments has so much to do with a child's adjustment to school learning, everyone has an obligation to our children -- and to their future teachers -- to provide them with experiences likely to build the skills they will need in the classroom. This does not mean that parents should prepare lesson plans for infants, expect preschoolers to read, or drill kids on math facts when they are in their high chairs. It does mean someone must help them learn to listen, direct their own thinking, and use language effectively. I have already described the erosion of language stimulation for many children today; now let us explore more fully the ways in which environments are teaching them not to pay attention. These two problems are closely related and may account for much of this mysterious "epidemic" we are now experiencing.

Listening Skills and Learning Disabilities

By far the majority of learning disability referrals include difficulty listening to, understanding, or expressing verbal material, reading, writing, and spelling. These skills all rest on an underlying complex of "auditory processing abilities" and are mediated by language areas in the brain's left hemisphere. They include abilities to:

• listen carefully to the order of sounds in words or of words in sentences
• discriminate between similar sounds (e.g., sh and ch)
• remember things that have just been heard ("short-term auditory memory")

Problems with the above do not stem mainly from defects in the ears, but from the brain's processing centers. The sounds may get in, but they become scrambled or lost before they can be analyzed, understood, and remembered. One of the most prevalent symptoms of such problems is difficulty in recalling spoken directions. For example:

Parent: "Please go upstairs, get the soap out of the closet, and bring it to the laundry room."

Child: "Huh?"

Children with poor auditory skills -- whatever the reason -- have a difficult time learning to read, spelling accurately, remembering what they read long enough to understand it, or retaining the internal sound of a sentence they want to write down. They tend to tune out during class discussions and when the teacher lectures or gives directions. They respond much better to visual input, particularly if it is in pictorial rather than written form.

To compound the difficulty, children who do not have to listen can easily develop habits to avoid exercising (and thus building) these important auditory-processing connections. The very act of remembering lays down physical tracks in the brain, but children can quite easily avoid having to build these systems. When a teacher gives directions, they watch her for clues or look around to see what everyone else is doing (now that so many seem to have this problem, sometimes no one knows!). They say "Huh?" enough times to make frazzled parents either show them or do it themselves. When they don't hear the homework assignment in class, they call a friend. In reading they rely heavily on pictures in the text. Most children get the message more from the pictures than from "talk" when they watch TV, so extended viewing -- particularly in early years when these brain connections are forming -- compounds the problem. No wonder, when they have to read longer stories, math word problems, history books, etc., they can't hold the sound of the words inside their own heads long enough to understand what they're reading! Their brains have simply not been trained to understand and retain discourse.

What causes the basic weakness? Research suggests this type of problem may tend to run in some families. Nowadays, however, when most children's listening experiences are limited or attached to pictures, it is difficult to sort out who inherited the problem and who "caught" it from the environment. Whatever the cause, studies have shown that early experience with careful, analytic listening can dramatically improve auditory processing, listening comprehension, and in turn, reading ability -- even in children with an inherited weakness. [9]

HEREDITY, ENVIRONMENT, AND "EXCEPTIONAL BRAINS"

Scientists are trying to get more specific about how nature and nurture affect patterns of learning ability. They have found that "exceptionality" (such as musical, mathematical, or linguistic talent, as well as some categories of learning disability) may be related to inherited differences in the way brains are constructed. Nevertheless, the effects of environments created by family members with particular interests can't be discounted, say Drs. Lorraine Obler and Deborah Fine in their fascinating book The Exceptional Brain. "Stating that a talent or disability is biologically or genetically based does not mean that it will necessarily develop or fail to develop regardless of the conditions under which a child grows up. Certain environmental factors are crucial for the manifestation of talent as they are for the manifestation of disability." [10]

Genes, Dyslexia, and the Fetal Brain

It is difficult and highly technical work to sort out the respective effects of genes and family habits, agrees Dr. Bruce Pennington of the University of Colorado. Dr. Pennington is director of a large study searching for specific genes by which language, reading, and learning disabilities can be transmitted from parent to child. Just because many members of a family have a certain trait, he says, we cannot assume it is necessarily genetic. After all, poor table manners can run in families!" [11] Likewise, parents who enjoy reading and conversation will tend to surround their children with a literacy-rich environment and extensive listening experiences, and vice versa.

Nevertheless, Pennington's research, the largest family learning-disability study ever conducted, has confirmed that some specific types of learning difficulties, including language disorders such as stuttering, speech, and some reading problems, are genetically influenced. Members of these families, interestingly enough, are often distinguished by talents in other areas. As researchers work to clarify definitions and probable causes, they are uncovering some fascinating clues about why this might be true.

The term "dyslexia" has often been used as a garbage can for any kind of problem with reading. Current research, however, has limited the use of the term to describe a brain-based disorder in putting together the sight and sound of printed language in reading, spelling, and writing (e.g., looking at a letter and saying its sound; remembering how to write said). Dyslexic children, who compose only one special segment of the entire LD population, may also have difficulty with some aspects of oral language, such as coming up quickly with the word they want to say or getting the order of the sounds and syllables straight. Because they tend to mix up the order of letters and words when they read (and sometimes the order of numerals when they do arithmetic), people used to think the problem was in their eyes. Now it is suspected that the culprits really are deficits in left-hemisphere systems responsible for analyzing and arranging things in sequential order and linking sound with written symbol.

Even with their genetically "different" brains, dyslexic children who come from homes where they have been exposed to books and good examples of language often learn to read reasonably well. Although their spelling is often "atrocious," these youngsters may escape diagnosis as they learn to compensate for or cover up their difficulties. They also prove that "disability" is a relative term, as they are often talented in more predominantly right-hemisphere skills, such as visual arts, mathematical reasoning, music, mechanical aptitude. [12]

Attention problems in school frequently accompany dyslexia, but dyslexics often have excellent visual attention for details of things they see (other than printed words!), and they can spend long hours in activities such as working on an engine or a design. They are youngsters who might be academic stars in a culture with a different set of intellectual priorities.

How are these brains different? Studies using new computerized pictures of brain areas in action show that dyslexic children seem to use different neural systems for reading than do "normal" readers. [13] A second line of evidence suggests that this mix-up takes place because certain brain areas developed differently before birth. Because the young brain is so plastic, it manages to reorganize itself around reading, but academic skills still suffer to some degree.

"A Terrible-Looking Brain"

Not long ago, the late Dr. Norman Geshwind and his colleague Dr. Albert Galaburda, of Harvard University, began intensive work on the brains of several dyslexics who had willed them for study. All of these brains differed in particular ways from the "normal" pattern of cell organization, especially in one general language area of the left hemisphere. Microscopic analysis pinpointed the origin of the differences at a certain period of prenatal cell migration. Instead of finding their intended homes, groups of neurons ended up in peculiar places and arrangements. Moreover, areas in the right hemisphere -- the ones, in fact, that would probably underlie visual, mechanical, or other creative abilities -- were proportionately larger in these people. [14]

Given the growing evidence that dyslexia tends to run in families and to be more evident in males, Dr. Geshwind decided to interview families of dyslexics. When he uncovered repeated prevalence of left-handed relatives and autoimmune, or allergic, disease, he developed a theory. He speculated that imbalances of hormones or antibodies secreted by the mother at different times during pregnancy might subtly rearrange the infant's brain in ways that would make it less adept at reading and language, more talented in visual-spatial skills, and more likely to be left-handed. [15, 16]

No final answers are yet available, but this research is being continued by Dr. Albert Galaburda. Until more is known, these studies provide powerful evidence that even though baby brains are born with differences, they can eventually learn to accomplish a complex learning task (in this case, reading) with brain systems different -- and perhaps geographically far removed -- from the ones best suited for the job. The scientists working on these projects agree that the way dyslexics -- or anyone else -- use their brains is a critical factor in modifying them.

I had an opportunity to chat with Dr. Galaburda after a recent speech in which he emphasized "the Darwinian-like interaction" between the environment and the growing brain. Genes provide the environment with "a range of structures to choose from," he explained, "and the environment chooses from this range of possibilities. The structure of your brain determines that you can dance, but it doesn't permit you to fly," he said, smiling. ''There are some things the genes just don't permit. But on the other hand, the brain is not prewired to act just one way; instead it gives the environment certain flexibility in selection. I think even if children have not quite the best wiring diagram for something, you can make it look better or less well depending on the environment. [17]

"Different kinds of environmental factors, from chemicals to societal pressures . . . are potentially capable of resulting in abnormal brain interactions," explained Dr. Galaburda. On the other hand, his studies of dyslexic brains have reminded him that we should never underestimate the ability of the brain, given the right kind of support, to compensate for innate difficulties. "If you change the brain [before birth] you probably change the range of possibilities that are available to this brain in some sense, but the range of possibilities is still very great. One of our dyslexics was a very distinguished, famous, brilliant psychologist and she had a terrible-looking brain!" [18]

The Flip Side of Dyslexia: Nonverbal Learning Disorders

Scientists are hot on the trail of brain differences that lie behind another difficulty, termed "nonverbal learning disorder," which seems to stem from the opposite problem: insufficient right-hemisphere power.

People with right-hemisphere disabilities may be quite competent at linear, sequential skills like spelling, reading out loud, or doing basic math equations, but have trouble when they must comprehend abstract ideas, relate to people socially, or reason in a visual-spatial format (e. g., maps, charts, three-dimensional puzzles, architectural drawings). They have trouble understanding the relationship of their bodies in space or the ideas in literature or social studies. They almost invariably run afoul of more advanced math courses. Their primary difficulty is one of seeing the "whole picture" of a situation: sizing up meaning when they read or when they deal with others, for example. They may have trouble interpreting the emotional quality of people's facial expressions and do or say inappropriate things in social situations. [19]

[A Cautionary Note: Most of us lean toward one "style" or another but are still well within the normal range; just because any of these descriptions sound like someone you know does not mean they have a brain disability, just that they are at a different point on a continuum than someone else. The fact that we all have unique patterns of talents keeps us supplied with people who want to be proofreaders as well as those who prefer architectural design.]

Serious cases of nonverbal learning disorder, in which the individual's abilities are obviously affected, are just now receiving professional attention. Little is known about causes or treatment, but researchers suggest early intervention to help the brain develop connections for manipulating the physical world and understanding other people's reactions and the principles behind ideas.

Children who show this type of learning profile may not look "disabled" in early grades and are often, in fact, viewed as quite advanced because of large vocabulary, facility on the computer, early reading of words, and good math computation skills. The tipoff is that they tend to pursue linear kinds of learning, like computer math or spelling drills, as obsessively as they avoid such visual-spatial challenges as video games, team sports, or mechanical puzzles. [20] Since the child's family may share some of the same characteristics, manual and interpersonal abilities may not have high priority at home.

Nonverbal learning disorders and dyslexia are just two of the many conditions that get lumped under the term "LD" (and which may or may not include "attention deficit" problems), but they are among the major ones for which specific, and possibly inherited, brain differences have been suggested. No one knows how many "learning disabilities" are caused by environments that interact with more "normal" brain patterns to make children unprepared for school learning. Most experts agree, however, that this number is probably growing. Because the types of technology needed to look, literally, at the learning brain are only now being developed and are expensive, it will be a long time before we fully understand the normal learning process, let alone all its variations. A few scientists have already begun the quest.

Looking Inside the Brain

At Michigan State University, Dr. E. James Potchen, chairman of the Department of Radiology, works at the forefront of these efforts. He directs a project in which magnetic resonance imaging, a method of seeing the working brain in "exquisite detail," as he says, is being used to probe the relationship of brain structure and learning disability.

Dr. Potchen has looked at 18,000 brains, and says that "we are all abnormal because all brains are so different. It's amazing we do as well as we do." Having brain differences should not necessarily be viewed as having a disease, he maintains, and there can be tremendous changes in the architecture of the brain from learning. He guesses the child's brain is always in the process of being rewired.

Dr. Potchen tells of both animal and human brains that have restructured themselves significantly on the basis of learning experiences. Some types of birds even develop new neurons when they learn to sing. In a human experiment he showed pictures of a stick figure to doctors and artists while their brain activity was being scanned. Different areas of the cortex would "light up" depending on the individual's profession. The artists, looking at the drawing, showed brain patterns indicating greater complexity of association and understanding.

This curious researcher has also been examining his own brain every four years to look for changes. "I haven't yet got to the point where I can see that if my golf swing got better, it would change my brain, but that may be coming -- especially for children." [21]

FITTING BRAINS TO LEARNING -- AND FITTING LEARNING TO BRAINS

Research like Dr. Potchen's has obvious promise for educators, but we are still a long way from being able to plan teaching on the basis of brain scans. In the meanwhile, this research should certainly sensitize us to the fact that learning environments -- at home or school -- can partially rearrange neural wiring diagrams. They can help the child overcome or compensate for innate differences or predispose to problems. In our schools, children who come with deficits in auditory attention and language processing are headed for trouble.

As I learn more about the wide variety of ways in which students' brains may differ from each other's -- and from my own -- I become increasingly aware of the importance of the "fit" between their brains' particular contours and the learning environment into which they have been injected. Now, when I walk into a classroom of twenty students, be they four- or forty-year-olds, I remind myself that I am trying to teach twenty individual brains that are probably as different in their learning patterns as my students' faces are in appearance. As a teacher, I must accept the fact that their level of success -- and thus their motivation -- will be directly related to the accommodation we mutually achieve between the subject matter and their particular pattern of abilities. I must encourage them to push themselves a little harder on things that do not come so easily, but I must also accept the necessity of supporting and working to develop each student's potential. Even with twenty students, which is fewer than the number found in most classrooms, this job requires skill, patience, and a lot of hard work.

If we could, as teachers, fill this awesome assignment, I venture to say both the number of "learning disabilities" and the dropout rate would decline precipitously. Our job is getting increasingly difficult, however, because we seem to be standing in the way of an avalanche of brains that are misfitted to our educational objectives. A teacher can easily become engulfed trying to reconcile administrators' demands for "achievement" with today's language and attention patterns. Unless the adult community decides to help us wrap these growing brains in the mental garments of language, reflection, and thought, I fear we will continue to see increasing numbers of children categorized as "educationally sick."

[admin]

PART 1 OF 2

CHAPTER 8: Why Can't They Pay Attention?

The reason our children don't follow directions is that they're tuned out. These children don't listen. They have so much stimulation --they're used to the TV blaring, the stereo, the household commotion. I'm not sure so many are ADHD; they're just restless because they don't have anything inside. They're so used to being-entertained. -- EIGHTH-GRADE TEACHER, SUBURBAN SCHOOL, GEORGIA

They have a much better store of general information than children twenty years ago. If they listen, they can follow directions, but it is difficult to keep their attention long enough to explain what to do. -- TEACHER, UNGRADED RURAL SCHOOL, MINNESOTA

The kids are sharp and intuitive, but -- listening skills? Not as good as students in the past. Some seem to have forgotten how to learn without visual stimulation and affirmation of what they hear. Concentration and memory are just not as important to them. They seem to have their own agendas in life, and school gets in the way sometimes. -- FIFTH-GRADE TEACHER, URBAN SCHOOL, OREGON

FIGURE 3 [Teacher] Students, turn to page 94. You will need a pencil, paper and your ruler. [Girl] What else do I need besides a pencil and paper? [Boy] What page did you say that was? [Boy] Do we need our books? [Boy] What page? Courtesy of Dodie Corpening and Gifted, Created and Talented Magazine.

THE PROBLEM OF ATTENTION

Although "attention deficits" are involved in the vast majority of learning-disability referrals, teachers of all students complain more about diminished attention spans than about any other characteristic of their students. As soon as I began to talk with educators, I discovered that merely mentioning the word "attention" opened a floodgate of response. To my surprise, I also heard the same concerns expressed from abroad, although in other countries the diagnosis of "learning disability" and ADHD are much less prevalent.

In Tours, a large city southwest of Paris, the director of a primary school and an instructor in the highly esteemed Ecole Normale (Teachers' College), told me, "The teachers here complain a lot; they say the children don't listen anymore, they are restless. This is only my personal opinion, but I think one learns not to listen when one watches television. I think the children get in the habit and then when the teacher talks, they don't hear her either." She went on to describe other concerns remarkably similar to those I was hearing at home about hurried lifestyles, overprogrammed children, and the decline of thoughtful conversations around the family dinner table. "Personally, I don't think the parents encourage calmness or listening," she mused. [1]

It is clear from the preceding comments that declining listening abilities are the main symptom, but most teachers sense that they also reflect students' problems with focusing and maintaining internal control of attention in any situation. Overall mental restlessness and inability to persist in solving problems, reading "hard" books, or doing work perceived as "boring" are even more serious symptoms. In the United States a national crisis in "problem-solving ability" -- the ability to stay focused long enough to reason out and solve a mental challenge -- has become the primary agenda item of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Could these trends simply represent inevitable signs of progress? Will children be better off if they learn early to respond to the pace of the contemporary world? Certainly, to be adapted to today's surroundings, young brains need to deal with a lot of rapid-fire stimuli. To reason effectively and solve problems, however, growing minds also need to be able to retain and connect these "bits." Perhaps most important, they need to learn what it feels like to be in charge of one's own brain, actively pursuing a mental or physical trail, inhibiting response to the lure of distractions.

Attention determines how and what an individual learns. [2] It enables us to make choices and maintain control over what we notice, absorb, and remember. Children with attention problems fall into two general categories: some are too mentally active, with their focus jumping from one thing to another, while others behave as if their brains were underactive. Those in the latter group frequently are termed "spaced out," but they are much less frequently diagnosed than the "hyper" ones, who respond impulsively to whatever can be touched or seen in their environments and have particular difficulty internalizing personal controls. [3] Those with serious disorders often grow up to be impulsive adults; ADHD is statistically linked with delinquency and antisocial behavior. If our society wants citizens who can reflect as well as respond, who can come up with solutions to the problems of a complex world, it must teach its children to stop, listen, and think as well as to react.

How can we help children learn to direct their mental energies? How much can the environment affect patterns of attention, listening, and problem-solving? Let us consider first what is known about attention and why physicians prescribe drugs for some children who lack it. Then we will start to take a look at what environments, both physical and mental, have to do with the way it develops -- or fails to -- during childhood.

What Is an Attention Deficit?

Attention, like learning disability, is not a single measurable quantity. Although psychologists are far from agreeing on an exact definition, they have generally believed, as far as learning is concerned, that selective attention -- the ability to concentrate and stay focused on a particular task -- is the critical issue. [4] But selective attention has proven hard to measure. Like memory, it is "task specific," changing according to the job the brain is asked to do and the underlying motivation to do it. For example, many teachers who complain that students can't pay attention and listen in class also notice that the same children will concentrate on a computerized video game for long periods of time. In these two situations there are clear differences between both motivational and cognitive factors such as auditory or visual attention, saliency (attention-grabbing quality) of the stimulus, requirements for memory, physical involvement, and the pace of the activity, all of which affect attention.

For all learners, attention varies from situation to situation, and it is difficult to determine the fine line between normal restlessness and pathology. Now that so many children seem out of sync with the attentional demands of their classrooms, the problem is compounded. Even the extreme diagnosis of "ADHD" -- which assumes that the child has some sort of organic brain dysfunction -- depends on rather vague criteria, since there are no surefire neurological tests to prove its existence.

To diagnose a child as pathologically inattentive most doctors depend mainly on behavior checklists filled out by teachers and parents; the official diagnosis is often subjective. A certain proportion of items like the following must be checked:

• failure to finish things he or she starts
• failure to listen
• difficulty in concentrating or sticking to an activity
• acting before thinking
• shifting between one activity and another
• difficulty in organization
• calling out in class/difficulty awaiting turns

To earn the additional designation "hyperactive," the child must also show excessive physical activity (e.g., run or climb excessively).

Since all children exhibit these behaviors at times, the diagnosis is supposed to be restricted to problems that are unusually severe for the child's age and level of mental development. Curiously, however, doctors are told that the child may seem perfectly normal during the office visit, since ADHD children are often able to control themselves in novel or one-to-one situations. [5]

Controlling Attention: From Inside or Outside?

Ritalin and other drugs prescribed for ADHD are variations on the type of stimulants, or amphetamines, banned in over-the-counter diet pills. They help heighten and sharpen attention -- even in many "normal" people. Some children with organic difficulties seem to benefit from carefully regulated doses that enable them to focus appropriately, listen more carefully to the teacher, and complete more work. In fact, moderate doses would have the same effect on almost anyone -- at least for a while -- and many doctors complain that the number of children treated is much larger than it should be. Some physicians, parents, and teachers are too eager, they say, to give children drugs with well-recognized negative side effects, instead of working to help them learn to manage their own behavior.

Many children diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder are extremely intelligent, but there is some reason to doubt the overall benefit of drug treatment alone in helping them use that intelligence productively. Students who take their medication do become more tractable, completing more repetitive "work" such as worksheets with fill-in answers and drills on math problems. In most studies conducted thus far, however, drugs per se do not make them score better on tests of academic achievement or of higher-level thinking and problem-solving. [6] Some studies have even shown that the level of dosage needed to make teachers approve a child's behavior is so high that it actually dulls reasoning ability. These findings raise questions, not only about the type of "work" dominating many classrooms, but also about the real source of the problem. [7]

Lasting improvement is generally not seen after the drug treatment is stopped. A few children appear spontaneously to "outgrow" attention problems around adolescence, probably because of nervous-system maturation, but many retain problems of self-control that persist into adulthood.

"Curing" attention problems seems to be close to impossible. Teaching students to talk through problems, thus developing conscious strategies for self-control, is the only therapy used thus far that appears to produce results lasting after drugs are discontinued. [8-10] In fact, this sort of "cognitive therapy" -- using language to control behavior -- has been shown to help even without drug treatment. Some professionals have gone so far as to suggest that the real disability is a lack of this type of teaching -- both at home and at school.

Misfitted Attention: What Is the Real Problem?

Since most of the "epidemic" of inattention cannot be linked to proven organic dysfunction of the central nervous system, other factors that create a misfit between the children's development and the demands of the schools are being considered. According to the newest research, a small percentage of problems called ADHD may be covering up basic anxiety or depression. [11] Many more may be related to other, environmental causes. Overall a confusing picture emerges.

In her book, When Children Don't Learn, Dr. Diape McGuinness expresses skepticism about the validity of the diagnosis itself. "Problems in the control of attention could result from deficiencies in the central nervous system, which could produce distractibility, failure to sustain attention to a task, inability to plan actions, and a diminished attention span. However, similar difficulties could be created by an environment that is either too overwhelming or insufficiently compelling [emphasis added]," she states. [12] Dr. McGuinness, who confesses she is irate about the amount of Ritalin being prescribed today, believes that many children thought to be "hyperactive" are really normally vigorous children "who refuse to abide by adult admonitions to sit still and conform to rules set by adults for their own convenience." She makes the point that children's bodies are designed by nature to be active, and the overly wiggly ones may really know what is good for them more than the docile types "who are overly conforming and remain for hours in sedentary positions."

Under some circumstances (such as in the doctor's office), even children labeled ADHD are able to control their attention -- but only if the situation is novel, one-on-one, and they get frequent and continuous rewards and reinforcement of some kind. For example, they can pay excellent attention to computer activities with frequent token rewards (e.g., a laser gun blows up a space invader every time the student gets a math problem correct), and their schoolwork improves noticeably when someone works individually with them. In one interesting study, children diagnosed ADHD were paid to respond quickly and accurately to a test on which they had previously scored quite poorly when no reward was offered. Much to the experimenter's surprise, promise of money brought their performance up to the level of a normal control group. [13]

These findings and others have led a number of professionals to begin rethinking their views. Dr. Russell Barkley, nationally noted authority and author of Hyperactive Children, recently told a large group of educators that he is changing his mind about what an "attention deficit" really is. [14] "If you have an attention deficit, shouldn't it show up everywhere? If language is impaired, we see language impairment anywhere the child needs to use language. How can this be an attention deficit? Don't we need to look for something else that explains this variation? Why do they do better with novel situations, with rich schedules of reinforcement [frequent rewards]? People are seriously questioning whether this is really an attention deficit."

One theory, according to Dr. Barkley, is that the ADHD children have particular trouble with what he calls "rule-governed behavior." When the environment demands adherence to a rule, especially one with few consequences, trouble begins. "So when a teacher says, 'He's not paying attention,' what she really means is he's not listening, he's not following the rule. 'I told him to go back to his desk, get out his math problems, and work on them, and he didn't do the rule.'

"It's been shown that when ADHD children are paying attention to what they like, they don't have an attention deficit," he emphasized. "So if they brought a car from home, or a transformer, or they're doodling war pictures on the corner of that reading workbook -- their attention span for war pictures is phenomenal! But it isn't for the stuff you ask them to do. The problem, then, is not attention, it's a disability in rule-following."

However, even these children can follow rules if there is an immediate reward, Dr. Barkley has observed. "In adults, we are the only animal that operates on a very sparse schedule of reward; I only get a paycheck once a month, but I show up at work every day. There is something fascinating about the human brain that allows it to be exquisitely sensitive to extremely sparse schedules of reward, but that is something that has to develop. Young children can't do it. You can tell a young kid you'll take him to Disneyland in February, and that won't do it. These ADHD kids are like younger kids; they need immediate feedback and reinforcement."

Why might this be the case? Dr. Barkley suggests, for some children, underlying differences in the motivational-control systems of the brain may not be operating normally; thus they need a much stronger external impetus to concentrate on the task at hand. They simply don't respond as other children do to "social approval."

"Somehow, neurologically, these children have a threshold for what rewards them that is set too high; it takes a more powerful reinforcer to get them to do what they are told. That is why they require the money, food, bikes, toys, privileges, bribes -- to work. Because the subtle rewards -- love of learning, grades, teacher approval -- don't motivate these kids at all. You can say 'good boy, good boy' all you want and that isn't going to work."

"They can understand what you say to them," he points out, "they just don't act on it. It's really a problem with how language governs behavior -- the connections between the linguistic and the motor systems." [15]

Dr. Barkley suspects there is a genetic cause for these brain differences, possibly related to the way chemicals (neurotransmitters) help different parts of the brain work together. Children who develop the most severe forms of ADHD so that they become openly "oppositional" and often delinquent, tend to come from families with a history of alcohol abuse, delinquency, and antisocial behavior, which he thinks may reflect some overall type of inherited problem. We can't blame parents for the fact that they have a difficult child, he insists, but we must acknowledge that a child's environment helps determine how the problem is expressed. As with bad table manners that seem to run in families, no one has been able to measure exactly how much living with impulsive adults in poorly structured situations contributes to the problem.

Obviously, no clear-cut answers about the "why" of attention problems are available. Perhaps neurology is just struggling to catch up with common sense, for it seems foolish to deny that the way a child is taught and shown to behave has a lot to do with whether or not he learns to manage himself without an immediate reward. A number of practical, real-life studies show that children's adult models may be a significant, but frequently unappreciated, variable. [16]

FURNISHING THE EXECUTIVE SUITE: HOW BRAINS LEARN TO PAY ATTENTION

Both physical and mental environments help develop the ability to pay attention. Because attention requires the use of many different areas of the brain, any severe trauma, "insult," or biochemical abnormality may affect it. As we all know, even transient emotional states can knock this delicately balanced block off the tower of learning abilities.

Attention systems grow in several directions in the brain: side to side, bottom to top, and inside to outside. Here's a brief summary of how they are formed.

Activating the Hemispheres

The side-to-side connections are mainly in the corpus callosum, that tough and busy band of fibers that carries messages between the hemispheres and lets the two sides of the cortex work efficiently together. Several prominent neuropsychologists believe that brains with attention and learning problems have trouble getting an idea into the appropriate hemisphere and keeping it there long enough to be processed efficiently.

One recent study measured electrical brain waves in right and left hemispheres of LD (in this case, reading disabled) children when they were doing different types of learning tasks; the measurements were then compared with brain-wave recordings from a group of good students doing the same activities. The good students showed the expected changes in hemispheric activation depending on whether the task was a verbal or nonverbal one, although overall they tended to favor left-hemisphere strategies. The LD children showed different patterns: (1) they had less overall left-hemisphere activation, even in verbal tasks, and (2) they showed significantly smaller shifts from one hemisphere to the other when the tasks required different processing strategies. [17]

If children have not had a chance to develop strong connections between the two sides or enough practice using left-hemisphere systems for careful listening, they certainly might have more trouble concentrating, getting their brains quickly and efficiently into gear for school tasks, and finding the best way to study and remember things they are supposed to learn. [18]

Three Levels of Attention

The up-and-down axis of brain maturation, which is probably the major route by which children learn to pay attention, may be particularly at risk in today's environments. Although, technically, this "attention circuit" cannot be separated from the hemispheres, since it crosses through them, it is, in many respects, a separate apparatus. Imagine, if you will, a circuit that runs from the base of your skull at the back of your head all the way up through the middle of the brain to the front of your forehead and back down again. This is similar to the main route from which higher-level systems receive information about where and how attention should be focused. These higher centers, in turn, decide what is to be done and then instruct the rest of the brain in how the behavior (including learning) is to be directed.

This attention loop has three layers that develop from bottom to top and inside to outside the brain. The first, primitive stage of the circuit lies near the top of the spinal cord, where it joins the skull, in brain structures that closely resemble those of other animals. It is responsible for basic alertness (e.g., staying awake when it is appropriate), screening out or letting in various types of stimuli (e.g., focusing without being distracted by background sights or sounds), filtering information, and getting the higher centers of the cortex "in gear."

Second come centers for emotion and memory, which are located in the middle of the brain in an area technically called the limbic system. In these "subcortical" areas, the incoming stimuli are connected with motivation (how important is it for me to pay attention to this right now?) and some centers for memory. I find it particularly interesting, although not intuitively surprising, that attention, emotion, motivation, and memory have such a close physical link in the nervous system.

Developmental influences on the limbic system are one of the great, barely unfolded mysteries of the brain. How do children acquire the neural foundations of motivation? No one really knows, but the central role of these midbrain connections imply that they must be important indeed.

At the very top of the circuit lie the frontal lobes of the cortex, comprising the frontmost parts of both right and left hemispheres. This part of the brain, which is the human animal's unique neural possession, is often called the executive of the brain because it is responsible for planning and regulating behavior. It consists of the motor cortex, which helps plan and implement physical movement, and the prefrontal areas, which, when (and if) fully developed, become the "boss" of thinking. (The terms "frontal" and "prefrontal" are used interchangeably.)

The neural groundwork for attention abilities is laid early in prenatal life, when the bottom layer of primitive "alerting" areas are developing. After birth the child must collaborate with nature and the motivational system to build the connections that put the thinking brain in charge. Because the higher centers can't take over immediately, young children are notoriously "stimulus-bound" -- at the mercy of any new sensory experience or idea. Thus they tend to be highly distractible.

During the years of childhood, especially between the ages of three and six, most youngsters work hard on learning to screen out both external and internal distractions and marshal their attention at will. Any environmental force that severely interferes with this important learning has the potential to disrupt the system. Sometime during adolescence, most brains are sufficiently mature to start to attend to future goals and use more complex forms of mental control (please notice, parents, I said "most"). It's a long process, indeed, and demands continued support from concerned and persistent (if often exasperated!) adults.

Attention and the Brain's Executive

Prefrontal development is not completed at least until late adolescence, or even adulthood. Thus, the way a child learns to use executive functions is doubtless highly dependent on the experiences the environment provides. Adults who show children how to put thought ahead of action, delay gratification, and use language as a tool for thinking and planning help provide the fundamental training ground for the brain's executive.

Curiously, this "highest" level of the brain's functioning does not seem to be measured by standard IQ tests. The rest of the cortex serves as the storehouse for taking in information, which it associates and connects into the intellectual data bank that constitutes a lifetime of learning. The frontal systems have a different responsibility: seeing that the data gets used effectively, the reason why they are referred to as the executive. When experts give advice about boosting mental skills, they are usually referring to the most efficient ways of filling up the storehouse. Unfortunately, they too often forget that merely trying to shovel in information will serve little purpose unless children also learn how to use their brains to stay mentally focused, put information into perspective, reflect on meaning, plan ahead, and follow through constructively -- the fundamental components of problem-solving. For this reason, "competency tests" that measure only the accumulation of data may seriously mislead us about children's real learning abilities. Without an efficient "executive," real-life competency is jeopardized.

Despite its critical importance in learning -- as well as in life -- there is little research on the way prefrontal development can be influenced. It appears that the way the brain learns to talk to itself may be a major factor in building its internal connections and learning to control the workings of both mind and body. [19] I will expand on this extremely important point in the next chapter.

For now, let us consider some of the interrelated factors that can cause trouble at any of the three levels of the attention system. Outright trauma, either before or after birth, is probably responsible only for a relatively small percentage of attention problems, but increasing numbers of children are currently seen as being at risk because of greater loads of environmental toxins and better survival rates for low-birthweight infants. Other more subtle factors, from "noise pollution" to biochemical effects of junk food, may tip the brain's attentional balances either before or after birth.

Several types of hazards in contemporary life should be specifically mentioned:

1. Toxic substances and foods that may predispose children to attention problems.

2. "Noisy" environments that cause children to tune out rather than tune in.

3. Sedentary lifestyles.

4. Failure by adults to act as constructive, thoughtful "coaches" for children.

HOW BRAINS GET "INSULTED": ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS FOR ATTENTION AND LEARNING

Before birth, some children suffer specific types of damage or so-called "insult" to attention-regulating systems. As we saw in Chapter 2, brains are at risk both before and soon after birth by overt damage from illness, accident, or exposure to toxins (e.g., lead, solvents, medications, etc.). Anything that deprives the brain of oxygen, particularly during times of rapid development, can also subtly jeopardize attention abilities. For example, children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy, who were premature, or who suffered various types of birth trauma tend to have a higher rate of attention problems and related learning disabilities than other youngsters.

Even after the foundation systems are in place, the brain can be disrupted by anything that interferes with the proper workings of the limbic system or the higher centers in the cortex, particularly the frontal areas. Sometimes these effects are so subtle that no one connects the cause with the resulting learning problem. One reason is that the brain has built-in mechanisms to protect itself, which may work well until they become overtaxed.

A good example of a built-in protection system is the so-called blood-brain barrier, which screens out brain-damaging materials that may be circulating in the rest of the bloodstream. Some potentially injurious substances are able to sneak across this barrier, and it can also be weakened, or made more permeable, by environmental factors, such as prolonged exposure to toxins or an unbalanced or inadequate diet.

Once across the barrier, troublesome agents can affect brain functioning in at least two ways that are, as yet, only generally understood. First, they may be directly toxic and create overt, permanent damage, as in the impairments inflicted on the fetal brain by alcohol. More subtly, they may cause temporary changes in the fine chemical balance that makes thinking possible. Brains can be either intolerant or frankly allergic to certain substances, but it is difficult to pin down the culprits.

[admin]

PART 2 OF 2 (CHAPTER 8 CONT'D)

Alcohol and Drugs

Every prospective parent should by now be aware that alcohol use during pregnancy is clearly related to future learning problems, but it continues to be a significant issue. Exposure of growing brains to recreational drugs other than alcohol can also damage attention abilities. Yet, despite increased publicity about this problem, it seems to be getting larger. A recent article in the New York Times reported that "a frighteningly high number of babies -- possibly 375,000 a year -- are being exposed to cocaine, marijuana, amphetamines, or other illegal drugs in the womb ... and face the possibility of health damage from their mothers' drug abuse." These findings, "not just an inner-city problem," span all levels of the socioeconomic spectrum and may significantly underestimate the extent of the problem, according to one expert quoted in the article. [20]

Toxic Environments

After birth, the growing brain remains highly susceptible. Lead is a particularly serious and ubiquitous threat to attention centers and can definitely lower children's IQs. Parents are well advised to screen their children's environments carefully for all possible sources, but educators are alarmed at recent reports that schools themselves may be physically hazardous in this respect. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, school officials began testing water fountains after a local newspaper reporter discovered unusually high lead levels in one school. Ultimately, they disconnected thirty-one water fountains and faucets after finding lead levels that were more than twenty times above the current EPA standard. [21] The national PTA has recently issued an appeal to schools to check lead levels of water and adopt appropriate safety measures. [22]

In Mexico City, where airborne pollution from car exhaust causes inhabitants to have drastically elevated blood lead levels, authorities shut down the school system for the entire month of January 1989, to reduce children's exposure to polluted air as they went to school and played outside during recess. Some foreign embassies in Mexico have even advised their diplomats to leave young children at home and not to have a baby while residing there. [23]

Other metals such as aluminum, arsenic, manganese, and mercury can also be neurotoxic, especially if they are combined with lead. Because scientists are now beginning to pay serious attention to this issue, we may hope that current vague warnings will soon yield to clearer guidelines.

Many potential sources of neurotoxic substances can be found in today's culture of chemical convenience. [24] Professor James Croxton of the University of Santa Cruz recently shared with me his concerns about widespread spraying of pesticides in areas near schools and homes. Pesticides may weaken or cross the blood-brain barrier, particularly in children who are not well nourished, he says. In another example, some school boards came under fire recently for the prevalent use of pesticides in school buildings. Parents who cite evidence of adverse effects in some children who are sensitive to chemicals have demanded more careful monitoring of the use of such strong substances around young children. Although there is no absolutely conclusive evidence about the relationship of pesticides to long-term difficulties in attention, a number of school districts are starting to reconsider and change their policies on spraying in classrooms. [25, 26] Since toxins may exacerbate each other's effects, any potential source of contamination should be a matter of serious concern. Intelligent societies do not poison -- in a very literal sense -- the minds of their young.

Junk Food and Jumpy Minds

Can fast food and soft drinks upset brain chemistry and thus be subtly poisonous to growing minds? In recent years a number of authorities have begun to investigate possible effects of dietary habits on brain function, but their disagreements are probably the prickliest in all of the research literature. While one responsible authority states with certainty that food does not cause attention or learning problems, in an adjoining room another insists that the diets of today's children -- particularly additives, sugar, and "overprocessed" fare -- play a major role.

As in most arguments, the truth appears to lie somewhere in between. Convincing evidence has been assembled to show that the chemistry of children's brains may be affected by what they eat or drink. Given the uniqueness of each individual's biochemical makeup, it is not surprising that offending substances may affect children quite differently. Moreover, since biochemical "insults" to the brain appear to be cumulative, some effects may not show up immediately or under some circumstances. For this reason, credible research findings have been hard to come by. I will summarize some of the newer findings.

The importance of a well-balanced diet is one of the few areas of professional agreement in this field. Such factors as iron deficiency and general malnutrition have negative effects on the brain and on learning abilities. The young brain is so plastic that the gross effects of severe early malnutrition can be reversed by changed environments, but authorities admit they cannot adequately assess more subtle forms of deprivation. Studies for many years have shown that children who eat breakfast or who are given nourishing snacks during school breaks show improved classroom performance. [27]

Increasing interest -- and more controversy -- has focused on effects of the modern diet, particularly excessive sugar or additives such as food dyes. Numerous studies have yielded a frustrating lack of firm conclusions; the best summary I can come up with is a rather unhelpful one: some things may be harmful for some children under some circumstances. [28] It does appear that several aspects of contemporary eating habits may be particularly dangerous. Children under three years of age may be most susceptible, but brains can be affected at any age. [29, 30] Many of our youngsters are routinely exposed to these suspected hazards:

• diets high in refined sugar
• no breakfast or high-carbohydrate breakfasts (sugars, starches)
• "empty" snacking calories replacing nutritious ones (e.g., too many overprocessed, snack, fast-type foods)
• soft drinks and other foods containing aspartame (NutraSweet)

In her book, Food Makes the Difference, Dr. Patricia Kane makes a strong case for the causal role of nutrition in children's learning and behavior problems. [31] Unsuspected food allergies are often at fault, she maintains, although they are frequently difficult to identify. An even bigger problem is that modern diets in general predispose children to difficulty by weakening the brain's natural defenses. "The surge of refined carbohydrates [sugar, starch] into children's diets is appalling," she says. Convenience and fast foods and sugared cereal are only symptomatic of our neglect of basic nutritional priorities.

Carbohydrates may impair intellectual performance differently in different children, suggests MIT biochemist Dr. Judith Wurtman, because in large doses they may act more like drugs than like food. Depending on the biochemistry of the individual child, heavy doses of carbohydrates may cause a "sugar buzz"; more often, however, the aftermath is lethargy.

"A child who comes home, has potato chips and Coke in the afternoon, pizza with little or no cheese on it for dinner, and ice cream for dessert, has been priming himself with carbohydrates for several hours," Wurtman says. "When it comes time to do homework, that child will [have difficulty] because of sleepiness or lethargy." A little protein might make a big difference. [32]

One of the leading authorities in the field, Dr. Keith Conners, author of Feeding the Brain, has been particularly interested in the effects of sugar on learning. [33] In conducting extensive experiments with both "normal" and, "hyperactive" children, he discovered that high-protein breakfasts (two eggs, in these experiments) could counteract sugar's negative effects and possibly even improve learning and memory in the brain's chemical transmission system. On the other hand, no breakfast or a high-carbohydrate one (two pieces of toast in this case) was a recipe for trouble in some children. (As a longtime parent, I should have asked Dr. Conners how he got the children to eat the two eggs, but I didn't.)

"Kids really ought to eat breakfast because there's a measurable decline in efficiency in all kids, not just hyperactive kids, when they don't," he concludes. "That breakfast probably ought to contain at least a minimum amount of protein." It's all right to eat cereal if it has milk on it, he explains, but children who only have dry cereal or things like doughnuts or potato chips may have trouble sustaining concentration through the morning. Stress makes the brain even more susceptible. "We may need to consider selective protein supplementation for kids under a lot of stress," he suggests. [34]

Dr. Conners also emphasizes that balanced nutrition can help the brain screen out undesirable substances, even toxins such as lead. Anemic, iron-deficient children, or those without other essential nutrients such as zinc, have brains more vulnerable to toxic assault. Vitamin pills probably aren't the answer, however, since combinations of essential nutrients may be less effectively taken up and used by the body than those in real food.

Dr. Conners is also concerned about a much less discussed but perhaps even more alarming trend. Along with many others, he deplores the growing use of aspartame by children despite warnings from physicians that extended usage may have unknown and potentially dangerous neurological consequences.

Aspartame, marketed under the trade name NutraSweet, and consumed by at least 100 million Americans in the form of soft drinks and other artificially sweetened foods (including some innocent-looking vitamin pills), is broken down by the body into compounds that can cross the blood-brain barrier. They have a proven potential to disrupt brain chemistry in some people. Small children may be particularly susceptible. One of these compounds is the same as the one that causes mental retardation in untreated victims of the inherited condition called PKU, for which all newborns are now routinely screened.

According to Dr. Richard Wurtman of MIT, the foremost researcher on aspartame's effects on the brain, some individuals may be genetically more susceptible than others. But the effects of consumption -- which range from headaches and impaired learning performance all the way up to seizures -- may show up only after prolonged use of the sweetener. The user, therefore, may not suspect the source of the problem. Researchers believe females are affected more often than males. Figure 4 presents a list of documented neurological effects of aspartame.

Dr. Wurtman convened a recent conference at which over one hundred scientists from all over the United States and Europe presented findings that should certainly make parents think twice about allowing their children access to this substance. A predominant opinion expressed by these experts was, manufacturers' reassurances notwithstanding, research to date is surprisingly "inadequate." [35]

"Some young kids do react very adversely to this artificial sweetener," says Keith Conners. "This is a real big concern since it is so widely spread out now in our food supply."

Having followed these reports, I find myself appalled that pregnant women and many young children, even toddlers, consume this controversial intrusion into the American diet. I also wonder, given the finding that depression may be one symptom resulting from use of aspartame, whether increased consumption has any bearing on some recent reports of increased incidence of depression in teenagers. It is easy to become impatient with a society that prates about the importance of mental ability and simultaneously feeds its children such substances.

The Brain of a Couch Potato

Unfortunately, "diet" soft drinks are partially a response to the fact that we seem to be raising a generation of sedentary, physically unfit children. A number of studies have shown that an alarming number of American kids are overweight and can't pass basic physical tests of strength, endurance, and agility. In 1984, only 2% of the 18 million children who took the Presidential Fitness Test received an award. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently issued a report declaring that up to 50% of the nation's schoolchildren are not getting enough exercise to develop healthy hearts and lungs, and 40% of youngsters between ages five and eight exhibit at least one risk factor for heart disease. [36]



FIGURE 4. Symptoms Reported by 405 Persons Susceptible to Aspartame

As clear evidence of lifestyle changes in the last two decades, rates of obesity among children and adolescents jumped 45% between 1960 and the early 1980s. The United States Army was forced in 1989 to modify the physical requirements in basic training because so many enlistees were getting injured.

"It's our opinion that the young people coming into the military now have spent more time in front of the TV than on the tennis court or a softball field," commented Lt. Col. John Anderson, who says he can't remember recruits in worse condition in his twenty-year career. [37]

George Allen, chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, expresses serious concern about our children's condition compared to that of their counterparts in other countries. On a recent trip to the Soviet Union, he says, "I was amazed at how far ahead the Soviet youngsters are in fitness compared to American youth .... You don't find many of them watching television until midnight and eating junk food." [38]

If young bodies are in bad shape, what about the brains attached to them? Surprisingly, we know little about what poor levels of fitness imply for neural functioning. A moderate relationship has been shown between motor performance and school success, and exercise can improve both motivation and subsequent abilities to concentrate. [39] Yet no one has thoroughly explored the real effects of sedentary lifestyles on learning abilities. How many attention problems could be related to the fact that so many children nowadays have their natural energies bottled up in schedules and expectation -- and few physical outlets? One survey of physical education classes even showed students getting only about ten minutes of active exercise because so much time was taken up by changing clothes and listening to the teacher talk. A mother of a third grader who just started taking Ritalin because he "can't concentrate" told me that her child comes home from a seven-hour "work" day (i.e., school), "has a snack, and must then sit down and do homework until dinnertime so that he won't have to miss his favorite evening TV programs. "Does he have any time for free play?" I asked. "Well, not really" -- she paused -- "but he has his soccer practice on weekends and a swimming lesson once a week."

Small-muscle activity is also important for school success. One recent study of children aged five to thirteen surprised researchers by showing that "sensorimotor-perceptual skills" (e.g., solving pencil-and-paper mazes, putting pegs in holes quickly and efficiently, copying geometric shapes) were as closely related to academic achievement for the older children as they were for the younger. [40]

"Thought is constructed, not only out of perceiving objects, but also out of physical activities with them." [41] When a child plays and exercises large muscles or pursues games and hobbies that build fine-motor skills (e.g., constructing models, carpentry, sewing, playing jacks), he or she is strengthening motor synapses that are next-door neighbors to the neurons that manage mental behaviors -- including attention. Some children with clearly organic learning problems are motorically clumsy; this may relate to a generalized difficulty organizing and managing what comes into and goes out of their brains (in this case messages to and from the muscles). It seems only reasonable to assume that learning to manage muscles teaches a child feelings of control. Whether or not specific neural connections for attention and more abstract types of learning are also being forged is an interesting research question.

A program of physical exercises, called Sensory Integration Therapy, was developed by California physical therapist Dr. Jean Ayres because of her conviction that movement is the foundation of many types of learning. [42, 43] Many physical therapists and some teachers who work with children with learning disabilities have become convinced of the value of these techniques. Definitive proof has been hard to come by, but even professionals who are skeptical of claims about "sensory integration" are aware of the need to study the relationship of children's movement and learning.

Dr. Phyllis Weikart, associate professor in the Division of Physical Education at the University of Michigan and author of Round the Circle: Key Experiences in Movement, fears that lack of play and body movement is jeopardizing young children's potential learning abilities. [44] She thinks adults are too busy trying to sit children down and force learning, rather than letting them play naturally to build the motor-control centers of their brains.

"All this conversation is going on about cognitive development, but we've forgotten the child's body," she says. "The amount of physical activity since the turn of the century has declined seventy-five percent; children are not playing, and through play a great deal of active learning takes place. Children used to play in natural ways, with kids of different ages, outside, basically unsupervised by adults. Visual and auditory attention, body coordination -- all were gained through that kind of play. This physical learning must take place before children start dealing with abstractions; it doesn't happen if children don't have those experiences."

Changing lifestyles may also be squelching the independent experiences by which children learn to manage their own brains, according to this expert on motor development. "We're providing care so the parents can work. We're creating homogeneity of age groups so children aren't learning in natural cross-age situations. There are so many issues that crop up for people who are caring for children; they have to keep the lid on so the child won't get hurt and they'll get sued. These issues didn't exist before, but they're not going to go away. Parents are going to work and these children have to be cared for, but we've got to be careful we don't negate all the naturalness that kids need in play."

Dr. Weikart has recently become fascinated by the question of how physical movement helps children develop an internal sense of "beat" that seems to correlate with reading and math abilities. She acknowledges she cannot yet explain, in terms of the brain, what "beat" has to do with academic learning, but when we were talking, I remembered that several elementary physical-education teachers had shared with me their puzzlement about why so many more children today seem to be lacking this basic sense of internal rhythm. Dr. Weikart suggests that the reason may be they have not gotten in touch with the internal beat of their own bodies.

"It's frightening! They need beat, but rock music doesn't give them that because it's heard, they don't create it out of their own bodies," she insists. "Feeling has to be independent for the child; you can't make it loud and you can't make it visual as in the videos; it has to be felt. Unless the child is rocked, patted, stroked, danced with at the same time; unless adults are creating the feel of the beat for the child who is hearing it, that feel of beat does not develop."

If children are exposed to too much strong, external beat, they may become "disoriented" and develop attention problems because they are having difficulty reconciling their own inner beat with the outside stimulus, suggests Dr. Weikart. ''That constant verbal, visual bombardment, all it's doing is tuning children out. If we want to improve their attention, we've got to get them up, get them physically involved, tune them back in." [45]

Noisy Brains

Nowadays when the parents bring these kids in the morning, we have to spend at least a half hour either waking them up or calming them down. They come from houses where the TV is going all the time, ride in cars with the music blaring -- it' s no wonder some have blocked it out and others are bouncing off walls. We used to be able to start our activities as soon as the children arrived, but now we always begin with a nice long transition period to get them tuned in. -- Nursery school teacher, Texas

Could stereo headphones change children's brains? Obviously there's the potential for that. One could argue one of two things: either that it will make them more auditorily responsive or that it's going to produce some kind of weird dissociation between modalities [hearing and seeing] because they're chronically dissociated by the use of those things. -- Dr. William T. Greenough

What does noise bombardment do to children's brains? How much may it account for kids who can't pay attention, listen to "talk," and tune in appropriately to learning? One line of research has centered on the irreplaceable structures in the ear that are especially vulnerable during early years. It has been proven that they can be damaged by certain loud noises, including music.

Another group of studies has shown that environments not considered particularly noisy by adults may interfere permanently with the development of language, listening, and even reading abilities. [46]

Other interesting avenues of speculation are also being discussed behind the closed doors of neuropsychological conferences. Three of these involve the effects of a preponderance of musical stimulation on the development of the hemispheres and the connections between them, some additional ideas about what heavy doses of "beat" might do to growing brains, and the effects of an overload of sensory input on a nervous system that has not yet developed effective mechanisms to defend itself.

Brain studies have repeatedly shown that music, for everyone but highly trained musicians, is processed predominantly in the right hemisphere -- in areas directly opposite those responsible for most language processing. Most of us listen and respond primarily in a holistic, "feeling" way to melody (right hemisphere's specialty), while musicians are trained to listen analytically to the technical sequence of notes and other features that must be handled by the left hemisphere. [47, 48] The relaxed state often induced by music is reflected in changes in brain-wave patterns: the more vigorous beta waves that characterize active mental processing yield to slower alpha waves, which are more commonly associated with relaxation. When parts of the brain are "in alpha," they are essentially switched off from active thinking or learning.

Why do some teenagers insist they can concentrate better on their homework with a background of music? We might speculate that music as background generates enough alpha in the right hemisphere to enable left hemisphere language areas to lead the attack on academic work. No one really understands all the ramifications of hemispheric byplay. Moreover, what works for one brain may be annoying or distracting for another. When music stops being background and becomes foreground, concentration probably suffers.

Increasing questions are being raised as to whether too much loud music might induce in a growing brain not real relaxation, but instead a habit of defensively "tuning out" to active thought ("going into alpha"). A related question is whether large quantities of uncritical listening may rob left-hemisphere language systems of the developmental time and space they need for fine-tuning. Certainly, the lyrics of much contemporary music are definitely not designed as linguistic models. "For every song that stands or falls by its words, there must be a hundred that thrive in spite of them ... and sound often has the edge over sense," commented Jon Pareles, acerbic New York Times music critic. [49] Like other serious musicians, he expresses concern over declining interest by listeners in responding to more complex, analytic forms of the art. Much popular music, he says, "eliminates the most complex, time-consuming, mentally draining part of the musical experience -- paying attention." [50]

No one would recommend depriving adults of badly needed relaxation and harmless -- for them -- pleasures. Yet there are many adult pleasures that are handled successfully only by the mature brain. For children, challenge is the stimulus for the hemispheres to get their act together by strengthening the physical connections between them. Anything that either forces or induces the brain into a non-learning state for extended periods of time could certainly interfere with this process.

Young brains are particularly sensitive because they haven't yet developed automatic screening devices. The normal human brain has built-in mechanisms for moderating incoming sensory stimulation to levels that keep it sufficiently "aroused" without becoming overwhelmed. Children's brains, however, have not had time to refine these filtering systems; when overwhelmed, they either "tune out" or their behavior becomes unmanageable. Even normal adults exposed long enough to abnormally high or low levels of sensory stimulation may start to act like hyperactive children! [51] We all learn to screen out a great deal of background noise (e. g., canned music in stores, offices, etc.), but at some point the unconscious effort involved takes its toll and we become habitually stressed out without understanding why. For youngsters, it is even harder to sort out such effects.

Dr. Susan Luddington-Hoe, the authority on infant stimulation, points out that even before birth tender young brains show a distinctly negative response to certain kinds of noise. She cites one example of a professional pianist who, when pregnant, found she could no longer play Chopin because her infant started to thrash around so violently. This fetus, however, seemed to love Mozart. "The fetal heartbeat changes significantly to different types of music," says Dr. Luddington-Hoe. "Both before and after birth, babies are really bothered by strong beat and loud music -- but they love soft music and are especially thrilled by Vivaldi." In another case, a fetus who was taken to a rock concert kicked so hard, apparently in consternation, that he broke one of his mother's ribs. [52]

"My guess is the biggest problem with learning-disabled children is that their sensory thresholds are so low because they've had such a history of bombardment," says Dr. Luddington-Hoe. "Their brains are letting in too much input because they're overwhelmed."

Hooked on Alpha?

When considering children whose attention problems seem to relate more to underactivity, some professionals wonder whether these children are learning to swaddle their brains in sensation-dulling music as an escape from excesses of stimulation in everyday life. Is it possible to be neurologically addicted to alpha rhythm? Certainly, headsets do seem to be on their way to replacing books and magazines for the young.

When I shared some of these questions with Dr. Jerre Levy, an expert on hemispheric development who teaches at the University of Chicago, she admitted she had been wondering about this issue herself. "It's the nature of the music they're listening to, this popular music," she said. It is different from other kinds of music in that the tempo is exactly like a metronome: beat, beat, beat. Studies have shown that flashing lights at a fixed frequency (flash, flash, flash) sets up a rhythm in the brain that interferes with normal processing. The same may be true of the auditory system, she suggests.

When a person is simply sitting doing nothing, Dr. Levy went on, brain waves are regularly synchronized: boom, boom, boom. (This is the case in relaxed states such as alpha.) If the person is given a mental problem to solve, the brain's rhythm becomes "desynchronized" because the rhythm is broken by being forced to think.

"Now, if in your waking hours you have something coming in that's going beat, beat, beat," she explained, "my own feeling is that you're going to make kids space out because it's putting the brain into a loop; if it's in the loop, it can't desynchronize and therefore it can't think. You're really blocking the capacity for thinking." [53]

Scientists have become sufficiently concerned to initiate animal studies of other kinds of rhythmic variables. Researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University reared mice either in a quiet environment, one with soft classical background music, or one with equally soft but arrhythmic drumbeats. The first two groups developed normally, but the latter animals showed difficulty navigating a standard maze, hyperactive and vicious behavior, as well as significant abnormalities in growth of brain cells in centers for learning and memory. Thus, it appears that continual exposure to other kinds of rhythms may also irritate the brain, irrespective of volume. [54]

In summary, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the brain needs time and quiet space in which to develop the ability to manage itself. To gain enough inner control to enjoy the quality of its own mental life, a child's mind should be furnished with some pieces of quiet thought, not the tacky trappings of constant noise.

[admin]

CHAPTER 9: The Starving Executive

It's the lifestyles. Kids have to learn to pay attention. But as far as adults sitting down and doing tasks with a child, I don't think our lifestyles encourage that. -- NURSERY SCHOOL TEACHER, SMALL TOWN, TENNESSEE

The growing brain, because it is so plastic, is a remarkably resilient mechanism that can probably withstand a number of adverse factors before it becomes overwhelmed. All the potential hazards in the world may not account for the majority of the attention problems now facing the schools. At least equally important, many experts believe, is the way adults teach children habits of organization, reflection, and internal control. These are important, not only for children at risk for a clinical diagnosis of ADHD, but also for every child who will be expected to pay sufficient attention to learn effectively.

According to a theory proposed by Dr. Michael Posner and Dr. Frances Friedrich in a recent book on the brain and education, [1] it is possible that training of attention in one type of learning -- such as how to do tasks at home -- might make it easier for a child to learn to use similar approaches in other situations -- such as school.

Dr. Martha Bridge Denckla, a pediatric neurologist, director of the Kennedy Institute Neurobehavioral Clinic, and professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, sees hundreds of children with learning disabilities and attention problems each year. She says she is beginning to wonder just how much of this growing phenomenon of inattention might be attributable to a lack of basic organization in children's lives.

"I think clearly organic problems may account for about one-third of the cases," she told me, "but I'm beginning to think many of the others relate to changing environments for young children. I see an awful lot of parents with a lack of knowledge about child development who don't have the ability to provide the structure children need. I had a couple in the other day who thought their three-year-old was hyperactive, and when I asked them about their daily routines, I found out they expected, among other things, this three-year-old to take her own bath. There was no one to say to the child, 'Now we get up, now we get dressed.' There are families nowadays that never have a family meal; they literally leave food out on the counters. These are people living in $300,000 homes and both working in law offices."

Definite changes have occurred in the last five years. Dr. Denckla continued. ''I'm worried about the parents who think they can just purchase goods and commodities without doing anything for the child. Simple things -- mealtimes, bedtimes, who lays out your clothes. It would be like language deprivation -- if you don't have organized 'tutoring' at home, you don't know what it feels like to have a rhythm to your day. Some parents' relationship with their children is almost all recreational. They view their child as someone to have fun with; they're the entertainment committee and the rest is up to the school or the day care. But I wonder if you can learn these general habits of self-regulation in day care. There will always be some survivors -- some children will always survive -- but how many are going to be in trouble?"

Could there be critical or sensitive periods for learning attention, just as there are for different aspects of language?

"No one knows," replied Dr. Denckla. 'The whole developmental curve is a very long story. The steepest part of the curve is probably between ages three and six. The question not answered is whether at the very earliest part it needs one-on-one. Then, later, in a group, the underpinnings are already set." [2]

HOMES ARE IMPORTANT

Whether we want to admit it or not, the way parents and/or caregivers interact with children is critically important in teaching them how to pay attention. These interactions also communicate subtle messages about what is appropriate to pay attention to, the thing most children diagnosed as ADHD don't seem to understand. [3]

Although up to 40% of children show some specific symptoms that look like attention deficit during the preschool years, [4] many overcome these difficulties as a result not only of maturation but of the way they are handled at home. Studies demonstrate: (1) for all but the most severely hyperactive or attention-disordered children, home environment variables are better predictors of educational outcomes and even later substance abuse and conduct problems (i.e., delinquency) than are innate biological factors; [5] (2) well-ordered, organized environments can compensate to a surprising extent even for the type of risk factors described in the last chapter; and (3) training of adult caregivers to teach children techniques of controlling behavior is at least as effective as and may be superior to the use of Ritalin. [6-8] Even when Ritalin is prescribed, its effects tend to be short-lived unless this kind of "behavioral" or "cognitive" therapy is included in the prescription. [9, 10] These facts hold true at all levels of the socioeconomic scale, although the economically disadvantaged are more at risk for attention and conduct problems because of more disrupted home lives, fewer role models, less adequate health care, and a greater incidence of prematurity. [11]

The Magic Formula -- Talk

In addition to helping a child with basic organization of daily routines, adults must be involved in showing children how to ask the right questions, talk through problems, plan ahead, and generally insert language (and some associated thought) between impulse and behavior. [12] In other words, adults must talk with children. Let me illustrate this point with an example. Traveling by plane, I was recently seated next to a mother with a four-year-old son and an infant daughter going from the East Coast to a western city that was to be their new home. The boy, an obviously bright and wiggly handful, had scarcely touched the seat before he began to spew forth questions. Despite her need to keep the baby under control, this mother patiently tried to answer each in terms the child could understand. I was struck with the advanced quality of both his language expression and his understanding -- as well as the degree of maternal patience. Soon after we took off, the inevitable occurred.

"Mommy, I have to go to the bathroom!"

Long pause. "Are you really sure?"

"No, I really don't."

"Well, if you must go, I will take you, but I'll have to do something with the baby."

"We can leave the baby with this lady," he suggested, gesturing all too willingly at me.

"No, we can't," replied Mom with a wink in my direction.

"Why?"

"Because we don't leave babies with other people."

Momentarily satisfied, the child decided his needs were taking a different course.

''I'm thirsty!"

"The flight attendant will come around soon with a tray of drinks. Let's plan now what you would like to drink when he gets here."

After actively debating the relative merits of soft drinks and juice, he decided, "Orange juice. Why are you putting the table down?"

"So you'll have a place to put your drink when it comes. Now you're all ready."

''I'm going to ask him if he's going to serve lunch on this flight." This child was learning how to get mentally as well as physically prepared.

Eventually, the conversation turned to their new home. "Mom, show me again where we're going." Mom took a map from the seat pocket and juggling infant and bottle, pointed out their former home and their destination.

"And my dad's right there," said the boy, tapping the map triumphantly.

"Yes, and tomorrow at three o'clock we're going to go to your new school and meet your new teacher. That will be fun because you'll get to meet lots of new children."

He mulled this over for a moment, and a shadow crossed his face.

"Mommy'" he lamented. "I can't read!"

Mom smiled. "You're not supposed to be able to read -- you're only four years old."

This seemingly unremarkable interchange struck me as important for several reasons. First, it seemed evident that the child's advanced language development stemmed, at least in part, from the time that his mother and other adults (she told me later she is a full-time student) have spent in conversation with him. Secondly, although he is obviously cut out of vigorous and distractible material, his energies have been directed into mental exploration of ideas rather than impulsive physical action. Third, his mother is teaching him the habit of using language to plan ahead and get prepared for things that will happen instead of responding impulsively. In this way, she is helping him get control over his own brain, his behavior -- and his world. I am willing to bet this child will do well in school, not just because he is bright, but because his environment is preparing him for the kinds of sustained mental involvement and control that are so integral to learning.

I have also observed, less happily, other types of interaction: adults who abdicate the job of showing children what this type of thoughtful reasoning looks and sounds like, others who slap or jerk around children, responding impulsively to the exigencies of the moment themselves rather than taking the time to think and talk through a problem.

Even well-intentioned, loving parents sometimes teach children to respond in ways that don't build the type of attention- and problem-solving skills they will need for academic learning. On another flight not long after the one described above, I was dealt a father and his adorable two-year-old daughter, who were flying from Chicago to Los Angeles. This dad, clearly devoted to his little girl, got another prize for patience as he tried to amuse her with no toys or books and just a few snacks. She soon spied the instruction card and in-flight magazine in the seat pocket and started playing with them, putting the card in and out of the pocket, on her head, behind his back, etc. Dad cooperated, smiling, in the game, but there was no conversation. Any time she wanted something, she would point or pull on his hand to attract his attention.

Eventually the game with the card became a bit too vigorous, so he opened the magazine in front of her, turning the pages as they regarded the pictures together. Again, almost no words were exchanged. The youngster would spy a picture and pound excitedly on it with her fingers; Dad would grunt an assent and then move on to another picture. Occasionally, he provided a simple label such as "flower" or "elephant." Once, at a picture of a tiger, the child held up her hands, pantomiming fear. "Ooooooo -- " she said, and Dad replied, "Ummmmmm."

Overall, it was clear, although this child was able to speak, she was being encouraged to respond more to color and interesting shapes than she was to the content of the pictures. Moreover, the "game" here soon began to focus on who could turn the page faster -- and the action began to get out of hand, with the magazine now assuming the function of a manipulative toy. As the child got increasingly excited, father replaced the magazine in the seat pocket and without a word, offered her a packet of pretzels as distraction and struck up a conversation with me.

I feel guilty being critical of this devoted parent, and we certainly can't compare the verbal development of a two-year-old with that of a child two years older. Nevertheless, I was struck by the different styles these two parents were modeling. The first mother was showing her son how to think and plan ahead -- to act rather than react. She was teaching him not only to express his needs, ask questions, understand and organize his world, but also to think and reason about situations far from the one at hand (the "decontextualized" thinking mentioned earlier as being so important in school). The father was encouraging his little girl, at a critical age for language foundations, to respond impulsively and almost exclusively to the physical, visual, and emotional aspects of each situation. A related message was that the text of reading material is secondary to the pictures.

Studies that we will explore fully in a later chapter have shown that children from homes that encourage these two different patterns tend to achieve -- and to pay attention -- very differently when they get to school. It is not a matter of intelligence, but rather a question of learning to use the planning functions of language to mediate personal thought and problem-solving.

Conversation Builds the Executive Brain

It is not intuitively surprising to learn that teaching children to talk through problems helps them with higher-level learning and mental organization -- as well as with managing their behavior. It is more surprising to discover, in the writings of Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, that conversing with one's own mind may have brain-altering physical effects. Luria believed, and many modern-day theorists agree, that using language can strengthen the brain's executive functions, with a shorthand system of communicating with oneself as the final and most critical stage of the process.

The term "inner speech" refers to this shorthand, an internal dialogue used, for example, to help us remember something ("Now, let's see, I was going to buy hamburger buns and mustard and something else for the picnic"), to plan ahead ("Since I'm going to meet him at noon, I'll have to leave home at eleven-thirty"), or to work out the steps in solving a problem ("If I start by trying . . . , then this might happen ... and then I'd have to ... ). As adults we don't say all these words to ourselves, we somehow think them almost instantaneously.

According to Luria, this ability develops slowly as a child's overall capacity to use language shapes growing powers of reasoning. He believed that both external and internal language partially account for the fact that the human species sports brains more complex and specialized than those of animals, mainly in the area of the executive prefrontal cortex. Language, he maintained, is a process that is "characteristic of the development of almost all the higher forms of mental activity" and can physically "reorganize the cortical zones that underlie higher mental processes." [13]

Luria drew many of his ideas about the way children learn to reason from the work of another Russian, Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky's work is currently being rediscovered in Europe, Israel, and America and applied both by developmental psychologists and by therapists working with attention-disordered children. In an influential book entitled Thought and Language, Vygotsky described both the way in which inner speech develops and how interaction with adults helps children learn to use it to organize their mental processes. [14]

SPEECH THAT TURNS INTO THOUGHT

According to Vygotsky, inner speech develops as the child learns to use language, first to think out loud and then to reason inside his own mind. Eventually, it becomes an instinctive tool with which to think and also to communicate thoughts by speech and writing. I am convinced that a major reason so many students today have difficulty with problem solving, abstract reasoning, and writing coherently is that they have insufficiently developed mechanisms of inner speech. First of all, their brains may have been bombarded with too much noise and overprogramming (literally and figuratively!). How could they tune in to an inner voice if they are never allowed to experience quiet? Secondly, some adults are copping out on showing children how to use this tool for thinking. Third, schools that keep young children from talking much of the time -- even to themselves -- do not help the situation.

Inner speech starts with social experience in the earliest interactions of the infant and the caregiver. Children gradually absorb the methods that caregivers use to regulate them and then begin to use the same methods on themselves. Impulsive physical punishment or careless unconcern may cause the child to try to manage his world in the same manner. He may also adopt a similarly impulsive or diffident mental style -- jumping at problems, striking out at them and then withdrawing, or else simply avoiding them. On the other hand, if adults show children that they themselves carefully evaluate, think, and talk through problems, the child receives a very different set of messages about the way the world -- both physical and mental -- should be approached.

Most parents talk to their infants. When they first begin, perhaps even before birth, speech has little if any meaning for the child. Soon, however, he or she begins to respond and gradually, as words spoken by adults begin to make sense, starts to use words on herself. A toddler may give himself or herself commands out loud, as when a two-year-old says "Susan, no!" when she knows she shouldn't touch something. At this point the system is still far from being internalized, so she may go ahead and touch it anyway! (Notably, adult patients who have suffered damage to frontal brain areas often behave in much the same way.) For the child, this step is an important one, which Vygotsky called "egocentric speech." "It does not merely accompany the child's activity . . . it is intimately and usefully connected with the child's thinking." [15]

Egocentric speech gradually starts to be absorbed. As prefrontal cortex matures, the regulatory "talk" goes underground between the ages of three and seven and becomes transformed into the ability to "think words" and use them to manage behavior. The ages of two to five years seem to be particularly important for this step, [16] and by the time a child is of elementary school age, the ability to reason within one's own brain should be off to a good start. It is probably no coincidence that this timetable appears to correspond with preliminary development of the executive control centers in the prefrontal cortex.

Examples from studies investigating the development of inner speech show how children learn it. Toddlers, when given a pegboard and instructed to hit a single peg, followed the directions better when they were shown how to say "one" at the same time they hit the peg. It was necessary for these little ones to say the word out loud. By upper-elementary school age, children should be able to use a silent cue with equal effectiveness.

School-aged children also tend to be more aware of the meaning of the words they use. In one ingenious series of studies, children aged three to seven were placed in a room containing highly attractive items such as food or toys. They were told that the longer they refrained from touching the tempting objects, the greater the prize they would earn. The experimenter then left the room while a hidden camera and a mike recorded the children's reactions. Children who mumbled or talked to themselves (e.g., "I won't touch, I won't touch") were more successful at waiting than those who didn't use language to help themselves. Then the experimenters tried teaching the children to use different types of verbal cues, either relevant (e.g., "I must not turn around and look at the toys") or irrelevant (e.g., "Hickory dickory dock"). Younger children were helped somewhat by being taught to say any words at all, whether they related to the situation or not, but older ones were more successful with instructions that had appropriate meaning. Experiments like these have shown that there is a definite developmental progression in the use of inner speech, and a "trend from externalized to internalized control." [17]

These forms of verbal self-regulation, as they are called, also help children with learning tasks. Children who use inner speech effectively can remember information and events better. They are better at problem-solving because they can "talk through" steps, evaluate alternatives, and speculate about possible outcomes. They can organize and apply information more effectively and develop better strategies when taking notes in class, studying for exams, and even understanding and remembering what they read.

Is it a complicated job to teach children verbal self-regulation? No, but it takes a long time and a lot of attention. When adults make the effort to sit down and work with a child, they not only automatically arouse the child's motivation, but they also tend instinctively to ask questions to clarify where the child's thinking "is coming from." Educational psychologist Eleanor Duckworth believes these natural interactions give children tools to refine their own inner dialogue. She says:

To the extent that one carries on a conversation with a child as a way of trying to understand a child's understanding, the child's understanding increases "in the very process." The questions the interlocutor asks in an attempt to clarify for him/herself what the child is thinking oblige the child to think a little further also .... What do you mean? How did you do that? Why do you say that? How does that fit with what was just said? I don't really get that; could you explain it another way? Could you give me an example? How did you figure that? [18]

In today's parlance, Vygotsky's theory suggests that adults must act as coaches to show children how to internalize speech. As they do so, they also teach strategies for thinking. Parents instinctively model and help their children practice physical skills or speech patterns that are just one step above their current level of development; in similar ways they help them talk and think their way through problems. The adult, working with the child, structures the situation so that the child can reason at a level that would be impossible if he were left on his own.

When I reflect on this important view of adult roles in the learning process, I like to picture the child as perched somewhere on a long developmental ladder. Underneath are all the stages of mental development already mastered, far above are those yet unreachable. But directly above the child there is a lovely, ripe area that is attainable -- but only with a leg up from adults who will provide physical and mental cues and clues. Vygotsky called this ripe area the zone of proximal development, now often referred to as the ZPD.

PROBLEM SOLVING, LIFESTYLES, AND THE ZPD

This type of adult support acts as a scaffold which surrounds children with competence as they move into new types of learning. Courtney Cazden describes a familiar scene in illustration of a basic physical type of scaffolding for a child who is just learning to walk:

Imagine a picture of an adult holding the hand of a very young child. . . . The child does what he or she can and the adult does the rest; the child's practice occurs in the context of the full performance; and the adult's help is gradually withdrawn (from holding two hands to just one, then to offering only a finger, and then withdrawing that a few inches, and so on) as the child's competence grows. [19]

Intellectual reasoning and problem-solving are similarly guided. One of the adult's most important and difficult jobs, of course, is gradually to withdraw the supports until the child can succeed independently. Rather than fostering dependence, good scaffolding encourages independence. Caretakers who are overly anxious about their responsibility for a child, who end up doing everything for him and "picking up the pieces" of the problems he should clean up himself, are setting him up for later learning difficulties.

When a child learns along with an adult, special sorts of motivation and mastery infuse the experience. They mutually share the responsibility for the outcome; the child does what he can, and the adult fills in the gaps. Thus the child learns:

• how to do the task in question
• what it feels like to be successful at doing it
• the importance of persistence
• what it means to take personal responsibility for the outcome

These particular experiences are ones in which learning disabled and ADHD children tend to be deficient. The alarming news is that increasing numbers of "normal" children also seem to lack them. Poor learners are poor problem solvers; they have difficulty taking internal responsibility and coming up with effective strategies to cope with new or difficult types of learning. In classrooms now, the term "learned helplessness" is increasingly heard as a description of typical forms of behavior. One major theory even argues that "learned helplessness" and weakness in problem-solving strategies may be fundamental causes of learning disability.

Many children today spend a great deal of time in situations where competent adults are not available or involved in providing suitable scaffolding for inner speech and other problem-solving skills. These abilities are best learned in natural contexts, with real problems that have meaning to both adult and child -- such as helping in the kitchen, the workshop, the garden, the store, or other forms of mutual activity. Watching television does not suffice, since it is not an interactive experience and tends to suppress any tendency to talk through problems or ask questions about why things are happening. It also tends to focus on "magical" solutions and visual effects that defy true logic.

One elementary school head in an affluent Midwestern suburb recently told me that children from "normal" households are now showing the types of language and impulse-control problems she used to see only in children who came from a home where a parent was disturbed, depressed, or alcoholic.

"It's as if no one had taken the time to talk to these children, help them think through a process step by step. People used to say things like, 'Now we're going to clean the living room; what are we going to need? Let's see, we'll need a dustrag and the vacuum, etc. You go get the dustrag. Oh, I'd better put vacuum bags on the shopping list.'

"Simple things like that, so the child gets to make connections, classify, follow directions, learn to think ahead. Now our children don't so often help with the housework, the grocery shopping. The caregiver may be different from the housekeeper, and so the child isn't exposed to these kinds of experiences. Even when the parent does the chores, after they've been working all day they're tired, and it's easier to do it themselves.

''I'm worried," she added as I prepared to leave her office. "These parents are highly achieving people because of the input they received from their parents. They expect their children to be high achievers, too, but they're cheating them out of the same experiences."

A Generation of "Weak Reasoners"

Older students now in schools also have difficulty developing strategies to solve problems and sticking to the task until success is achieved. The startling national decline in reading comprehension, mathematics reasoning, and science ability in the United States has been attributed by many educators to a growing prevalence of this type of "weak reasoning" -- and not just among the learning disabled. As an example, "dismal" was the term applied to student proficiency in mathematics by the National Assessment of Educational Progress on the basis of testing done in 1986. Although the amount of math homework and testing in schools has increased "dramatically" over the last few years, what little progress has occurred has come in lower-order skills (routine adding, multiplying, etc.). Students' abilities to answer questions requiring application of concepts and even elementary-level problem-solving strategies were alarmingly far off the levels required by future life and work settings.

Only 6.4% of the seventeen-year-olds could solve a multistep problem like the one in Figure 5 (which requires only simple knowledge of number facts, but which demands some persistence.)

One mathematics specialist recently told me she anticipates a growing "crisis" in analytic thought and problem-solving. As an example, she cited a group of "typical" middle school students who, she discovered, could multiply four-digit numbers with ease but were unable to deal with word problems like the following:

"A man bought four shirts at $19.95. How much did he spend?"

"They can compute, but they don't seem to be able to stop, think, and reason about the processes involved," she concluded.

Who should be teaching children the real-life basics of problem-solving? Adults need to be available -- at home and at school -- to act as models and guides at every stage of development. Jerome Bruner calls this "loaning children our consciousness." [20] But the models must themselves have the mental abilities in question. There are as many routes up the ladder -- neural and mental -- as there are different types of learning. When parents make decisions about who will have the job of caring for their children, they are signing up the intelligence and the consciousness that will shape those growing minds.



The Starving Executive: A Hypothesis

I believe the brain's executive systems and their links to lower centers for attention and motivation are particularly at risk for children today. These late-developing areas, which may be particularly sensitive to environmental deprivation, are responsible for many so-called "control functions." [21]

Individuals who have suffered damage to prefrontal areas (depending somewhat on the location of the injury) behave much like children with attention problems: [22, 23]

• inattentiveness; distractibility; tendency to be "stimulus bound"
• lack of organization, planning, and programming of behavior
• difficulty delaying gratification and working toward future goals
• difficulty inhibiting inappropriate behavior
• dissociation between talk and follow-through
• problems with complex and conceptual verbal activities
• inability to regulate and sustain motivation
• difficulty controlling emotional responses
• deficits in selective attention

I am not implying here that children with attention problems are "brain damaged" in the same sense as adult frontal-lobe patients. I am suggesting that they may never have fully developed these abilities in the first place and thus may behave similarly to people who once had the functions but lost them through injury to the brain areas involved.

When Should Children Start to Learn Self-Control?

Researchers have been unsure when the various functions of the prefrontal lobes normally begin to mature. We know their growth continues into the twenties -- and that they comprise the longest of the brain's developmental processes. One of the most important tasks of the adolescent brain, in fact, is to refine these control systems and learn to use them effectively. [24]

In a recent review, Dr. Pennington and his colleague Dr. Marilyn Welsh presented evidence that prefrontal abilities begin to emerge even earlier than anyone imagined, in the first year of life. According to these authors, even preschoolers may suffer from "subtle prefrontal dysfunction" that mainly takes the form of a lack of self-control, lack of "active information gathering" (e. g., systematically exploring the physical environment, asking questions). With older children, poor problem-solving is a prominent indicator of difficulty. These researchers call attention to the fact that "many childhood learning and behavior disorders are manifested in the context of normal IQ and some subset of these may be the result of a specific frontal dysfunction." [25]

If Luria was correct about inner speech being the mechanism that "feeds" the development of the frontal cortex, and if this area's development continues as long as researchers believe, it seems reasonable to assume that lifestyles that bombard children with noise, constant activity, and limited access to thoughtful adult models might certainly jeopardize its development. Many children today do not get much exposure to what reflective thought looks or feels like. Many live in homes or attend care centers where hurried, overworked, or undertrained adults don't have time to provide one-on-one scaffolding or to sense where that critical "zone of proximal development" lies. Others are tended by caretakers who do too much for the child and thus block the internalization of responsibility. Many attend schools that try to cram the storehouse full, while disregarding the necessity for internal motivation, talking -- and thinking -- to oneself, and personal coaching for problem-solving. A great deal of babysitting is done by a mesmerizing screen that reduces problems to two-minute "bits" in a generic "zone of proximal development." No wonder many of our children have trouble.

No one knows whether or when critical or sensitive periods occur for specific functions of the prefrontal cortex, but this principle may well apply here as well as to the rest of the brain. How long is the window open? Dr. Kenneth Klivington of the Salk Institute and an editor of The Brain, Cognition, and Education [26] says he thinks it is important for scientists to try to find out. "Attention is fundamental to any learning process, but no one knows if there is a critical period for attention. To my knowledge, there are no scientific studies of this fact, but there are so many capabilities that have critical periods in their development, it could also be that attention and logical thinking are the same. If so, once you pass that critical age, there's little likelihood of your being able to learn it," he told me recently.

"I wonder what that age would be," I replied.

"I don't know, but it's probably in the early teens -- that's just guesswork on my part. It's important to raise those kinds of issues because the experiments need to be done, and unless those issues are spelled out and brought to people's attention, nobody's going to do the experiments," he continued. "They're hard experiments and may not even be possible to do, but it's important to try. We need to obtain further evidence if there are critical periods in attention or logical thinking."

"In the meanwhile, how would you advise parents?" I asked Dr. Klivington.

"I continue to place the emphasis on the need to generate language and thought, not just listen and watch," he answered immediately. [27] "If we consider the brain as the organ of thought, it has to be structured right to work right. If you don't wire up your computer right, it isn't going to work right."

SUMMARY: LIFESTYLES AND LEARNING

Attention and learning abilities depend both on the way the brains of the learners are innately structured and the uses for which they are trained. The success of any learning experience depends on the interaction between a brain's strengths and weaknesses and the demands of the learning situation. Some children's learning abilities are damaged by overt or subtle environmental impairment, but the term "learning disability" now often simply describes an unexplained misfit between child and school. Attention deficit disorder (ADHD) and dyslexia are examples of disabilities that may sometimes have a genetic component but that also reflect strong effects of environmental training.

The growing brain is resilient, but may eventually be compromised by combinations of factors ranging from exposure to toxic substances, over- or understimulation, or lack of availability of appropriate adults to provide scaffolds for intellectual growth. Particularly important are inner speech, attention, and problem-solving strategies attributed to prefrontal development in the brain.

Environments can cause problems if (1) the specific demands they place for learning are misfitted to the brains of the learners, or (2) if they fail to instill in developing minds the fundamental skills of attention and reasoning. Increasing numbers of children today show evidence of weakness in attention, language, and reasoning, yet teachers continue to assume the presence of these skills and tend to blame the students for their unwillingness to pay attention to content and method for which their brains have been poorly adapted.

If adults in a society have things they want children to pay attention to, they must make available the consciousness that will develop the habits of mind -- and thus the structures of the brain -- to make it possible.

[admin]

Part Four: CLASHING CULTURES

CHAPTER 10: TV, Video Games, and the Growing Brain

It turns kids into zombies!
Children are active while viewing.
Television shortens attention spans.
There is no evidence that television viewing affects children's attention spans.
Video games make people right-brained.
Children today are smarter because of television.
Video use is killing off literacy.

Everyone has opinions about the effects on learning of television and other uses of video. What is the truth? What does viewing do to the developing brain? How much does growing up in the culture of visual immediacy affect a child's performance in the culture of academic learning?

When I began writing this book, one of my first questions was how much video use has played into the changes observed in children's learning habits. I soon found out: (1) good research on TV is hard to find, (2) much of what is purveyed as "fact" has not been thoroughly documented, (3) according to the most recent studies, television's effects may be more subtle, but also more powerful and pervasive than most people believe and (4) virtually no research is available on the effects of video tapes or computerized video games on children's mental development. Moreover, because more children now spend more hours with all video media than ever before, effects which might not have become apparent in previous decades may just now be showing up in schools.

Calling a Very Large Duck a Duck

All video has effects on mental activity; some of its uses are clearly more positive for academic learning than others. Good television programming has made a wealth of information available to children, although this benefit alone does not make them smarter if they lack the habits of mind to use it effectively. Good-quality videocassettes for children may also enhance cognitive and perhaps even language development if they encourage response from the child and if viewing is mediated by an adult. Many young children now use a familiar videotape as a sort of security blanket with which to relax. Rock videos, on the other hand, have aroused concern, not only about their effects on young brains, but on other aspects of development as well.

Let us first consider television. I was surprised to learn how much a part of young children's lives TV has become. American youngsters, on average, now spend more hours in front of the set than at any other activity except sleeping. Sesame Street has helped institutionalize the viewing habit for preschoolers, many of whom begin watching several hours a day of varied programming at about age two. By ages three to five -- the height of the brain's critical period for cognitive and language development -- estimates place viewing time of the average child at twenty-eight hours a week. For many children, extended hours in front of the set have drastically curtailed active playtime. Average viewing time for elementary students runs at about twenty-five hours a week, and for high schoolers, twenty-eight hours a week, approximately six times the hours spent doing homework. [1-4] No estimates are available on time spent with videotapes.

In many households, even infants are constantly exposed; programs replace family conversation that builds language and listening skills, reading aloud, and games and activities in which adults show children how to solve problems, talk out future plans, or deal with their own emotions. Many parents who would earnestly like to redirect their family time find the kids so "hooked" on viewing, says Marie Winn, that they "reject all those fine family alternatives" -- mainly because watching television is easier. [5] Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds watch the most of all. [6]

Where Is the Research?

Scientists are acutely aware that large doses of any type of experience have shaping power over the growing brain. Have they, therefore, been hotly researching the effects of large doses of television? No!

A relatively small number of studies have looked at TV's effects on learning, but when I initiated computer-assisted searches of all studies and articles ever published in the fields of medicine, psychology, child development, and education on TV's effects on brain development, I came up with a virtually empty net. As I queried experts and burrowed further into sources of professional information, I learned the truth: no sustained effort has been made to find out how TV might affect the basic neural foundations for learning. Moreover, many of the "facts" purveyed about television's effects -- not only on brains but on learning in general -- are based on wobbly research.

Appropriate, non harmful technology for studying living brains while they are reading, learning, remembering -- or watching the tube -- has become increasingly accessible. For example, by pasting electrodes to the scalp and hooking them up to a computer, scientists can monitor brain waves and map mental activity in living color! [7] Good research is admittedly hard to do, but I find it surprising that no effort has been made even to get it started. Since the scientific community's research proposals tend to cluster around any topic where funding is available, the obvious conclusion is that the interest -- i.e., money -- has not been there. Most of the few available studies, in fact, were done by advertisers who wanted to know how to grab and hold the brain's attention -- whether the "subject" chose to be spellbound or not. (More about this later.) When some early results began to indicate that the actual physical act of viewing may cause the brain to enter a hypnotic, nonlearning state, the research trickle abruptly dried up.

One might certainly be tempted to conclude that no one is very eager to get the answers to the questions. And, of course, it is more comfortable to believe that TV's effects on learning are not particularly harmful. As I began writing this chapter, headlines throughout the United States were seized by a new, quasi-scientific "review of research" which seemed to suggest just that. Statements such as the following were quoted:

"There is little evidence to show that brain viewing reduces children's attention span. . . ."

"There is no evidence that television makes children cognitively passive."

Unfortunately, these articles were, in the words of the study's author, Dr. Daniel Anderson of the University of Massachusetts, "badly distorted." They failed to mention, first, the primary reason there is "little evidence" is that there has been little research! Moreover, some of the few reliable studies which have been done suggest just the opposite! Here are some other statements from that report that didn't make the headlines:

Television may indeed:

• overstimulate children and create passive withdrawal
• cause attention and listening problems (e.g., paying attention to an activity such as drawing pictures instead of to a teacher delivering instruction)
• make children need "the classroom equivalent of special effects" to maintain attention
• emphasize skills which do not transfer well to reading or listening [8]

"No, I am not at all satisfied with the quality of the research that has been done," Dr. Anderson told me. "There has been no agency willing to consistently fund research on the cognitive effects of television.'' [9]

"There is really no satisfactory data," agrees Yale's Dr. Jerome Singer, another of a handful of well-respected national authorities on children and television. "But it's amazing how we fail to appreciate the fact that children spend more time in front of TV than in school. Of course there are cumulative effects!"

Dr. Singer believes that it is best to withhold television completely until reading and learning habits are well established. He mentioned during the course of our conversation that his son, who has been a father himself for several years, delayed purchasing a television set as part of "an active decision" to significantly limit family viewing. [10]

Cognitive Consequences of TV Viewing

One problem with studies comparing viewers and nonviewers is that it is now impossible to find large numbers of American children who have not been exposed to the medium. Research clearly shows, however, that better students tend to watch less. Moreover, as viewing goes up, academic achievement scores eventually go down.

In a thoroughly documented and objective review article published in the Reading Research Quarterly, two scientists from Leiden University in the Netherlands culled the most reliable data on the relationship of viewing and reading, including some obtained when television first became available in several different countries. They found that television's negative effects on reading skills were particularly strong for the more advanced abilities needed for higher-level comprehension. Among other conclusions, they stated that television:

• displaces leisure reading and thus inhibits the growth of reading skills
• requires less mental effort than reading
• may shorten the time children are willing to spend on finding an answer to intellectual problems they are set to solve
• has particularly negative effects for heavy viewers, socially advantaged children, and intelligent children [11]

Curiously, these quotes never made the headlines either.

Much more research is needed to establish guidelines for the constructive use of this enormously influential medium. We know far too little about how media in general, and "educational" programming in particular, can aid literacy, school learning, and knowledge acquisition.

VIDEO AND THE BRAIN

Does viewing cause brains to become hyperactive? Passive? Tuned out? Can it change brain structure and function in ways that alter learning potential? Attempts to study brain activation and/or patterns of brain waves of viewers have been the main means by which studies -- reliable or otherwise -- have searched for answers to these questions. Babies', children's, and adults' brain waves change in response to television, but little has been proven about the types of changes that occur. [12] Three effects on learning abilities, all related to attention, have been suggested: (1) some television and videotape programming artificially manipulate the brain into paying attention by violating certain of its natural defenses with frequent visual and auditory changes (known as "saliency"); (2) television induces neural passivity and reduces "stick-to-it-iveness"; (3) television may have a hypnotic, and possibly neurologically addictive, effect on the brain by changing the frequency of its electrical impulses in ways that block active mental processing.

(1) Forcing the Brain to Pay Attention

Studies sponsored by advertisers have suggested the best way to get viewers to pay attention to their messages is to capitalize on the brain's instinctive responses to danger. First, sudden close-ups, pans, and zooms are effective in alerting the brain because they violate its reflex need to maintain a predictable "personal space" -- a certain distance between oneself and others. Second, "salient" features such as bright colors, quick movements, or sudden noises get attention fast, since brains are programmed to be extremely sensitive to such changes that might signal danger.

Television advertisers and most children's programs, including Sesame Street, are planned with an eye to capitalizing on these involuntary responses. When the Sesame Street format was initially designed, pilot studies were conducted in which children were shown program segments alongside competing "distractors" such as colorful slides. Thus the programmers learned that the use of many "salient" effects would keep children watching -- whether they wanted to or not. [13]

In a sense, these carefully planned manipulations separate the natural responses of brain and body; although the viewer's attention is alerted, there is no need for physical action. The brain registers specific changes after a camera zoom, for example, responding as if to real danger. [14] Yet the impulse has no outlet. Researchers soon began to suggest that children thus stimulated, without natural physical outlets for the pent-up response, might develop overactivity, frustration, or irritability. [15,16] In 1975, two Australian researchers predicted with increasing viewing time spent by children there would be a proportionate increase in disorders of attention. [17]

It has been hard to "prove" that this prophecy has come true, although virtually every teacher I interviewed is convinced that it has. Dr. Dan Anderson's review report summarizes several studies in which "there does appear to be some effect of TV on attention, although the importance, generality, and nature of the effect is unknown." [18]

One reasonably well-documented fact, also according to this report, is that children's attention to TV programs tends to be fragmented, in the sense that they are actually watching it only about two-thirds of the time they spend in viewing. They may simultaneously engage in other activities or simply look away for "reduction of stimulation" -- until they are drawn back by another special effect.

Television is physiologically arousing, confirms Dr. Byron Reeves of the Department of Communication at Stanford, who conducted studies of viewers' electrical brain activity. Their brains did, indeed, respond to movement as if it were actually present, causing the nervous system to prepare for a physical response. Personally, Reeves told me he also believes these habits show up in school, as children become habituated to "surprise and circus-type" presentations.

"I see it with my college sophomores," he remarked wryly. "We all know a Sesame Street presentation gets more attention these days." [19] Manipulations of "arousal mechanisms" that separate brain and body may be related to reports from psychologists and teachers that today's children are increasingly "touch starved." A heavy diet of vicarious viewing that replaces real sensory involvement is directly antagonistic to the most basic principles of a young child's learning. Much early development of physical and mental skills -- and of their foundations in the brain -- comes from experimenting and solving problems with real-world materials. The long-term outcomes of forcing children's attention unnaturally may have even more serious implications than we have realized.

Jerking children's attention around may cause a certain amount of emotional withdrawal, as well. Young children, while involuntarily captured by novelty, really need repetition and familiarity. Anchoring experience in this way helps them gain a sense of organization and mastery. Parents who laughingly complain about how tired they are of reading the same book ("Sometimes I think if I have to do Goodnight Moon one more time ... ") or seeing the same story on tape are the best witnesses to a child's overriding need for familiarity. Such predictability may be particularly necessary for learning to make sense out of a world that is already sufficiently confusing.

(2) Passive Brains?

Good learning and good problem-solving require active involvement and persistence. Failures at this level are related to many types of learning disabilities. Many people intuitively feel that exposure in early childhood to a great deal of television may create passive learners who give up too easily. Proof is now starting to emerge.

One prominent researcher, Dr. Jennings Bryant of the University of Alabama, is personally convinced that TV "certainly changes things" as far as active learning is concerned.

"One thing we do know," he explained recently, "is that it reduces what we call vigilance [the ability to remain actively focused on a task]. If they watch lots of fast-paced programs and then we give them things to do afterward such as reading or solving complex puzzles, their stick-to-it-iveness is diminished; they're not as willing to stay with the task. Over time, with lots of viewing, you're going to have less vigilant children. This is especially critical with relatively young children -- about three to five years seem to be particularly vulnerable times [emphasis added]."

Dr. Bryant, who served on a research and planning committee for Sesame Street's sibling, The Electric Company, told me he now believes that choosing such a fast-paced format for both programs was a mistake.

"Unfortunately," he said, "I don't think Sesame Street is one of the good examples. We worked so hard to grab the child's attention in the competitive media environment that sometimes I'm afraid we forgot the learning. We may have been teaching the wrong thing -- learning externally instead of internally. We may have created a child who was so reinforced to go after the excitement, the blazing stars, etc., that the learning was almost secondary."

Dr. Bryant says he decided, on the basis of his research, to sit down and watch with his own children to make them aware of "how this medium can manipulate." Now they're good students, active problem-solvers, and "very selective and cynical TV consumers."

Dr. Bryant also thinks that it is probably a mistake to let children do homework in front of the set. He says that his newest research shows how competing video messages get in the way of learning and cause homework to take longer and be done less well. Programs with many auditory-orienting devices to call attention to the screen make it especially hard to focus actively on learning. [20]

Research, overall, strongly suggests that fast pace and special effects can interfere with development of active learning habits. A few studies have shown that children try to organize meaning, follow plots, and make sense out of what is happening in programs or tapes that are of interest to them, but only if they are old enough and can understand the material presented. Studies show attention tends to wander when the material is seen either as "boring" or not readily understandable; then, when something salient happens, attention is drawn back. This conditioned pattern of sporadic, externally directed attention corresponds precisely with what teachers are reporting. In class or when doing homework, one can't just let the mind change channels or wander away when things become a bit difficult or "boring."

If "receptive" learning (e.g., reading, listening) is affected by TV-induced passivity, the more active "expressive" skills, such as organizing and getting ideas down in writing, are in even greater jeopardy. Even television's staunchest defenders admit that it is primarily a receptive medium that in itself provides little practice in expression of any kind.

Dr. Anderson, who has been accused by other authorities of interpreting the research too generously in favor of television (some of his work, in fact, has been commissioned by Children's Television Workshop, which produces Sesame Street [21]), himself admits that "television viewing probably does not require many of the self-generated cognitive processes required by writing; as receptive cognition it is likely different in many ways from productive cognition." [22] Moreover, he acknowledges, it is likely that it "reduces task perseverance and this affects reading comprehension." [23]

(3) The "Zombie" Effect

Does television suppress mental activity by putting viewers into a trance? The few studies made of the human brain in the process of viewing, while hardly definitive, suggest that it may, at least in some individuals and with some kinds of content.

In one early experiment, an electrode was pasted to the scalp of a woman while she first looked through a magazine and then watched television commercials. As she was reading the magazine, her brain registered active alertness, but switching to TV viewing "instantly produced a preponderance of slow (alpha) waves," which are classically associated with lack of mental activity. [24]

Unfortunately, little research followed. In 1980, researchers Merrelyn and Fred Emery, at the University of Australia, reviewed a meager crop of studies and found reason for concern that prolonged television viewing might cause a syndrome of mental inactivity that would interfere with thinking and concentrating. In an article titled "The Vacuous Vision," they suggested that as viewing time by youngsters increased "this prolonged idleness of the prefrontal cortex" would have serious consequences. [25]

Although it has been shown that alpha levels can be altered by training, [26] no one has conclusively proven that persistent viewing invariably changes basic brain patterns, although several other studies have also given loose support to slower brain activation (more alpha) from TV when compared with magazine advertisements. Only three can be found comparing brain waves during television viewing versus reading of regular text. Two of the three confirmed higher levels of more passive alpha while watching television and higher levels of fast-wave beta activity during reading. [27, 28]

The third study, an unpublished doctoral-dissertation, may be the most important of all: it suggested that active brain response depended more on the subject's involvement with the material than on the medium itself. [29] This researcher found that interesting, more complex (but still comprehensible) reading or television could be used to elicit fast brain activity, while more simple, uninteresting, or incomprehensible material induced more slow alpha activity, irrespective of the medium. It seems probable that if the subject "tunes out" because the content seems incomprehensible, brain waves would follow. Research to be examined in the next chapter suggests that even programs specifically directed at children may be largely incomprehensible to them, even when adults think they are understanding what they see.

Other studies have described a phenomenon apparently related to the "zombielike" responses of some viewers: "attentional inertia." The longer a look at TV continues, the greater the probability it will be maintained. For example, if a child gets "glued" to the set during a program, the more likely he is to remain fixated when the scene breaks to a commercial. Mothers who have trouble summoning their children to chores, homework, or even supper are already aware that the longer a child has been watching TV, the slower he is to respond when someone calls his name. While Dr. Anderson and colleagues take this only as a sign of "increased engagement with the TV," others fear that such nondiscriminating responses verge on "mindlessness." [30] Anecdotal reports suggest that this phenomenon is more severe in some individuals than in others.

"You raise kids on sweets, they become addicted to sweets. You raise kids on alpha, they get addicted to alpha, just like any hypnotic state," commented one neuropsychologist, himself a member of the TV generation and the father of a young child (who is allowed to watch TV in highly selected quantities). He recognizes that parents in high-stress jobs may crave a soothing dose of alpha for themselves after a hard day's work, but believes this habit is not desirable for immature brains that have not yet firmed up all their connections. "The brain is programmed to repeat the same experience; neurons learn to replicate a pattern, that's how people learn, but we don't realize that what we are really learning is habits. Whenever children are doing something for a lot of the time, we should ask: Is this a habit we want them to have?" [31]

Taken all together, this sorely limited research suggests that children may be physiologically compelled to "space out" when viewing fatuous, overly difficult, or confusing content. Since the brain builds its internal connections primarily in response to active mental effort, I am willing to make the leap and suggest, by inducing our children to habituate their brains to too much easy video pleasure, we may truly risk weakening their mental abilities. Studies have shown, when young animals are placed in an enclosure from which they can merely watch others playing, that their brain growth is proportionately reduced, no matter how stimulating the visual environment.

THE VIDEO GAME ADDICTION

If I didn't make him eat, sleep, and go to school, he would be at that thing twenty-four hours a day! -- Mother of an eleven-year-old boy

Computerized video games appear to be even more addictive for many children than television. Why do they exert such a hypnotic force? What will happen to kids who spend every available moment seeking ever greater conquests in a fantasy microworld? Could this preoccupation possibly be educational? Will it build up imagination and nonverbal abilities -- or will it limit them by keeping the child from normal play and human interaction? Will children learn new strategies of problem-solving -- or will they lose the ability to initiate ideas unless prompted by a machine? Unfortunately, even less is known about the long-term implications of this new "addiction" in American life. The child-development experts I have queried have given only cautious responses -- most of them negative. One of the main points they always mention is the issue of "transfer," that is, how much we can expect experiences with one type of input -- such as video games -- to build up abilities that can be used elsewhere -- such as reading or more general types of reasoning.

The Problem of "Transfer"

One of the main problems with speculations on the effects of machines is that what may seem "obvious" about what children are learning from them may not be true at all. For example, we might reason that anything improving children's visual-spatial skills (e.g., playing fast-paced video games where objects coming from all directions at once must be shot at or avoided) should also improve their reading speed, or even their geometry abilities, which are known to call heavily on visual spatial reasoning. Many people have similarly reasoned that teaching children to program a computer, with its immutable demands for logical, linear thought, must certainly teach them to think more logically.

Unfortunately, however, the brain often seems to have difficulty applying skills it has learned in one specific arena to other kinds of problems. When teachers ask, "How well will this learning transfer?" they are referring to the fact that teaching children how to outline a story in English class does not necessarily mean they will automatically apply the same skills to their history textbook -- unless someone specifically shows them how, and they practice the same outlining with the history book. Expecting some kinds of learning to transfer is a little bit like expecting jogging to build up finger dexterity; just because the body (or the brain) is exercised, we cannot assume that the activity will "take" other than in the specific area that receives the practice.

The brain has many millions of separate cell networks or "assemblies," and does not seem to generalize very readily from one set to another. For example, after hundreds of studies showing that eye exercises involving complex designs have little effect on reading ability for most children, experts concluded that reading is the best way to improve reading. There is no evidence that the general visual stimulation of watching TV improves visual reasoning abilities in other domains. Nor does listening to music improve auditory skills for language, because words and melody are processed by totally different cell networks.

Training in more fundamental "habits of mind," such as planning organized steps to reason through problems -- at home, at school, or anywhere else -- may well be more generalizable. Showing children how to apply critical analysis to both reading and video is a good example of "teaching for transfer" in today's world.

Another issue raised by video games is that children may be accomplishing higher-level tasks with low-level strategies. Just because a child appears to have "mastered" a game where he is required to work his way through various levels of decision-making does not necessarily mean he has learned any new mental operations. He may simply have mastered a routine through trial and error.

It seems fairly safe to say that much of children's experience with such games will have little, if any, transfer value to traditional school tasks. While the schools should think about how they might make use of skills learned outside the classroom to further learning, no one has figured out how to make intellectual capital out of "Space Invaders." On the other hand, we do know that lack of use can definitely affect potential for brain connections. If a child spends an inordinate amount of time on video games (or television, or even other types of computer use) instead of playing and experimenting with many different types of skills, the foundations for some kinds of abilities may be sacrificed. These losses may not show up until much later, when more complicated kinds of thinking and learning become necessary. Tender young brains need broad horizons, not overbuilt neural pathways in one specific skill area. This point is extremely important as we return to the topic that has many parents worried -- for good reason.

Mania for Mastery

Video games such as "Nintendo" augment some of the most riveting aspects of television viewing with the built-in reward systems of computer games. These are many children's introduction to the computer's "artificial intelligence." Much like their elder counterparts termed "computer hackers," children enmeshed with this powerful alter ego seem to be hooked by lures that ordinary activities simply do not exert. [32] Here are the games' secret weapons:

• feelings of control and mastery by the players
• exact calibration of the level of difficulty to the player
• immediate and continual reinforcement
• escape from the unpredictability of human social/emotional relationships

As with television viewing, moreover, human brains are easy prey for the demanding, colorful, fast-paced visual formats.

Human nature drives us all to master problems. A golfer may think her life's goal is to break 100, but once she is consistently scoring in the high 90's, is she content -- or, more likely, does she set a new goal to break 95? Video games are perfectly designed to promise mastery -- in gradual degrees, which keep the player coming back for just a little more of this heady potion. The child is always presented with slightly greater challenges, individually calibrated and always tantalizingly within reach -- with continued practice. Each effort, successful or unsuccessful, is promptly reinforced; the machine becomes a personalized tutor. Even children with attention problems in other settings respond to such immediacy.

Mastery leads to a sense of power, which feels especially good to a child in a world where things seem pretty much out of control, and where teachers order children around a lot of the time. Many of the games play directly on this need.

Can these games be educational? Some have suggested that they may be training children in skills which will be needed in the future but for which we don't yet know the uses. Many teachers comment, however, that frequent players have trouble readjusting from the microworld to that of a classroom, which offers much less sensory "saliency," not a whole lot of power, and less individual attention and gratification. Some, of course, suggest that what we really need to do is make school as personally rewarding as the games.

"If we could just convince children that learning to read, and do math would make them powerful, too . . ." one teacher wistfully suggested.

Although some preliminary research suggests that perceptual-motor (specifically, eye-hand) skills may be improved by the games, there is apparently little transfer to school tasks, including writing. In addition, although the player's attention is, indeed, riveted, there has been no evidence of transfer of attention to other kinds of learning. [33]

Do such games teach children to be better problem-solvers? After all, success in many is predicated on making a series of correct decisions. Dr. Linda Siegel, authority on child development and education, has wondered about this possibility. She suspects, however, that the ability to use logical thinking may actually be impaired rather than improved in children conditioned to this visual, holistic environment.

"We should be thinking hard about what these games really encourage. I'm not convinced they really promote decision-making," she told me. "I watch these kids playing and I wonder if those decisions are made on a rational basis, or if it is just chance. Are they developing systems of rules in their minds, or are they just responding intuitively? They seem to be in control, but how much control do they really have? And if it's intuitive rather than logical, is it thinking?" [34]

It would be nice if we had some answers to these questions. In the meanwhile, parents should remember that they are still in charge of the household. Aren't they?

BRAINS THAT READ VS. BRAINS THAT WATCH TV

One thing television does is it keeps kids from reading. Reading triggers certain experiences in the brain that just don't happen if you don't read. I think our brains are designed to symbolize and represent information in the way that we call language. If we don't exercise it, we lose it. Television, even Sesame Street, is not very symbolic. It makes things very tangible and easy to understand, but reading is the kind of exercise that causes the brain to develop differently because it uses that symbolic capability. -- Dr. M. Russell Harter [35]

Children's brains develop connections within and between areas depending on the type of exercise they get. A "good" brain for learning develops strong and widespread neural highways that can quickly and efficiently assign different aspects of a task to the most efficient system. Such a brain is able to "talk" to itself, instantly sending messages from one area to another. Such efficiency is developed only by active practice in thinking and learning which, in turn, builds increasingly stronger connections. A growing suspicion among brain researchers is that excessive television viewing may affect development of these kinds of connections. It may also induce habits of using the wrong systems for various types of learning.

The only sources of data -- both direct and indirect -- on this topic are studies comparing the effects of viewing with those of reading. Although, as always, the data are slim, they suggest that reading and watching TV make quite different demands on the brain and thus encourage different kinds of development. As with any activity, repeated exposure, particularly during sensitive periods, has the potential to cause lasting changes.

"If a certain part of the brain is available for reading and that part doesn't serve a reading function, a reorganization may take place that allows another function to become more developed," adds Dr. Harter, a major investigator in one of the first large-scale studies of reading and the developing brain, now being conducted at the University of North Carolina.

Intensive viewing has the potential for at least three effects on the growing brain, any of which could interfere with a child's natural potential for intelligence and creativity: (1) it may reduce stimulation to left-hemisphere systems critical for development of language, reading, and analytic thinking; (2) it may affect mental ability and attention by diminishing mental traffic between the hemispheres; (3) it may discourage development of "executive" systems that regulate attention, organization, and motivation. Without a solid research base, we can take only a speculative look at each of the three.

Does Television Unbalance the Brain?

The medium (at least in the United States), by maximizing quick cuts, which permit little critical analysis, and the visual presentation of violence or disaster, assures retention of global imagery content (right-brain functions?) at the cost of the more orderly and logical verbal and analytical processes (left brain?). Reading, by contrast, can present equally sensational information. . . but it requires a more active stance by the reader who must project his or her own imagery onto a more orderly array of verbal information. [36] -- Dr. Jerome Singer, Yale University

The fear most often expressed about extended television viewing is that it robs the left hemisphere of developmental time and space. Over a decade ago, Marie Winn speculated that television's "repeated and time-consuming nonverbal, primarily visual activity" and negative patterns of "nonverbal cognition" [37] might interfere with "left brain" functions, disrupting language and reading development. Two years later the Emerys suggested that non-verbal systems in the right hemisphere were being overstimulated by TV and that even "advantaged" children would be harmed if neural pathways essential to the development of spoken and written language and critical thought were not fully developed. [38]

Little credible research has been conducted to compare hemispheric activity during viewing vs. reading. What is available suggests that, relative to television, print media generate more left-brain than right-brain activity. [39]

Syntax vs. Saliency

While it is physically impossible to stimulate one side of a normal brain without engaging the other as well, it may be possible to "unbalance" development by neglecting certain types of input. Skilled reading depends heavily on (left-hemisphere) auditory language abilities. [40, 41] (Many good readers may not even be aware that they "hear" sentences in their head as they read.) Children who lean too heavily on (right-hemisphere) visual, holistic strategies (they remember or guess what a word says only by the way it "looks" -- first letter, shape, etc.) run into trouble when the text gets harder, when words get longer, and when they must read or spell accurately. Symptoms include inaccurate oral reading ("vacation" for "vacancy") and difficulty reading or spelling syllables in the right sequence ("renuramate" for "remunerate"). Children who never learn to process (understand and remember) language without pictures attached also have difficulty in school when they must listen to a teacher or to the author of a textbook. They keep looking around for meaning instead of creating it inside their own heads.

As we saw in Chapter 4, television is a poor teacher of language because it is not interactive and because it cannot tailor conversation, as can parents, to the needs of the individual child. Even seriously disadvantaged children do not seem to gain linguistic benefits from extended hours of TV. A number of studies have shown that children get information from television primarily through attention to visual action and nonverbal sounds (booms, crashes, music), not through following the dialogue. [42] To understand a complex plot or make sense of speech on television, they would have to overlook the highly salient features and focus instead on such "nonsalient" aspects as low action or normal human speech. Yet, as programs are increasingly designed to attract attention, the child viewer gains the habit of ignoring language in favor of visual and auditory gimmicks. Syntax is a very poor second to saliency.

As I watch children's programming, I am struck by the following (L or R indicates the hemisphere presumably more involved in each case):

• Holistic visual action (R) dominates oral language (L).
• Sound effects are mainly novel noises (R), not sequential speech (L).
• Language modeling consists primarily of vocabulary words -- semantic (R and L) rather than grammatical -- syntactic sequences of words or phrases (L).
• Rapid movement and novelty (R) are almost continual.
• Exaggerated emotional tone (R) characterizes many of the characters' responses.
• Color (R) is a predominant feature.
• Immediacy (R) dominates logical sequence (L) of episodes.
• There is little time for analysis (L) of anything, particularly what the characters say.
• Perception of the sounds (L) in the speech of the characters is very difficult, even for an adult brain.

Robbing left-hemisphere systems of valuable developmental exercise may tip the balance for brains constitutionally at risk for learning problems. Could it put more normal brains at risk? As the hours add up -- who knows? Will minds schooled by television relinquish the special form of intellectual precision afforded our species by the evolution of language in the left hemisphere? No one can answer this question, either, but a lot of teachers have their own opinions.

Changing Brains: Neural Imprints of Literacy

While research has yet to show whether watching television permanently changes the brain, it has suggested that literacy does. Because reading and writing are skills not innate or even inevitable for the human brain, they require training and practice. The practice, in turn, seems to develop both brain and thought patterns in certain specialized ways.

Indeed, I am considering the possibility that the adoption of the alphabet by Western cultures has had a reordering effect on the brain and the whole nervous system of literate people. . . . [43] -- Derrick de Kerckhove in The Alphabet and the Brain

Scientists are having fun trying to find out how learning to use an alphabet, particularly one that is read from left to right, might change the way a human brain functions. Clues have come mainly from two types of studies, as yet far from conclusive: some showing that illiterate people tend to have less strongly developed left-hemisphere language-processing than people who can read, and some showing that people who learn to read both a letter-type and a picture-type script, as in Japan, tend to process language more equally between the two sides of the brain than do people who read only letter-type scripts. [44, 45]

Good and poor readers commonly show up with differences in brain function. Part of the reason may be that brains that read more develop differently. "Good readers may spend more time reading than poor readers, and this could conceivably affect brain lateralization," reports one noted team of researchers. [46]

Brains that read in unusual ways also develop differently. Studies similar to those discussed in an earlier chapter show that deaf readers use the two sides of their brain divergently. Deaf readers, we must recall, rarely process beyond third- or fourth-grade-level reading ability in spite of intelligence and teaching; not surprisingly, they tend to use right hemisphere (more visual) systems instead of left (more auditory). [47] Is it only a coincidence that the reading abilities of today's hearing students also begin to level off and then start to drop at/about the same point where most deaf readers get stuck?

Teaching That Changes Brains

Dr. Dirk Bakker, of the Free University and Paedological Institute in Amsterdam, believes that the way children use their hemispheres can be changed with surprisingly little effort. Using different methods of reading instruction, he has altered brain function and also improved reading scores.

Bakker insists that reading problems result when children use their hemispheres inappropriately. Part of this "functional overdevelopment" may be inherited, but experience can at least partially restore the balance. To get these brains more effectively organized for reading, Bakker uses training in which he tries to strengthen the weak system causing the problem.

Bakker's students improve their reading, but, more important, they also show "training-induced electrical changes in brain asymmetry" (changes in relative strength of brain waves over the two hemispheres) that correlate with the changes in their reading abilities. It is particularly notable -- and a little frightening -- that the teachers achieved these changes in hemispheric activity with only twenty-two weekly sessions of forty-five minutes each! [48, 49] Although it has not yet been shown that the brains were permanently altered in any major way by such brief training, these experiments offer hope that early elementary school years still provide an opening for reeducating underactive neurons. [50]

Most researchers are skeptical of what Marcel Kinsbourne terms "dichotomania" -- the tendency to look at everything in terms of right versus left hemisphere. Children must learn to use -- and thus help develop -- both sides and the connections between them. Higher-order reasoning and putting language meaning together with the visual input are particularly important. In these respects skilled reading is a much better trainer than television.

Mental and Physical Effort -- or Withered Brains?

TV isn't tapping any higher-order integrative processes. It's much more dangerous than simply engaging children's right hemispheres. Both hemispheres can watch TV, but they do it with lower-level systems, mainly visual ones. The issue is not right or left, but the type of processing that gets stimulated. -- Dr. Wendy Heller. [51]

Authorities now suspect that the ability to activate and coordinate the work of both hemispheres may be even more important than developing individual systems in either side. They argue we should not allow viewing to replace physical play (e. g., running, kicking, climbing, throwing), handwork (e.g., building, working with clay, needlework, origami), doing puzzles, playing games, or other activities through which the two sides of the body -- and their related connections in the brain -- learn to coordinate with each other.

The corpus callosum, the thick bridge of fibers connecting the hemispheres, is one of the brain's latest-maturing parts. It ultimately makes possible important skills such as flexible manipulation of ideas, mature creative imagination, and effective interplay between analytic and intuitive thinking (e.g., seeing the way details fit inside the "big picture"; implementing an action plan for a creative idea). Poor development of this critical link between the hemispheres can result in learning and attention problems. [52]

Because of its late maturation, the corpus callosum may be extremely vulnerable to lack of practice. After an initial spurt of growth during the first two years of life, it probably continues to develop at a slow, relatively steady pace until somewhere between ages eight and fourteen. As the connections mature, the youngster must practice using them -- through physical and mental activity. If the brain remains relatively passive during childhood and/or adolescence, it will be much more difficult to develop these skills later when the brain is less flexible. [53]

Dr. Jerre Levy, biopsychologist at the University of Chicago and an internationally known authority on hemispheric development, believes that mental effort of all kinds is what firms up these connections.

I suspect that normal human brains are built to be challenged and that it is only in the face of an adequate challenge that normal bihemispheric brain operations are engaged. [54]

Dr. Levy insists that children need "a linguistic environment that is coordinated with the visual environment they're experiencing," not the "linguistically depleted" environment of TV. In other words, they need to pay attention to words as well as to pictures.

Dr. Levy feels that older children may actually be more affected by the low-level linguistic content of much television programming than little ones. "Furthermore," she added, "the main thing that worries me about TV is not even its intellectual level. To the extent that children commit time looking at TV, they're not spending time reading. When a child reads a novel, he has to self-create whole scenarios, he has to create images of who these people are, what their emotions are, what their tones of voice are, what the environment looks like, what the feeling of this environment is. These self-created scenarios are important, and television leaves no room for that creative process.

"I think brains are designed to meet cognitive challenges," she concluded. "It's just like muscles; if you don't exercise them they wither. If you don't exercise brains, they wither." [55]

POOR SCAFFOLDING FOR THE BRAIN'S EXECUTIVE

Equally troubling is the growing suspicion that the brain's executive centers may be compromised by too many hours in front of the tube. This concern was repeatedly expressed by neuropsychologists whom I informally polled at a recent conference, most of whom, incidentally, said they allow their children to watch [TV] -- but on a limited and selective basis.

"It's too simple to say TV makes kids 'right-brained,'" commented Dr. Sid Segalowitz, an authority on children's hemispheric development. "It's important that parents realize how complex the brain is. They hear all this stuff about stimulating their child's brain; it's important to realize that you can't stimulate just one isolated part of it. Brain function is a system; we need to get away from this right and left idea. When we look at slides of blood flow in the brain when kids are reading, we can see so many different areas lighting up at once. Good readers tend to use both left and right hemispheres, including the prefrontal systems."

Spending time with something that doesn't challenge their brains much could impinge on development of prefrontal executive functions, such as control of thinking, attention, and general planning skills, said Dr. Segalowitz. "The frontal lobes are late enough developing that they can definitely be affected by environmental variables, but we still don't know how much is programmable hardware, and how much is not." [56] Like several colleagues, he would like to initiate research to find out more about how environmental influences affect this mysterious -- and influential -- brain area.

As reviewed in Chapter 8, frontal-lobe development continues throughout childhood and adolescence. It is closely related to the vigilance (persistent attention) that seems to be particularly affected by TV viewing. Growth in these executive systems probably accounts for the dramatic shift usually seen in children's control over their own reasoning abilities between ages five and seven. [57] During this period they become much better able to understand and plan strategies for what they are learning, as well as for controlling their own behavior. Parents don't need to be reminded, however, that many "control functions" don't become dependable until much later! How television may affect this course of development is unknown, although we may safely assume that extensive viewing has some effects.

Prefrontal development enables higher-level learning. Conversely, thoughtful, mentally challenging reading, reflecting, planning, and problem-solving nourishes these neural circuits. It is possible to read words without much help from these higher-level control centers, but comprehension and application -- as well as motivation and persistence -- require their use. These endangered skills appear to be the ones most related to our national crisis in learning. How much can be blamed on a generalized willingness to let TV "scaffold" children's development?

CONCLUSION: VIDEO CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO BRAINS AND LEARNING

The overall effects of television viewing and other forms of video on the growing brain are poorly understood, but research strongly indicates that it has the potential to affect both the brain itself and related learning abilities. Abilities to sustain attention independently, stick to problems actively, listen intelligently, read with understanding, and use language effectively may be particularly at risk. No one knows how much exposure is necessary to make a difference. Likewise, no information is available about the overall effects on intelligence of large amounts of time taken from physical exercise, social or independent play, pleasure reading, sustained conversation, or roaming quietly about in one's own imagination.

The notion that television overdevelops the right hemisphere is giving way to the much greater possibility that it underdevelops several areas and/or the connections between them. Not only left-hemisphere language systems, but also higher-order organizational abilities, including the all-important control, motivation, and planning functions of the prefrontal lobes, may be in jeopardy for children who watch without expending much mental effort. All these functions may have sensitive periods when they are particularly susceptible to variations in stimulation, but it is difficult to determine which age periods are more critical than others or how much exposure is needed to cause physical effects.

The fact that reports from teachers so precisely mirror the "symptoms" of these same deficits should give us all pause. Surely, with the amount of time children in this country spend in front of the screen, we should demand better research on its effects. There must be a great untapped teaching potential there somewhere. Meanwhile, the best advice to parents seems to be the usual caveats:

• Place firm limits on television and video use; encourage children to plan ahead for favorite shows and games.
• Participate with children whenever possible.
• Talk with the child about television content, methods of audience manipulation, point of view, etc.
• If you want children to become readers, show them how to turn off the tube and pick up a book.
• Remember, what is pleasantly relaxing to your brain may not be good for theirs.
• Give substitute caregivers strict guidelines regarding TV and video use.
• Read the next chapter before you encourage preschoolers to watch Sesame Street.

[admin]

CHAPTER 11: Sesame Street and the Death of Reading

With a small sigh, four-year-old Nancy settles her thumb in her mouth and herself next to her grandmother. The screen in front of them throbs into strident action. Blasts of music and color, brighter and louder than life, assail her consciousness. A confusing melee of animation churns forth as characters, seated around a dinner table, leap up and down shouting a harsh and hurried parody of human conversation. What are they yelling about? A winter storm rages violently on the sound track, doors slam, dishes crash; the overwhelming sound effects drown out the few words that might be intelligible.

"What is it? What is it? What is it?" whines two-year-old Peter, running to the screen and pointing anxiously at something. But Peter's question remains unanswered. Under his insistent finger the scene and characters alter, the action races relentlessly along, and Peter retreats to Grandmother's other side, also sucking a thumb.

From across the room I am stunned by Sesame Street's sensory assault. I am equally unnerved by the transformation of these lively, curious children, who, five minutes earlier, had been chattering enthusiastically as they investigated the workings of my pocket tape recorder. Although some parents report that children who watch TV regularly become very active during the program, the response of Nancy and Peter is much more typical of novice viewers. We are all, in fact, overwhelmed as we sit, silent, engulfed by a cacophony of vignettes that change, literally, by the minute; Sesame Street segments run anywhere from thirty or forty-five seconds up to a rare maximum of three minutes. Muppets, people, objects, cartoons, cascade inexorably -- each scene arrestingly novel and removed both visually and contextually from the last. Within twenty minutes we are propelled from Spain or Mexico (the pace is so rapid it is hard to tell) to the streets of New York, to a zoo, behind the set of a television studio, and to a game show. A cartoon history of the growing of peanuts and making of peanut butter is shown in fifty seconds, narrated by a voice mimicking an antebellum Southern accent. "It gr-ao-ws in the gr-ao-u-nd!" we are told. Nancy looks up, puzzled. Grandmother starts to explain, but the children's attention is instantly captured by numerals that leap onto the screen to dance, jump, metamorphose -- appear, disappear, grow larger, smaller, in the flick of an eyelash.

"One, two, three," shouts a disembodied voice. H floats by, suddenly experiencing an explosion of parts that transform it to h. "H," the voice intones, but immediately h is gone and we are on a street in London where cartoon characters shout a slapstick routine that features rhyming sounds, unrelated in any discernible way to the previous "teaching." Unfortunately, their abrasively contrived dialects and the rapid pace of the jargon obscures both content and rhyme. Grandmother tries to repeat the rhyming words, but she is drowned out as we are swept into a new surge of music.

"Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu!" imitates Peter, picking up one intelligible sound from a character who sounds as if he is suffering from some sort of speech impediment.

A pulsating red numeral 3 appears, capering among a series of boxes. "Three," blasts the sound track amid more sounds of crashing and banging. Now 3 becomes a ball and leaps into the final box, which is immediately transformed (to an adult's eyes) into some sort of grinder; in a second, 3 is decomposed and pours out the spout as red powder.

"What happened to it?" asks Grandma.

"I don't know," says Nancy, registering surprise.

But there is no time to discuss this hidden machinery of cause and effect -- to clarify the chimerical "magic" that transforms reality without human action or experience. Comprehension is superfluous.

CONFRONTING A SACRED COW

"But at Least It's Educational . . ."

The worst thing about Sesame Street is that people believe it is educationally valuable. It stands as a symbol of "good" programming, an institutionalized excuse for "boob tube" as baby-sitter. Well-intentioned parents earnestly swallow the dictum: "It helps children learn."

But what are they learning? First, that we expect them to enjoy this manipulative sensory assault. With habit, of course, they may indeed grow to "love" it, perhaps as smokers desire their prebreakfast cigarette. Human sensory organs -- and the brains attached to them -- grow accustomed to, even need, often repeated experiences. If children tell us they "love" Sesame Street, we should not decide it is ipso facto good for them; we should more likely be concerned about what has been done to their brains that enables them to tolerate -- much less enjoy -- it!

"Just because children do something willingly, even eagerly, is not sufficient reason to believe it engages their minds," cautions Dr. Lillian Katz, author of Engaging Children's Minds. [1] "And remember, enjoyment, per se, is not an appropriate goal for education." [2]

Yet children have also bought into the notion that Sesame Street is both "good" for them and educational. A typical platitude was recently expressed by a youngster interviewed for a national radio program. [3] "It teaches kids to read," he declared, confirming his adult-fostered delusions about the fundamental nature of the reading process. Like this little boy, who may be forgiven a certain degree of disillusionment when he gets to school, many children solemnly mouth the reassurances of their elders; yes, indeed, this is "education"!

Although Sesame Street's major raison d'etre has been to improve the educational prognosis for the disadvantaged, the gulf between socioeconomic groups and the failure rate of poor school children grows daily to ever more frightening proportions. Clearly, a single program cannot be expected to reverse major societal changes. Poor children also tend to watch much more commercial television, with less supervision, than others, factors linked to poorer school performance. Yet, as we shall see, several aspects of Sesame Street's chosen format may be particularly damaging to the most needy of all.

Many hours of viewing Sesame Street have convinced me that adults who endorse it give children an erroneous message about what learning feels like. It is truly amazing that everyone seems to have bought the notion that this peripatetic carnival will somehow teach kids to read -- despite the fact that the habits of the mind necessary to be a good reader are exactly what Sesame Street does not teach: language, active reflection, persistence, and internal control. The truth is that most adults have probably not taken the time to sit down and view this program objectively, from the perspective of tender young brains struggling to make the connections that will organize their intellects. They should.

Pervasive, Expensive, and Short on Research

Sesame Street is viewed by almost half of all American preschoolers on a weekly basis -- over 5.8 million children between the ages of two and five watch an average of three episodes per week. Where I live, the program is broadcast three times a day for an hour each time. (In contrast, Reading Rainbow, which actually stimulates book circulation in libraries by engaging its audience with good children's books, is aired once a week at a time when children who can read are in school.) Sesame Street's main influence, however, is not the proportion of total viewing time it occupies, but the messages it conveys -- or fails to -- about learning, about constructive children's programming, and about the responsibility of this overwhelmingly pervasive medium.

Sesame Street is expensive in every respect. Estimates have put the cost of producing each viewing hour anywhere from ninety-two thousand to one million dollars. [4, 5] No one questions that this monumental product reflects good and earnest intentions on the part of its generators and producers, Children's Television Workshop. Yet when we encourage preschoolers to watch Sesame Street, we are programming them to "enjoy" -- and perhaps even need -- overstimulation, manipulation, and neural habits that are antagonistic to academic learning. In my opinion, it is a serious travesty of the educational enterprise particularly because it has assumed the mission and garnered parents' trust.

I am convinced it is not merely a coincidence that our faith in it has coincided with a major decline in reading and learning skills. Uncritical acceptance of Sesame Street as a model for "learning" has been part of a larger infatuation with expedient, product-oriented approaches that denigrate the essence of the educational enterprise. Its substitution of surface glitz for substance has started a generation of children in the seductive school of organized silliness, where their first lesson is that learning is something adults can be expected to make happen for them as quickly and pleasantly as possible. Thus prepared, they can hardly be blamed if they fail to discover for themselves the personal joys -- time consuming as they are -- of serious learning, mental effort, and mastery.

Despite its obviously large budget, the carefully crafted flagship of television's educational armada has not produced significant research by which the effects of its chosen format on either brains or learning abilities can be assessed. Although elaborate "instructional goals" for the program have been promulgated, little accountability for meeting them seems to be built into the system. Almost all of the research done by Children's Television Workshop, in fact, falls in the category of "formative evaluation": production research that mainly tests the program's appeal (i.e., how well it "sells"). [6] "Summative" research, by which the attainment of those instructional goals might be evaluated, has mainly been left up for grabs -- and for the twenty years of its life, few researchers have grabbed. The resulting studies have been piecemeal and inconclusive. Little documentation exists about the overall cognitive effects of Sesame Street despite all the money, time, effort, and good intentions that this program has consumed.

TEN REASONS WHY SESAME STREET IS BAD NEWS FOR READING

Studies showing how young children should be taught to read indicate that Sesame Street is going about the job the wrong way. Moreover, the show fosters inaccurate ideas about what and how preschoolers should be learning.

1. What Is "Brain-Appropriate" Learning for Preschoolers?

Sesame Street has popularized the erroneous belief that it is appropriate for most preschoolers to learn to read. In fact, it is a serious mistake to push reading skills at children before they have completed certain developmental tasks that will give them something to read about -- and the ability to understand it when they do! Moreover, research shows that the correct way for very young children to start to read is not with structured lessons.

Misguided efforts to train preschoolers in skills more appropriate for kindergarten or first grade diverts valuable time and attention from their real learning needs. To become good readers children first need help in installing the cognitive and language furnishings that will make the brain a comfortable place for real literacy to dwell! During the early years these are best learned through active, hands-on experiences (e.g., playing, building, exploring, talking), imaginative social play, and listening with enjoyment to good children's literature, not from a medium which has made a science of taking control of the viewer's attention.

Preschoolers also need to practice the fine motor skills that will eventually enable them to write. New research indicates that the increase in dysgraphia (difficulty with handwriting) plaguing the schools may be related to the fact that children have spent so much more time in front of the TV than in free play and activities such as bead stringing, sewing cards, carpentry, sand and water play, crayoning designs, cutting out shapes, and other natural and appropriate learning activities. [7 ]Sesame Street could -- and should -- do much more to encourage them.

The mechanics of naming letters or "sounding out" words, as important as they will eventually be, are better saved for later -- usually around age six. Many, perhaps even most, preschoolers' brains are not prepared to cope with connecting written symbols (letters) to sounds ("B says buh','). Some young brains can glue these together with remarkable ease; others, including many bright ones, do not. If well-meaning adults are encouraged to force the issue, they may create problems ranging from disaffection to disability. [8]

Many experts now believe that early pressure to remember letters and their sounds may cause learning problems for some children, especially those whose environments have not primed them for literacy. At the very least, youngsters who are mystified by the meaning of the dancing symbols on the screen may be picking up feelings of bewilderment about phonics -- and about their own inability to understand something that everybody seems to think is so important. If teaching letter sounds to preschoolers really were important, it might be worth the risk. But it is not!

2. The Empty Alphabet vs. Language Meaning

Reading is not walking on words. It's grasping the soul of them. -- Paolo Freire

Sesame Street has overemphasized letters and numerals and underemphasized the language and thinking skills necessary to make them meaningful. Contrary to what most parents believe, learning the alphabet is only a minor part of learning to read. Overall language development is much more important. Yet back in the mists of reading research, some quite misleading studies "proved" that kindergarteners' ability to recognize alphabet letters was a good predictor of their reading success at the end of first grade. As is too often the case, people who did not understand that a correlation (relationship) of this kind does not necessarily imply causation decided that teaching alphabets would make children learn to read faster. The truth of the situation is somewhat different.

Alphabet (or "letter-sound") recognition by three-, four-, and five-year-olds might be viewed as a symptom, not a cause, of the type of brain that will acquire reading easily: (1) it comes from an environment with exposure to books and print; (2) it can, through a combination of nature and experiential stimulation, remember a sequence of spoken sounds and attach them to printed letters; (3) it is mature enough to make these connections with ease. This type of brain is likely to learn to read quite readily, whether someone drills it on the alphabet or not. Conversely, simply teaching the brain to have the surface "symptom" will not create the underlying abilities.

Children who buy Sesame Street's implicit message that alphabet letters are the major key to reading are headed for trouble. When researchers ask groups of poor readers what reading is all about, they tend to say something like: "sounding out the words." When good readers are asked the same question, they give answers such as, "Understanding what the words and the sentences say." Somehow the poor readers have failed to pick up the idea that reading must take them far beyond the alphabet into an active search for meaning.

Children must have good language development before they can get the meaning. Ability to recognize printed letters and words gets children through early reading instruction. After grade 3, however, overall listening comprehension (e.g., the ability to understand and remember stories or reports they have heard) is much more closely related to students' reading comprehension than their ability to read the words themselves! [8, 10] Many long-term studies show that children superior in oral language in kindergarten and first grade are the ones who eventually excel in reading and writing in the middle grades.

When it comes to learning these uses of language, early environment is the critical factor. From the University of Umea in Sweden, Dr. Ingvar Lundberg, who has been working on a large study of children's reading development in all the Scandinavian countries, reports that even though Scandinavian children do not enter school until age seven, most pick up basic decoding (alphabet and word-reading) skills without difficulty. At that point, however, the effects of the preschool language environment become evident in the level of their reading comprehension.

"Right now we are in the process of looking at the effects on comprehension of a lot of early things happening," Lundberg reports. "If you have adequate teaching (in school), regardless of a lot of external circumstances, a majority of kids will certainly learn how to decode ["sound out" the words], but a majority of kids will certainly not have a guaranteed development of comprehension just by a reasonably good school environment. It seems that home factors play a very considerable role as far as comprehension is concerned." [11]

Given these well-recognized facts, it is disheartening to observe that Sesame Street itself provides such a poor language model. Although apologists for the program claim that its sentence length and grammatical complexity are appropriate for young children, [12] the only study I could locate on this topic failed to take into account the pace, clarity, or volume level of the characters' speech. Even a casual observer soon becomes aware that most of the characters talk too fast and shift topics too abruptly. Research on the development of auditory abilities shows that children of four, five, and even six years are still immature in their abilities to discriminate frequency and duration in human speech; they need slow, repetitive talk, with emphasis on word inflections. [13]

"You know," explained Dr. Janet Jensen, a prominent researcher in this field, "the way kindergarten teachers talk. Everyone makes jokes about it: 'Now -- children -- let's -- look -- at -- the -- bunny,' but they do that because the kids need and respond to it. Many children's programs, including Sesame Street, go much too fast for them." [14]

(Testimony to the fact that a children's program can follow sound development guidelines and still be enduringly popular comes from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, whose slow, repetitive speech and invitations to the child to respond appeals instinctively to preschoolers -- at least those whose sensibilities have not been dulled by raucous sideshows.)

Sesame Street also subordinates meaningful dialogue to brain-grabbing visual events, noises, and slapstick comedy. This emphasis is particularly troubling in view of the fact that both disadvantaged children and those with reading disabilities commonly show difficulty in using what are called "verbal strategies" for processing information. [15] This tendency to focus on the nonverbal aspects of a situation and disregard the language sets a child up for difficulty in school.

Although, to its credit, the program attempts to present both standard and nonstandard dialects and grammar, they too often appear in the form of poorly modeled and unclearly articulated parody. Sesame Street also sporadically attempts to teach vocabulary (e. g., names of ten baby animals in ninety seconds), but its format militates against sustained attention to the meaning of the grammar, sentences, or phrasal inflections that children will meet in books. And far too little effort is made to get the child to respond.

The few studies which suggest that Sesame Street teaches preschoolers to recognize a few more spoken vocabulary words provide very unconvincing evidence of overall language development. Although children who have watched Sesame Street get better at pointing to pictures in response to vocabulary words, [16] this type of recognition-level test cannot be taken to mean that the children can use the words in their own conversation. [17] Moreover, children in one study whose parents encouraged them to watch Sesame Street had the lowest overall vocabulary scores! [18]

No one has convincingly demonstrated that Sesame Street actually succeeds in its fundamental goal of helping young brains learn to crack the alphabetic code. Well-publicized early claims. that it had successfully taught disadvantaged children to recognize alphabet letters and numerals have subsequently been questioned on the basis that the money spent did not justify the small gains engendered. [19] Moreover, we now realize that empty word recognition is a meaningless exercise. Twenty years of throwing alphabet letters and dancing words at children is producing exactly what we might expect: students who, even after learning to read, lack the foundations for further progress; children who find reading "boring," who are satisfied with the superficial, who can't understand why meaning doesn't magically appear -- like a visual effect -- and who give up when it doesn't. The resulting failure and disenchantment are particularly tragic for those very children the program was primarily designed to serve.

3. How Does Print Behave?

The age of Sesame Street, optimistically crafted to narrow the chasms of disadvantage, has, in fact, seen those gaps widen. The facetious treatment of letters and other symbols gives children an erroneous idea of what to expect from the printed page. Words in books do not jump about, transform before one's eyes, or call attention to themselves. Children, particularly those disadvantaged by lack of experience with real books during the preschool years, are in for quite a shock when they get to school and discover that print stands still. No wonder they turn off when informed that they must bend their brains around the hard job of attacking the words, rather than having a barrage of letters, words, and pictures attacking them.

Even on the rare occasions when a real book slides through the cracks between Sesame Street's animation and agitation, the program may display only its illustrations (which, incidentally, tend to appear pallid and uninteresting by comparison to the program's vivid coloration). Thus, children miss one of their most important pieces of reading readiness, technically termed metalinguistic awareness, which is made up of knowledge that literate adults take for granted:

• understanding that letters make up words and that written words must be linked together into meaningful sentences
• knowing what a "word" is (i.e., that funny-looking bunch of squiggles with white space on all sides
• becoming familiar with the conventions of print (i.e., in English we read from left to right, observe punctuation marks, etc.)
• knowing firsthand the meaning of terms associated with books (i.e., "cover," "title," "author," "illustration," etc.)

Metalinguistic awareness is an important predictor of a child's success with early reading and is apt to be particularly deficient in Sesame Street's target audience. Youngsters may be totally bewildered in school if the teacher says, "Now, Johnny, try to read this word," and the child has never learned to differentiate between letter, word, and sentence. Many children without book experiences or writing experiences with drawing and scribbling can't visually locate word boundaries or consistently follow a line of print from left to right. These skills require slow, careful, firsthand exposure, and the program should be placing more emphasis on this sort of learning for children who do not have access to such experiences.

4. Bits vs. Big Bites of Meaning

Sesame Street viewers are exposed to lots of incidental knowledge, but adults who think this kind of information automatically makes them "smarter" are fooling themselves. Apparent precocity can be deceptive; if the child has not also integrated good reasoning skills along with the data, the early promise will soon fade. Indeed, one of the biggest problems of older students today is making connections. "There now exists a large body of research that clearly shows that children of all ability levels in Grades 4-12 have considerable difficulty in studying and linking together the concepts presented in science and social studies texts," states a report from the International Reading Association. [20]

"They have all these little bits of information, but they can't seem to see relationships, make inferences, or draw conclusions," say teachers from kindergarten to college. Difficulties with understanding sequence in text and writing logically reflect identical problems with linking thoughts together meaningfully.

All television programming is increasingly predicated on the idea that rapidly changing scenes keep viewers watching. "Watching thinking is boring and slow," says Neil Postman, who quotes Robert MacNeil of The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour on the fact that viewers are never required to pay attention for more than a few seconds at a time. "The idea is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement," said MacNeil. [21] Sesame Street has adopted the same format -- only with more noise and more vivid color.

Watching Sesame Street with an adult brain that struggles to make connections can be a very frustrating experience. The rapid, minute-by- minute alterations in context -- from a pirate ship to a city street, a barnyard to a cartoon of letter symbols -- defy sequence or logic and make it impossible to see relationships, understand the sequence of cause and effect, or keep a train of thought in motion. Such brain-training is directly antagonistic to the active and sustained work on connecting ideas that is needed to understand written text.

5. Listening vs. Looking

Why doesn't Sesame Street make a much greater effort to teach listening skills? Not only are its "graduates" deficient overall in ability to pay attention to and understand oral language, but they also lack the skills of auditory analysis that underlie mastery of "phonics."

Many in our growing ranks of poor readers (and spellers!) can't listen carefully enough to discriminate individual sounds in words or identify the order in which they come (e.g., "Here is a word: sun. Now tell me what sound you hear first in the word sun. Which sound do you hear last?"). As was mentioned in an earlier chapter, these skills of "phonologic awareness" are fundamental for reading and spelling.

Sesame Street purports to teach children "phonics," and its statement of educational goals includes such elements of phonological awareness as rhyming words (which, unfortunately, are too often presented unclearly and far too rapidly). [22] Its demanding visual format belies the claim, however, since "phonics," by definition, is an ear skill, not an eye skill. These auditory systems are in a period of critical development during the very preschool years when so many youngsters are watching the tube. Researchers agree that when given both visual displays and dialogue, children attend to and remember the visual, not the "talk." (Even for most adults, listening can't compete with looking if the brain is given the chance to do both at the same time.) Yet, as we saw in an earlier chapter, if auditory processing skills aren't embedded in the brain during the critical early years, it is much harder, if it is even possible, to insert them later.

Research also shows that children process the same information differently, depending on whether they look at it or listen to it. In one study, clear differences were found between children who had seen a televised folktale and those who heard the same dialogue read from a storybook. Those who had watched the story on television described the visual effects and what the characters did, whereas those in the read-aloud group described more dialogue of the story and gave significantly more information about the content of the text and the characters. [23]

What our children need is lots of good, slow, clear exposure to the sounds that will become their armamentarium for attacking language meaning as well as the written word. What a shame they are not getting it from this program!

6. Perceptual Organization vs. Perceptual Defense

One of the brain's major learning tasks is to organize the confusing array of sensory stimuli that start bombarding the infant at birth. For this, children need an environment over which they feel some control.

Researchers investigating the brain's "sensitive periods" report that the extent to which aspects of the inanimate environment change as a result of the child's actions has been found to relate to overall later intelligence and also to the ability to pursue a goal. [24] Unfortunately, viewing Sesame Street presents quite the opposite situation; the events are not only out of the child's control, but the noisy and visually violent nature of many episodes may cause sensory overload. [25]

The ability to organize a visual field is the entry point to reading. Children with poor skills of visual organization have difficulty, for example, in distinguishing word boundaries and keeping their place in the text. Yet, rather than encouraging children to develop perceptual organization, such programming may actually force them to practice habits of perceptual defense simply as a matter of neural self-protection. When even an adult brain has difficulty organizing confusing action, abrupt changes, and inexplicable deus ex machina visual effects, it should hardly be surprising if children become overwhelmed by the perceptual chaos.

There is no good evidence (although it has been suggested) that television can create serious, organic, perceptual problems. We need some studies looking at possible subtle effects of noisy, visually demanding programming on a normal child's perceptual (auditory and visual) organization skills. The "tuned-out" viewing behavior that many parents report may simply be the immature nervous system's defense against too much stimulation. How much exposure is needed to have an effect? No one knows, but different children have different thresholds at which they become overloaded.

7. Active vs. Passive Brains

Poor readers -- and poor problem-solvers in any domain -- tend to be passive; they give up if they don't immediately "get it." Such habits of incomprehension may be exacerbated by programs which teach a young child that seeking understanding is either superfluous or impossible. While research suggests that most children instinctively try to comprehend the content they see on TV, they are too often prevented from doing so by overly confusing program formats. When this experience is repeated frequently, they soon learn they are neither required nor expected to grasp what is going on.

Studies by experts not commissioned by the program are beginning to show that much of Sesame Street's content is incomprehensible to young children. Dr. Singer cites an example:

One of the programs in the series we studied involved an attempt on the part of the producers of Sesame Street to demonstrate the notion of deafness to children. A group of deaf children were introduced and they engaged in a series of activities, including suggesting letters through their body postures. Despite the production effort and undeniable sensitivity of the show (at least from the perspective of an adult), only 1 of the preschoolers in our sample of 60 who viewed this program grasped that the children on the screen could not hear. In effect thousands of dollars went into the production which failed completely to communicate its major message to the preschooler target-viewing audience. [26]

Most parents assume children understand Sesame Street much better than they actually do, reports Dr. Singer after studying youngsters' responses to the program. The reason, he says, "is that too often the children simply failed to follow the material being presented from one sequence to the next. The necessary time for mental replay was not allotted, and there was insufficient repetition." [27]

No one has determined what effects continued noncomprehension has on brain function, but research cited in the last chapter suggest it may cause it to retreat into alpha -- one of the "habits" we were warned about.

8. Good Readers Learn to Remember

Another related problem concerns children's ability to remember the meaning of what they read, a skill that requires, first, understanding the text, and second, use of active strategies for remembering it. Memory also demands mental perseverance, for it depends on maintaining information in what is called "working memory" long enough to "store" it in some sort of meaningful form, and "retrieve" it when needed. Passive brains retain sensations, not information.

Children who do not understand what they are seeing do not learn active memory strategies. Curiously, although Mister Rogers' Neighborhood does not rivet children to the set (research has shown they are much more inclined to walk and look around than during Sesame Street's sensorially demanding format), they actually remember more from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. In this regard, reports Dr. Singer, those children who were less intelligent suffered more [i.e., remembered less] from exposure to Sesame Street, purportedly designed for the educationally disadvantaged [emphasis added]." [28]

9. Good Readers Can Pay Attention

While young children watch television, their attention tends to wander unless it is continually pulled back. Researchers who cite studies "proving" that children "pay attention" to TV are usually referring to this type of involuntary attention, which is quite different from the sort of voluntary attention needed to do well in school in general and reading in particular. Likewise, when you hear that children "actively" watch programs like Sesame Street, you should know that this really means that the viewer is frequently tuning out, looking away from the screen, playing, eating, or doing other things. The average look at the screen is actually less than five seconds in duration. [29] The truth is that the viewer may indeed be active, but the viewing is not.

Ideas in a text do not seize the reader's mind as do Ernie and Big Bird. Reading demands sustained voluntary attention from a mind that can hold a train of thought long enough to reflect on it, not one accustomed to having its attention jerked around every few seconds.

10. Who Makes the Pictures?

One of the most serious charges leveled against television viewing in general is that it robs children of the chance to learn to make pictures in their own minds. This critical skill is a cornerstone of good reading, not only because it keeps the reader connected to the text, but also as a very practical way to keep track of and remember what has been read. When poor readers -- and poor verbal problem-solvers -- hear (or read) words, they have trouble projecting anything on the screen of imagination.

Not long ago I visited an advanced-placement English class in a fast-track high school. The first act of Macbeth had been assigned to students as homework the previous evening; as they arrived in class the teacher asked them to write a description of what they had "seen" as they read. With a classful of good readers, I anticipated some colorful and dramatic accounts, and I was not disappointed. For a handful of students, however, this assignment proved frustrating.

"I read this over and over, but I guess I just don't see anything when I read," lamented one girl.

"That must make it hard to understand what you're reading," I ventured.

"It sure does," she confessed. "Maybe that's why I really hate reading -- but don't tell Mrs. --!"

Later the teacher drew me aside to tell me that the same students who didn't see the pictures were the ones she was most worried about. "I knew they weren't as good readers as the others," she said. "Now I think I know one reason why!"

Visual imagery also helps with solving math and science problems. "If Tom has three baskets of apples with twelve apples in each, and he divides each basketful evenly into four small boxes, how many boxes will he have and how many apples will each box contain?" Many people use some sort of visual image to "see" the baskets and boxes and to keep track of each step in the problem. Interestingly, students of the Sesame Street generation have particular difficulty with such "story problems." It seems that a combination of poor reading skill, lack of persistence, and inability to visualize contribute to this difficulty. While this skill seems to come more naturally to some brains than to others, it can be developed with practice. In a few studies, after children had been taught to make mental pictures, their reading scores went up. [30]

Sesame Street is constrained by its medium in teaching visual imagery. Yet, with some research already available, it should not be too difficult to come up with activities to give "mind pictures" much more emphasis than they now get. The longer children are habituated to this externally demanding visual format, the less likely they will probably be to generate their own scenarios.

Only a few studies have looked at television's interaction with more general aspects of imagination. They have found that children tend to provide longer and more imaginative endings to audio (radio) than to audiovisual (TV) stories. [31] There are also many anecdotal reports from veteran preschool teachers who began to report changes in children's imaginative play soon after the inception of Sesame Street. Their principal concern is that frequent viewers are more likely to mimic characters and action from programs than to make up scenarios of their own. Jerre Levy has reminded us that the systems linking language and visual imagery are forming throughout childhood, but no one knows if -- or when -- there is a critical period for imagination.

ISN'T THERE ANYTHING GOOD ABOUT SESAME STREET?

During a famine, even a sacred cow may be required to yield some nourishment. During the two years I have watched Sesame Street for the purposes of writing this chapter, I have noticed the genesis of some encouraging change. The pace is slowing just a bit, although not nearly enough. Expansion of content has also occurred in an effort to broaden both conceptual and "pro-social" (positive effects on behavior) learning. The program exposes children to some important concepts (songs about "Same, Different" as just one example). It has provided a happy familiarity with new heroes of cultural literacy such as Ernie and Big Bird. (And sold a lot of products, too.) Although its sense of humor has accurately been described by Dr. Lillian Katz as "too arch and much too sassy," children do get a kick out of the slapstick routines once they learn to adapt their brains to the noisy pace (a questionable benefit!). Personally, I find some of the plays on words terribly clever (e.g., "Placido Flamingo" sings with the animal orchestra), but then, I already know how to read and I happen to know who Placido Domingo is.

The program has made a serious effort to give positive messages about cultural diversity, handicaps, and major emotional issues such as those surrounding death [32] -- although, as we have seen, most of the message is missed by its young audience because of inappropriate modes of presentation. The material is arguably of better ethical quality than much other programming, and the statement of educational goals reflects current research (although it seems evident that they are poorly expressed in actual programming). If Sesame Street did not purport to be seriously educational, it might pass as clever and colorful light entertainment. But lauded as our major media effort to educate children, I believe it has failed and misled us at a time when we desperately need better models.

Children's Television Workshop has enjoyed a mandate to define good video "education" as well as appropriate academic methods and goals for preschoolers. They have not met their responsibility to provide sufficient summative research on their effects -- either positive or negative -- on learning. It can easily be argued that they have led an overly trusting public astray. The public, in turn, has been only too willing to cede them responsibility. And thus we reap the consequences.

One perceptive first-grader has summed up the situation quite neatly:

"It doesn't teach me much. It makes me laugh."

As a reading teacher, however, I'm not laughing.

CONCLUSION: TEACHING VS. SENSORY HUCKSTERISM

Reading is a complex intellectual act that cannot be peddled like an educational toy. The ability to read, and the related ability to write, are not hard-wired into the human brain. To make meaning out of printed text, the brain must be readied to think and to understand language; only then can it be trained to connect an internal mental life with written symbols that have no intrinsic meaning of their own. If reading is "sold" to unprepared children, they will soon discard it as worthless or uninteresting, because they lack the inner resources, both mental and physical, to bring life -- and meaning -- to the printed symbols.

Children immersed from birth in the spicy sensory bouillabaisse of visual immediacy will not become readers unless they have also soaked up the rich broth of language and reflection. Preschoolers who have been sold gimmicks in the name of learning and school-age children whose minds are habituated to the easy pleasures of viewing may well find the culture of the school an alien one. Their brains, shaped by visual novelty, may gradually lose the ability to bend themselves intelligently around the written word.

Who, then, will teach the next generation to read?

[admin]

PART 1 OF 2

CHAPTER 12: "Disadvantaged" Brains

Plasticity represents a double-edged sword: Processes available to be changed for the better may also be changed for the worse. -- RICHARD M. LERNER, PH.D. [1]

In the flossiest enclaves of New York's Upper East Side, an unusual child-care center serves the diverse needs of preschool children from two dramatically different constituencies. First to arrive each morning, the "neighborhood" children emerge from the sumptuous lobbies of their apartment buildings, accompanied by nannies or smartly clad parents. Chattering busily, they set about the activities of the morning as they await the arrival of their classmates, who come by bus from a welfare hotel. These youngsters started the morning in cramped rooms, usually without kitchen facilities, where as many as four children and a mother share two bunk beds. More silently, sometimes somberly, they enter the classrooms and begin the school day.

Lourdes Rivera, the energetic director of this venture in humanity, is a veteran teacher of children from severely deprived environments, but this is her first experience with such widely disparate groups. Like many visitors, I wondered how these children from opposite ends of the socioeconomic yardstick relate to each other.

"Kids are kids," stated Ms. Rivera emphatically. "They all learn from and help each other." To adults on the staff, however, the special needs of the homeless children are all too evident. Many come from brutalizing environments where even their most basic safety needs are in jeopardy. The simple learning experiences taken for granted in most families have not been available. For example, the children may never have eaten a meal at a table or helped (or even seen) anyone cook on a real stove. Because of their dangerous surroundings, both indoors and out, some have not been allowed to move freely about, so their motor development is often behind schedule. Some of the most serious gaps are in language and attention.

What is the prognosis for these youngsters, arguably the most disadvantaged group in our society? Can an enriched and caring environment make up for the appalling experiential abyss of their daily lives? "If we get them early enough," says Ms. Rivera, "I think we can make a big difference." Noticeable improvement usually begins as soon as they enter the preschool, she says.

"We've saved a lot of lives. I think of Matthew, a homeless child I worked with a couple of years ago. He was one who came from a loving family, but they had so many problems -- both parents were in treatment for drug addiction. Matthew made fantastic gains when he was with us -- he is in kindergarten now and I just heard he's being tested for the gifted program. We got him early, and his parents tried their best to help. When kids are older, though, or when the environment at home is too awful, it is so much harder."

The most difficult children to reach, she said, are those who have been physically abused or suffered severe emotional neglect from the adults in their lives. "Even when their mouths smile, their eyes don't," she reflected sadly.

Research on the long-term effects of early intervention programs confirm Ms. Rivera's observations. Although, as one researcher remarked, even the most enriched surroundings will not make every child into a Nobel Prize winner, environments can determine how well each one's inherited pattern of abilities is actualized. And while cognitive "stimulation" is important, so is the presence of caring adults in a child's life. Any teacher knows how important emotional as well as material support is for all children, and in this respect, at least, "disadvantage" does not always rest on economics. Even ostensibly "privileged" children may suffer in much more subtle, but still significant, ways if their emotional needs are neglected or if parental expectations are too demanding. Ms. Rivera reflected ruefully on one such case.

"We have a little boy here whose parents are very wealthy, but you might also call him 'disadvantaged' in a sense," she mused. "Paul has been in day care since birth; he's two and a half now and he's here from eight A.M. until six P.M. Then his parents hire our staff members to take him home and stay with him until they get home, which might be anywhere from seven until eleven that night. Unfortunately, it has to be a different person each day. He's a wonderful little boy, hut he's just so weary and tired most of the time. Naturally, his parents have big expectations for him. He's still vastly better off than these homeless kids, of course, but . . ."

As we walked through the classrooms, I was impressed by the cheerful environment as well as the obvious attention by staff members and volunteers to the children's needs. Although some children required special help or comforting from adults, most were playing, learning, and interacting happily. To a practiced observer there were major variations in the maturation of language skills, but it was not always obvious to a casual eye which children were the "privileged" ones and which were the homeless.

As we entered the last classroom, I saw a small, sad-eyed child sitting alone, listlessly resting his head on the table in front of him. Stifling the urge to sit down and take him onto my lap, I whispered to Ms. Rivera, "One of the homeless?"

"No," she replied, "that's Paul."

DIMENSIONS OF DISADVANTAGE

Children are "disadvantaged" to the degree they do not receive adequate physical, social-emotional, or intellectual nurturing. Longstanding deprivation in any of these domains puts children at risk; when factors overlap and accumulate, learning, lives, and society are proportionately endangered.

In the United States the most seriously and dangerously disadvantaged are the children of poverty, a problem swept under the rug for so long that it has become a sizable lump that now threatens to trip up the progress of the body politic. A disgraceful number of American infants arrive each year into worlds of hunger, drug abuse, and neglect. Many are born to young teenagers whose own brains lack both a history of adequate nurturance and the final strokes of nature's maturational brush. These parents are ill equipped to provide for even their children's most basic physical needs, much less their intellects. This growing subculture of deprivation represents a growing threat to our institutions of education and inevitably, of law, despite demonstrated results from programs showing that it may be possible to repair and restructure, at least to some degree, both lives and intellects.

The physical, emotional, and cognitive events that transpire during the early years of a brain's development have a lifelong impact, not only on that brain itself but also on the society in which it will inevitably make its mark -- for better or for worse. Children from economically disadvantaged families often come to school with brains poorly equipped for success there. The same is increasingly true for some of their more privileged counterparts. Let's examine the reasons why.

The Physically Deprived Brain

Many economically disadvantaged children start out with brains already compromised. Poor nutrition, substance abuse, or excessive stress for the pregnant mother can jeopardize its structural integrity. Pregnant women in lower class urban neighborhoods are more likely to be exposed to lead from car exhaust and to other pollutants that may harm the brain. Prematurity, often found in conjunction with poor health-care, can also put children at risk for learning disorders. Every year more and more preterm babies are being saved through technological advances, but without the enriched environments more common to middle class homes, these children are educationally at risk. Middle class preemies are more likely to recover or show milder forms of learning or attention disabilities. The prognosis depends on the severity of the initial problem and the infant's innate resilience, but also on the quality of the early learning environment.

For the children of poverty, nutrition may be inadequate, lead poisoning still a threat, and crowded quarters disruptive of free play, development of motor skills, and sleep patterns. Many poor children spend a great deal of time in front of a television set, which, unfortunately, does little to remedy perceptual, motor, cognitive, or interpersonal delays. They are much more likely to be targets of abuse and physical neglect. Most children living in poverty are never enrolled in any type of preschool; a large majority of the 253,000 children estimated to be homeless at this writing never attend school regularly. [2] Many more not classified as homeless suffer similar conditions.

Severe malnutrition takes a lasting toll on mental ability. The best-known study showing its long-term effects was conducted with a group of Korean children who grew up in conditions of extreme poverty, including malnutrition to the age of eighteen months, when they were adopted into American middle class homes. Although they rapidly regained much of the lost ground, the ill effects of the early experience on learning skills were never totally reversed. [3] No one has measured the effects of more subtle forms of dietary restriction, but there is good reason to suspect that it, too, can have lasting consequences for the brain, particularly if protein is inadequate.

No matter what its initial potential, a brain malnourished, assailed by toxic environments, or poorly nurtured has little chance of realizing its biological promise. Because risk factors are so interactive, youngsters higher up on the stack of environmental privilege are much better "buffered," but deprivation in one or more of the basic areas of need can have serious results for any child.

The Emotionally Deprived Brain

Children who do not receive interpersonal and emotional support during early years are harmed in less obvious but still devastating ways, although specific effects on the brain have not been well documented. Teachers are all too acutely aware that a mind preoccupied with worries or unmet emotional needs is a poor candidate for academic learning. The emotional centers of the brain (technically part of the limbic system, which underlies the cortex), are closely linked to more primitive systems whose job it is to "gate" the messages that pass into -- or are kept out of -- the thinking brain. If the "emotional" brain is preoccupied with fears or anxiety, it may fail to activate the proper cortical switches for attention, memory, motivation, and learning. High levels of stress can also change the fine chemical balance that enables messages to pass through all these systems; although the "good stress," generated by exciting and manageable challenges, may enhance learning, a child who is emotionally stressed may literally have trouble getting the brain's juices flowing for academics.

THE "ADVANTAGED" DEPRIVED BRAIN

Paradoxically, the same lack of respect for children's needs that causes the lump under the rug of poverty also threatens mental development at the other end of the socioeconomic continuum. Even materially "privileged" youngsters are put at emotional and intellectual risk when they become victims of a caretaker shuffle that exposes them to emotional neglect, inferior day care, or inadequate surrogate parenting. Habits of learning can also be compromised by inexperienced caretakers who overprotect their charges. Such oversolicitous attention may stem either from fear that children might get hurt or that they might complain to their parents if they don't get their own way. It can foster both "learned helplessness" and habits of manipulating adults.

Victims of the Caretaker Shuffle

Many parents find the growing shortage of well-trained caregivers a source of frustration and anguish. Most parents naturally love their children and care deeply about their development. At the same time, with the majority of children in some sort of child care because either a single parent or both parents are working, adults who do not share their educational experience, conversational ability, cultural background, or academic values are being hired to mold the offsprings' brains. As a result, concerned observers report, the insidious tendrils of disadvantage are quietly inserting themselves across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Dr. Fred Hechinger, education editor of the New York Times, spoke at a recent meeting for teachers and administrators of the country's private schools to warn that their constituency is being profoundly influenced by changes in child-rearing habits among the middle and upper-middle class. The problems of children in poor and affluent families are becoming more and more similar, he explained, because the same people are taking care of the children. [4] No matter how loving or well-intentioned they may be, the environments they create for development of language and thought are quite often inconsonant with the parents' and the schools' expectations for the child.

Andree Brooks, author of Children of Fast-Track Parents and an outspoken critic of current trends in child rearing, warns of the potentially disastrous effects of a lack of nurturing by well-to-do parents who depend on an ever-changing stream of caregivers. A host of developmental problems, including "stunted language ability," may ensue, she maintains. [5, 6]

"I hear this all over the country, and I'm hearing it more and more," she told me. "There's an increasing concern from the teachers of young children of the upper-middle class, which has traditionally been such a source of enormous educational and cultural enrichment, that the children are coming in without the same exposure. They're taking on some of the aspects of the disadvantaged. Upper-middle-class women are going back to work even sooner after their children are born than disadvantaged women, and all the traditional interactions we have assumed between them and their children are missing."

The practice of hiring surrogate caretakers is spreading, Ms. Brooks adds, as well-to-do nonworking mothers hire live-ins in order to keep up with the Joneses. And the mores of this fast track are now being copied by the less affluent. In countries abroad, she says, the same concerns are also beginning to surface.

"Do you think we have lost respect for children and their needs?" I asked.

"Absolutely," replied Ms. Brooks. "The child has been devalued." [7]

Reveta Bowers, director of a large early-childhood program in Los Angeles, has similar concerns that extend beyond the children of the wealthy. "You'd be surprised how many children are being raised by surrogates who don't speak English, and the parents don't care because they think the child will be bilingual," she says. But this rationalization, she points out, may put some children at risk for learning problems.

Insufficient research is available to quantify the effects of bilingual environments, but those that are inferior or not "natural" to the family itself may slow down overall language development and exacerbate potential learning problems. The quality of the language input, whatever it is, often varies according to the educational background of the speaker. While proficiency in more than one language is obviously an advantage, a child -- particularly one who is not linguistically talented by nature -- needs to interact with adequate syntax in at least one language to wire up the basis for development of the others.

Still, because of insufficient numbers of well-trained child-care providers, families at all socioeconomic levels feel pressed to compromise when they hire a caregiver. "It's a gamble," says Professor Edward Zigler of Yale University, a leading expert on early development. "If you get a wonderful one, it's like having a new valued family member. If you get an awful one, you and your child are in trouble." Zigler is acutely aware that even families who can afford good care for their children have great difficulty finding it. "Up and down the economic ladder, children are receiving care that may be compromising their optimal development." [8]

It is an unfortunate reality that the low pay scale for day-care workers has similarly tended to downgrade the level of skills in these facilities. Not many are lucky enough to have the able and dedicated corps of teachers and volunteers found in Ms. Rivera's center. Yet large numbers of children are in their care during the time when these developing brains are crafting the mental skills of a lifetime.

Children as Artifacts of Ambition

Parents who care about their children's success are vulnerable to false information about the best ways to get their children onto the academic fast track. A zeitgeist, fostered by dubious "experts" and seized upon by well-intentioned or guilty parents, now advocates an all-out campaign to "stimulate" mental ability. Parents, beware! Trying to force learning that may be all wrong for the child's level of development is dangerous, as are the inappropriate demands for performance -- no matter how subtle -- that usually accompany this kind of pressure. Even in the wealthiest of homes, a child who becomes an artifact of parental ego is at risk in a very real sense.

"Superbabies" of all ages are driven (quite literally, to an unremitting schedule of lessons, as well as more figuratively) to perform. These child "products" appear to be the polar opposite of the physically and intellectually neglected children of disadvantage, yet they, too, are deprived of important basic rights. I hear many tales like that of a young suburban mother who told me, "You would not believe the mothers in my neighborhood; they have flash cards for their kids before they're two and the children are in so many lessons and programs that they hardly have time to play! My neighbor insists her three-year-old sing the alphabet song; the other day the child was pleading, 'Please, Mommy, please, no more alphabet,' but the mother kept saying, 'Just one more time, sweetheart. Do it for Mommy.'"

Driving the cold spikes of inappropriate pressure into the malleable heart of a child's learning may seriously distort the unfolding of both intellect and motivation. This self-serving intellectual assault, increasingly condemned by teachers who see its warped products, reflects a more general ignorance of the essential needs of the growing brain. In a society that reveres the speed with which a product can be extruded from the system, that has become impatient with the essential processes of childhood, that measures children's mental growth like steaks on a butcher's scales, and that deifies test scores instead of taking the time to respect developmental needs, every child is potentially in jeopardy.

Wise adults do not impose demands for which development and experience have not yet primed the system. They take the time to listen to the child, to observe and enrich the environment accordingly. If they are too busy, lack the coping skills, or neglect their responsibility, the chances at each stage of development may be lost or diminished.

If a brain is jeopardized, what are the chances for "synaptic remodeling"? No one has yet been able to measure the long-term toll of too much pressure. Improved environments can make up to some degree for some experiential physical deprivation if it is "caught" early enough. The brutal truth, however, is that more acute forms of disadvantage leave indelible imprints. Their most serious consequences are probably for higher cognitive functions such as language and abstract reasoning. Emotional deprivation and stress take their toll in less measurable ways.

Research does not suggest bombarding children with high-powered brain-training or forcing overwhelming doses of "stimulation" on unready nervous systems. Prying open preschool minds and pouring in ersatz precocity is not the answer; realistically assessing -- and then addressing -- children's real intellectual needs is the way to improve their chances.

SOCIAL CLASS AND MENTAL DEVELOPMENT: THE PROBLEM NOBODY WANTS TO TALK ABOUT

It is an uneasy but incontrovertible fact that, on average, individuals from different social classes have widely different success in school. A close look suggests that learning patterns and brain organization may be shaped by certain types of environments in ways that make children's adjustment to academic learning more difficult.

Yet despite research that might help teachers understand and teach high-risk children more successfully, the issue of social class is one that many people prefer not to discuss. In an address to members of the American Psychological Association on the subject of "Race, Culture, Class, and Ethnicity," Dr. Richard Brislin pointed out that it has become easier and even more acceptable to talk about racial differences than about social class differences in America. The two should definitely not be confused. [9]

Race is determined by a person's genes. There is no convincing evidence of any genetic differences between races in learning potential. According to Dr. Brislin and other scholars, however, because people of the same race and ethnic background tend to grow up in communities where social class, cultural habits, and practices are similar, important differences caused by these variables may seem to be racial in origin.

"In classrooms, as in American life generally, ethnicity is confounded with social class," explains Harvard's Dr. Courtney Cazden. In her useful book, Classroom Discourse, she makes a realistic case for better education of teachers in understanding, accepting, and teaching children of different social classes, as well as those of differing cultural backgrounds. [10]

"Social class" or socioeconomic status (SES) is defined in research by several factors, primarily family income, parents' level of education, and occupations. The terms "lower class" or "underclass" are used by social scientists as an objective descriptor that includes both working class poor and the chronically unemployed. These terms sound blunt, but they are not meant to label individuals in a pejorative way, merely to describe a particular socioeconomic group. Any set of statistical generalizations about group differences has many exceptions; the main danger in reporting on this sort of research is in creating new stereotypes and unfair prejudices. But it is equally unfair to ignore data that may help us understand why some children have difficulty adjusting to school.

Members of different socioeconomic as well as different cultural groups tend to have differing values regarding children's learning and behavior. Overall, they rear children in different ways, have different ideas of what is important for learning, and may encourage different "habits of mind." Thus it is not surprising that children from these different types of environments arrive in school differently adapted to learning. It is unfortunate, in a country that claims to take pride in its heterogeneity, that educators have too often tried to cram all children into an unyielding curricular format. All children need a chance to participate equally in academic success, but unless policymakers start paying attention to the realities, they risk destroying both our children and our intellectual standards.

Separating Class Differences From Racial Differences

A growing number of studies confirm that irrespective of race, people develop different patterns of learning skills according to the social class in which they are reared. [11] Concerned researchers also point out that too many studies have tended to draw conclusions about blacks in general after studying only underclass black children. "In studies of black and white children and children from other ethnic groups, it' s rare to find any race differences when class differences are carefully looked at," points out Dr. Brislin.

Dr. Sandra Graham of the Graduate School of Education at UCLA, one of a few scientists looking specifically at both racial and social-class differences, studied levels of school motivation among lower and middle class black and white seventh-grade students. She found significant differences between students from the different socioeconomic groups; the only racial differences were that the middle class black children displayed the highest persistence, more positive levels of self perception, and greater sustained achievement strivings. [12]

Teachers like myself, who have taught academically brilliant as well as not-so-brilliant students from various racial, cultural, and socioeconomic groups, realize how foolish it is to categorize youngsters intellectually on any basis. Still, in the classroom it also becomes clear that all students have tucked a myriad of formative learning experiences into their brains long before they started tucking notes and assignment sheets into their bookbags. The research shows, although there are always many exceptions, the most predictable variations in school success in most countries are found among families of different social classes.

Different SES, Different Learning

Children from families of different social classes may be prepared for and supported in learning differently. Even when not physically or emotionally disadvantaged, some children receive different types of cognitive and language stimulation because parents' level of education, perceptions of children's needs, and style of approaching problems may diverge from the "middle class norm." According to Dr. Brislin, middle and upper class families tend to emphasize verbal development, self-control, intellectual curiosity, and social skills, whereas values for many working class children are more likely to stress obedience, neatness, good manners, and quietness around adults. While this focus may have been more appropriate in an economy with a large number of factory jobs, it is maladaptive for the type of work increasingly available as a part of information technology. Moreover, because lower class children may not be as assertive around adult authority figures, teachers may expect less of them.

Social class is such a powerful predictor of "mainstream" test results that it can even override early risk factors. In one representative study, a group of researchers in Zurich, Switzerland, compared the long-term development of premature infants from higher- and lower-class families. These children were considered at high risk for language problems, learning disabilities, and "lower mental functioning" because of complications surrounding pregnancy and birth. Their course of development was also compared with that of a group of healthy full-term babies matched with the preemies according to social class. All the children in the study were carefully observed and tested for language development and intelligence at frequent intervals until they were five years old. As is almost invariably the case, socioeconomic status (SES) was highly correlated with tested ability in the normal, full-term children from the beginning of their lives. The at-risk children, however, all started out with below-average scores. Yet by age five the power of the environment over the biological problems had been demonstrated. The middle class high-risk group had narrowed the gap, while the lower SES children had not. [13]

Studies from all over the world demonstrate that children from higher SES groups have better language development and more mature cognitive skills. [14] Nevertheless, higher socioeconomic level alone does not offer a fail-safe guarantee of good progress, nor, certainly, are children raised in so-called "underclass" homes automatically destined to have difficulty in school. U.S. Education Department researcher Martin Orland, although acknowledging the high statistical correlations between poor academic achievement and "intense" poverty factors, points out that, even in poor homes, parents' attitudes have the most dominant influence. He claims that measures of "home atmosphere," such as parent's aspirations for children, language stimulation, the amount of reading materials in the home, and family attitudes toward education, actually explain more of the variation in student achievement than parental income levels or other traditional socioeconomic measures. [15]

Families whose poverty has been long-standing and severe are much less likely to be able to provide a supportive home atmosphere, but some succeed despite the odds. It is clearly absurd to make assumptions about home quality only on the basis of an economic yardstick, and Dr. Brislin warns against letting class distinctions become a new source of discrimination. These differences should only be a "reminder variable," he points out, to lead us to more constructive opportunities for intervention.

In a large, longitudinal study conducted in England, researcher Gordon Wells was surprised when the expected correlation between class and educational attainment at age seven did not emerge. Carefully analyzing his results, Wells, too, developed "grave reservations" about any simple statements regarding this connection. Noting the close link between language development and school success, he concluded that certain 'kinds' of interaction with adults, particularly a child's conversational experience, are mainly responsible for the difference. [16]

What Is the Problem?

Why, specifically, do so many "learning disadvantaged" [17] children have difficulty adapting to the demands of traditional schooling? Many become school dropouts during the first week of first grade -- although they usually continue to occupy a desk (and a great deal of the teacher's physical and mental energy) for several more alienating and unproductive years. In the meanwhile, the growing dichotomy between their level of skills and the demands of the school interfere with the entire mechanism of teaching and learning, and their poorly suppressed rage may erupt in externally or personally destructive forms. Unsuccessful, "turned-off" children exist in every school, but they are endemic in areas housing the poor of our society, where over half of the five-year-olds who surge into the kindergarten each year may be doomed to failure.

These statistics are particularly tragic because poor parents often "have an especially high -- even passionate regard for education and view it as the most promising means to improve their children's futures," asserts Lisbeth B. Schorr in her landmark book Within Our Reach. [18] They need help, however, in translating their yearning for their children's achievement into useful action.

PREPARING GROWING BRAINS FOR THE "CULTURE OF THE SCHOOL"

No one knows exactly what proportion of the ultimate differences between mental abilities come from differences in types of environmental input during the years when the brain is being encouraged -- or not encouraged -- to practice and master different types of skills. It is clear, however, that the closer the culture of the home (or the primary care center) is to that of the school, the easier the child's adjustment is likely to be.

Schooling, particularly beyond the elementary years, demands specific types of skills and even particular ways of looking at the world and of reasoning. [19] Such "scholastic thinking" involves analyzing experience, reasoning reflectively, using formal logic, and assimilating, storing, and recalling information. Because language development is so closely tied to these mental skills and to brain development as well, it assumes an especially pivotal role in preparing children for learning.

Many "learning disadvantaged" children are handicapped by lack of exposure to school-like ways of talking and thinking. Academically advantaged brains, in contrast, are well-girded for school learning because adults have provided models and given them time and encouragement to practice these basic ways of dealing with information.

Adult Models of Problem-Solving

The most frequently mentioned factors in the development of intelligence might include parental encouragement for achievement, exposure to intellectual models, and encouragement to rely on language. They are, in short, aspects of the upper-middle-class environment. -- Dr. Robert B. McCall [20]

Psychologists have spent a great deal of time studying the ways in which schooled and unschooled people typically go about solving problems and how they model these mental habits for their children. Homes influence several important dimensions of this "cognitive style":

1. Ways of Categorizing

Studies across many different cultures show that people who have been to school tend to group objects and ideas together in more abstract ways than do young children or unschooled adults, who tend to relate ideas on the basis of their physical attributes or use. For example, if asked whether an apple matches best with a pear, a red ball, or a knife, most schooled people, who tend to think more categorically, will respond "pear" because it is a member of the category "fruit." Unschooled individuals, and young children may choose the ball "because they look alike" or the knife "because it is used to cut the apple." Although there is really no right or wrong answer here, schools tend to expect children to have the ability to deal with categorical modes of thought. A child who has not been exposed to them at home ("Johnny, let's put all the vegetables in this cupboard, and all the fruits in that one") may have difficulty understanding this type of reasoning.

2. Internalizing Understanding

"Many at-risk students have not internalized a cultural sense of what understanding is, probably because parents and teachers seldom hold 'understanding conversations' with them," suggests Dr. Stanley Pogrow, who has worked on ways to teach "thinking skills" to disadvantaged elementary school students. [21] Having "understanding conversations" means trying to get a child to reason through, evaluate, and express ideas ("How many different ways could this story end? Let's predict which one the author will choose ... "). Dr. Pogrow says many of his students come to school not knowing how to use ideas to understand, generalize, or even talk about anything but "turfdom," because they have never been exposed to other types of thinking. Incidentally, he notes, "this problem is not limited to students from low SES homes."

Parents and teachers who try to force high-level material on brains that have not been primed to accommodate it should be warned by Dr. Pogrow's finding that it is much better to converse intelligently about simple subjects than to have simple conversations about overly sophisticated content. "For example," he says, "teaching students Shakespeare will not develop general thinking skills if relatively few understanding conversations take place." Unfortunately, many of the "competency-based" teaching agendas that have been cantilevered into classrooms for disadvantaged children have fallen into this latter trap. Well-intentioned, they are essentially flawed by attempting to pour in information and drill children to repeat it at a superficial level rather than taking the time to give understanding -- and synapses -- a solid foundation.

It is possible to get almost any child deeply and constructively involved with important material, but the teacher must have the sensitivity -- and above all, the time -- to engage the students in activities or a dialogue that is meaningful to them. Dr. Robert Coles tells in his book The Call of Stories of his delight in "culturally disadvantaged" youngsters who "take to" a novel such as Silas Marner, often regarded as old-fashioned and boring. The reason? A skilled teacher spent time leading them into personally meaningful discussions of moral and spiritual issues in the novel that reflected many of their own life concerns. [22] Unfortunately, "competency," as it has too often been defined, has no time or space for this type of intellectual inquiry.

3. Reflectivity or Impulsivity

Unsuccessful students often tend to act without thinking. Research shows that impulsive youngsters fail to talk through problems in their own heads; they jump in without analyzing or planning the appropriate response. In research on problem-solving, students who use such an impulsive approach are seen as "weak reasoners" because they fail to apply what they already know to the new situation. [23] "Strong reasoners," on the other hand, are able to use previous examples to help reach conclusions.

The impulsive style (which overlaps with the problem now diagnosed as "attention deficit disorder") gets people into trouble outside of school, as well. There is a well-recognized link between this type of behavior, delinquency, and adult criminality.

Children who do not stop, reflect, and talk through situations often come from homes where adults never showed them how, irrespective of their economic advantages. I sometimes notice parents or caregivers who model widely different styles with children in public places such as the supermarket. Some are busy teaching the child to talk through alternatives ("No, we won't buy two boxes of cereal today because it will get stale before we eat it all. Tell me if you want Goops or Nuggets."). Others give in to the child's impulsive demands. Still others try to control behavior physically, with a minimum of conversation. They may even slap or jerk the child around as he reaches for desired treats. These parents undoubtedly are managing the situation in ways they think appropriate, and of course, we all tend to recreate the ways in which we ourselves were handled. The child who is being taught to stop and reflect is the one more likely to succeed in the culture of the school and perhaps, beyond it as well.

"Reflective" approaches are a useful adjunct to inspiration in nonverbal problem-solving such as in art work, geometry, or higher mathematical reasoning. One of the tests used to measure whether someone responds reflectively or impulsively requires picking the exact match for a drawing of a common object, such as a house, from several very close and confusing alternatives. To be scored "reflective," a child needs to take the time to compare carefully, analyze details, and weigh alternatives. Even in this visual task, however, many reflective children talk and analyze their way through the problem ("I think I'll start with the first one. Let's see, the chimney is different. Now, how about the second?" etc.).

An interesting cross-cultural study not long ago showed that American and Chinese-American children of comparable SES were similar in the way they developed the ability to solve the problems on this test. A comparable group of Japanese children, however, became more accurate much earlier in life in finding the matching picture. They outscored the American and Chinese youngsters, speculated the researchers, not because they were smarter, but because they were better able to manage their own patterns of thinking and responding. [24] These researchers did not hazard any guesses as to where they learned this mental control.

4. Scaffolding for Learning to Remember

Another major way in which parents who have been successful in school tend to differ from those with less schooling is in showing children ways to remember things. As they use and talk about their own memory strategies, their child becomes aware that remembering something doesn't just happen automatically but is something over which he or she has some control.

"I have five things I must buy at the hardware store this morning; let's see, I need two tools -- a hammer and a big screwdriver -- and three kinds of Wire -- thin, medium, and thick (categorizing). I'll remember H,S,W,W,W (forming active memory strategies)."

Or, "I think I'd better make a list so I won't forget." (Shows importance of writing and reading as well as planning ahead.)

5. Analytical vs. Relational Styles of Thinking

Traditional schooling also tends to teach people to approach problems analytically. This way of thinking calls on abstract logic rather than firsthand experience. For example, one of the cognitive skills learned in the culture of the school is to reason with syllogisms.

All of the women from Mexico City are beautiful.

I have a woman friend from Mexico City.

Is my friend beautiful? [25]

To most schooled people, the answer to this problem seems obvious, but adolescents and adults who have had little or no exposure to the institutions of formal schooling do not find it obvious at all. They tend to answer the question more pragmatically, on the basis of women they know personally ("My friend from Mexico City is very kind, but she is not beautiful"). The way questions like this are answered in different cultures are related to years of schooling, not to basic intelligence, conclude the researchers.

Parents Show Children How to Think

These are just a few of the many ways in which parents and caregivers directly influence the ways in which children learn to think. Does this mean that conscientious parents need to sit down and plan a course in problem-solving for their children? Or perhaps, if they are too busy to take the responsibility, sign them up for lessons? The fact is that these ways of thinking are learned and internalized because they are conveyed through everyday, emotionally cushioned and meaningful experiences with a close, respected adult.

Mealtime conversations, for example, have always been prime time for communication, not only for ways of thinking but also of values about what it is important to think about. Even such subtle attitudes as whether children are expected to ask questions of adults or whether people talk about ideas as well as about what they bought at the mall can make a big difference in the way children approach school activities. These days, though, thoughtful family dinner-table conversations are on their way to joining the dinosaur category even in many middle and upper middle class homes.

Other adult-child activities -- cooking, relaxing, playing games, doing errands, working with tools, cleaning the house, visiting a parent's office, or pursuing real-life projects together -- are also natural means through which these mental habits are learned. One of the reasons that school success, in all walks of life, is inversely related to the amount of time spent watching television may be that minimal TV viewing forces grown-ups and children to tune into each other's thoughts and activities. Children in severely disadvantaged homes, on the contrary, tend to watch more television; as we have seen, it offers precious little scaffolding for academic habits of mind.

Disadvantages in models of thinking are obviously not restricted to the children of the poor. Since I know this book is most likely to be read by parents of the middle or upper middle class, I would like to stretch this point with one personal experience.

This year I spent a lovely fall afternoon with some friends who live in a modest house in a rural area that has recently become the setting for a number of large, expensive new homes. The husband, a math teacher, had confided to me that he was beginning to feel self-conscious because he suddenly realized, observing his new neighbors, that he couldn't afford to give his son many of the advantages of their children. He admitted to particularly uneasy feelings when he watched his son's new friends being trundled off to their expensive schools, camps, computer and music lessons, etc.

On the day I visited, this dad and his son were heavily engaged in a tactical war with the family dog, an accomplished escape artist who had systematically broken out of every pen ever constructed for her. Armed with tool kit, boards, and wire mesh, they spent the entire afternoon contriving an escape-proof enclosure. As his wife and I sat in the yard, enjoying the autumn sun, I observed them reasoning together. "But Dad, if we ... she might" "What do you think will happen if ... ?" "Why don't we try because ... "

As an unregenerate speculator about growing brains, I found myself having visions of pathways being forged between the hemispheres as parent and child talked about and physically manipulated the three-dimensional problem at hand. Their efforts inevitably linked verbal and visual-spatial systems in the way the brain learns best -- with a firsthand problem. When one solution didn't work, the son got frustrated and wanted to give up, but his father patiently suggested they try yet another approach, while I fancied prefrontal neurons joyously reaching out to each other to strengthen systems for planning, attention, and problem-solving.

Meanwhile, on the large grounds next door, another youngster of about the same age amused himself for the entire afternoon zooming at top speed -- and top volume -- around house, stable, and swimming pool on a four-wheeled motorized vehicle that he propelled by pushing a pedal.
"Yeah," said my friend's son with just a trace of envy in his voice. "He rides it all year-round. His mom's usually at a meeting or something, but sometimes his dad takes him out to play golf with him on the weekends. Their maid doesn't speak much English, so she never even makes him do his homework."

"It's really a shame," my friend remarked. "His parents are so worried about that child. He's quite intelligent but they found out he has a learning disability. They have to send him to a special school because he got such poor grades and couldn't concentrate long enough to do his assignments."

"Learning disadvantaged" children are found everywhere.

[admin]

PART 2 OF 2 (CHAP. 12 CONT'D)

SOCIAL CLASS, LANGUAGE, AND LITERACY

There is no solid evidence that the poor lack stimulation, except in the domain of language. It is accepted that the very poor everywhere use concrete, reduced vocabulary which takes away from communication the rich conceptual sharing that is taken for granted in the middle classes. -- Professor Gonzalo Alvarez, Santiago, Chile [26]

Sociolinguists tell us that the more stratified a society, the more variations there are in language, [27] and this variable alone seems to account for many of the social-class differences in academic achievement. Homes that offer substandard or unstimulating conditions for children's cognitive development tend to produce youngsters with language delays that ultimately translate into lower IQ and achievement scores. [28, 29] Two aspects of the way children are exposed to language appear to be particularly important: ways in which they are talked to, and their contact with reading and written language.

Ways of Talking to Children

The types of questions the child learns to ask and answer are particularly important. Children trained mainly to be quiet, polite, and obedient have trouble at school when they need to talk in front of a group or speak up to ask an adult a question. The teacher may not understand that this behavior is considered "good" at home.

Children also have trouble in school if they are unaccustomed to answering questions asked by an adult, particularly ones to which they realize the adult (teacher) already knows the answer! [30] Parents who have not themselves absorbed school-type talk tend to ask questions only when they really want information from the child ("What do you want for breakfast?"). Middle class parents are more likely to ask teacherlike questions, such as, "What is the girl in the picture doing?" (The most intelligent answer, actually, might be, "Why ask me? Can't you see for yourself?" But a polite child will only sit quietly and wonder how someone who asks such dumb questions could have become a teacher.) Eventually, experiential gaps in answering the "wh questions" (who, what, when, where, why -- and how) translate into difficulty with analytic thinking.

Basic language skills alone do not assure school success. Later-developing. abilities, such as understanding more complex sentence patterns, being able to "hold the floor," and possessing a more extensive vocabulary, gain increasing importance as students get older. Teachers may inadvertently use these criteria to judge students' abilities and may place lower-class students with more interactive, informal styles in lower "tracks." [31, 32]

Dr. Jerome Bruner reminds us that language is also a major means by which a learner can "objectify" and get control of learning -- instead of having the learning process in control. [33] When I visit a classroom where the children are reciting from memory and clearly do not understand (which, tragically, seems to be a situation foisted more frequently onto poor than privileged children), I am not surprised to hear they have "no initiative" for learning. If someone would take the time to make the learning, whatever it is, meaningful by coaching them in ways to talk about it, the turned-off faces might light up. The type of coaching provided by home environments in uses of printed as well as spoken language may differ according to socio-economic level. In an important recent study Dr. Shirley Brice Heath of Stanford University reported on her experiences observing both kinds of "literacy events" in homes of three different SES groups in a North Carolina town. She discovered that the two "non-mainstream" working class groups differed significantly from the "mainstream" homes, not only in the availability of books, magazines, and newspapers, but also the way they prepared their children for the type of thinking required in school. In one non-mainstream group, which Heath called ''Trackton,'' parents demonstrated a great deal of love for their children, but their own lives contained few occasions for reading and writing. Books, magazines, or newspapers were not generally in evidence, and no priority was placed on story-reading. According to Dr. Heath, children's efforts to talk were generally ignored, and they got attention from adults by nonverbal behaviors such as bouncing up and down or tugging on a sleeve.

In contrast, the mainstream parents tended to reward children's verbal expression and "provide a running verbal commentary" on what they themselves were doing. They read often to their children, and showed them the uses of writing. For example, they followed written recipes, made lists, and wrote notes about chores to family members. Their children came to school ready to use and respond to traditional classroom language, materials, and expectations; when children from ''Trackton'' arrived in school, they entered an alien culture. Not surprisingly, they tended to do poorly from the outset and had often "given up" by sixth grade.

The second "non-mainstream" working-class community, dubbed "Roadville" by Dr. Heath, represents an interesting contrast to both other groups. These parents were overtly interested in education and tended to expose their children to alphabet books and other purchased "educational" materials such as workbooks. Yet, although the children mastered the "basics" in early grades, they tended to fall behind when deeper understanding of the material became necessary in later elementary years. The reason? Dr. Heath suggests that these well-intentioned homes had failed to show their children how to think. Unlike the parents from the higher SES group, they did not use questions to help children's reasoning develop. Their questions to their children tended to be more "directive or scolding in nature," and considerable emphasis was placed on getting the right answer. ''Talk'' as a means of solving problems had little priority; parents were much more likely to show, rather than tell, children how to do something. Reason-explanations such as, "If you twist the cutter, the cookies will be rough on the edge," were rarely given. Heath suggests that these "Roadville" children "do not know how to ask teachers to help them take apart the questions to figure out the answers." [34]

Although Heath's findings should not be over-generalized beyond these two communities, they do reinforce the point that even the most loving and well-intentioned caregivers can mold children's patterns of talking and thinking so as to put them at risk in "mainstream" classrooms. Educators have long been aware that environments which do not expose children to models of literacy impair their chances in school; we now realize that merely giving children books and pencils is not enough. Too many parents mistakenly believe that the purpose of reading to their children is to "teach" them to read rather than what it really is -- showing them how to love and use the language and stories in books. Likewise, making preschoolers sit down and practice copying letters and words is poor preparation for higher-level thinking.

Parents don't need to -- in fact, shouldn't -- turn reading sessions into drills, emphasizes a researcher in the United States who discovered significant differences among middle class families in the effectiveness of their children's story times. In one of his studies, half of the parents were shown how to intersperse their reading with open-ended questions (e.g., "There's Eeyore. What's happening to him?") and to help the child elaborate on responses, while the other half were told just to read in their usual way. Later testing showed that children from the first group scored higher on both vocabulary and ability to express ideas, traditionally good predictors of later school abilities. [35]

DIFFERENT SES, DIFFERENT BRAINS?

How do these different cognitive and language backgrounds affect neural development? When considering this question, we should bear in mind that structural or functional variations that cause children to use different "learning strategies" do not necessarily imply lower overall intelligence. Brains less well adapted for certain types of verbal learning may still have many talents: creative, practical, or otherwise valuable.

There are several ways, both overt and subtle, in which the environmental differences found between different socioeconomic groups might be linked to brain differences. Dr. Gonzalo Alvarez, a neurologist on the medical faculty at the University of Chile in Santiago, who has studied the effects of severe physical deprivation on brain function in developing countries, is convinced that different patterns of child rearing also make their marks on the developing cortex.

Certain stages of cognitive development (i.e., the ability to understand the relationships of physical objects) are hard to change because they are "imbedded in the genetic code," maintains Dr. Alvarez. Although these relatively "hard-wired" abilities may be delayed in underdeveloped parts of the world, they will still eventually emerge, given even a minimum of stimulation. In children he has tested from such "opaque circumstances" of deprivation, however, he has also typically found "failure to perform adequately in tasks that involve complex abstract thinking and problem-solving" which he attributes in part to brain differences resulting from different levels of stimulation. Dr. Alvarez makes it clear that these children are not "mentally retarded" or even "neurologically damaged"; brains in the lower socioeconomic groups he has studied are not abnormal, he insists, but they may be delayed or incomplete in certain specific ways. When such children enter the educational system, these differences cause them to "miss the boat."

Dr. Alvarez contends that the "different levels of stimulation" go beyond basic differences in sensory (seeing, hearing, touching) input. He finds that different sets of cultural demands cause children to have particular difficulty with abstract, analytical thinking -- because their brains are trained to work differently.

The various strategies that brains elaborate in order to solve problems peculiar to that particular culture may depend on circuitry which varies from one culture to another .... Whether or not sensory stimulation is lacking in early years amongst the poor, different modalities of rearing may lead to differential processing of information by brain structures [emphasis added]. [36]

Different Hemispheres: Different Learning Styles?

The parts of the brain in which scientists have looked for this sort of different neural circuitry are the two cerebral hemispheres. A few studies have, in fact, suggested that different ways of using the right and left hemispheres may account for some social-class differences in school success. Specifically, more successful students -- and more middle class children -- tend to use analytic "thinking styles" attributed to the left hemisphere, while less successful ones -- and more economically disadvantaged children -- rely more on the relational, holistic propensities of the right. As we have seen, many children raised in nonacademically oriented environments have little experience in using decontextualized, analytic language strategies for learning, and they may be more inclined to reason with visual, here-and-now, "hands-on" ("relational") strategies.

Thus far, most research on the use of these "styles" has not peered directly at the brain. Instead, children are tested on certain tasks that have been shown to reflect particular brain functions. In one such study, neuropsychologists looking at attention and memory skills of white kindergarteners from higher and lower socioeconomic levels found that children from the two groups used significantly different cognitive strategies for the same task. There were no differences in the amount of ability to pay attention overall, but the lower-SES group used more visual-spatial tactics (ordinarily mediated by right hemisphere) on a simple computer game, while the higher SES children were more likely to talk their way through the problem (calling on more left-hemisphere use). [37]

A few researchers have looked more directly at this issue in terms of the brain itself. Two early studies turned up differences in a standard listening test in which information is directed either into right or left hemispheres through the opposite ear. Results in both cases indicated different hemisphere use among children of different social classes. In an effort to control variables as carefully as possible, these studies used only right-handed youngsters because a small percentage of lefthanders have a reversal of the usual left-hemisphere dominance for language. This study also suggested that children from lower SES were later in developing the usual left-hemisphere superiority for language, and that their left hemisphere did not appear to be as dominant for several types of tasks as that of the children from higher SES. [38, 39]

One current study of part of a new generation of "disadvantaged" -- a group of street kids in Toronto -- found that 82% had reading problems. Overall, they were particularly poor in left-hemisphere language skills, including the "phonological awareness" so critical for reading success. [40] Their learning "styles" tended to be more "hands-on" and nonverbal.

Dr. Deborah Waber and her colleagues at Harvard University and Boston Children's Hospital, searching for reasons for such "stylistic differences between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds," studied 120 fifth and seventh graders from low- and high-SES backgrounds. All were Caucasian, right-handed, and spoke English as a first language; none had been identified as learning disabled. Using a machine (tachistoscope) that flashed words and numbers to right or left visual fields (which are connected to the opposite sides of the brain), they clearly showed that even though both groups got equal numbers of answers correct, the different SES groups used their brains differently to do so. Even when the effects of IQ were statistically controlled, the high-SES children showed a clear pattern of using their left hemispheres more effectively, while equally intelligent low-SES children tended to rely on the right. According to the researcher, these results reflected "SES-related variations in the nature of information processing in the two hemispheres." Boys' and girls' scores did not differ from each other. [41] Waber does not believe that her research implies that these differences are "immutable," but rather that they may have resulted from differing life experiences. [42]

These few studies are insufficient evidence on which to draw any conclusions on brain function and SES. Not all studies have even produced consistent patterns. "But if the differences are real, they suggest that environmental factors correlated with SES affect lateralization of function," suggests another team of researchers Drs. Sally Springer and Georg Deutsch, authors of the well-regarded book Left Brain, Right Brain. [43]

Culture and Brain Differences

A similar group of studies looking at variations in "cultural hemisphericity'" (i.e., differences in development or use of brain hemispheres by different cultural groups) has produced other evidence that Springer and Deutsch term "scanty but intriguing." [44] This understandably controversial research has identified apparent hemisphere-associated differences in the responses of Navaho and Hopi as contrasted with English speakers. The scientists have suggested that some Native American languages, being more literal, concrete, and closely tied to visual experience, tend to engage the right hemisphere more than the left. Therefore, they reason, users of these languages may have an associated difference in the use of their brains that alters the usual specialization of left hemisphere for language. [45, 46] Other researchers are in the process of investigating whether Native American children think about math problems and spatial relations differently from Anglo children.

Conclusions about hemispheric use are tricky, however. At the University of Northern Arizona, Dr. Walter McKeever administered a simple listening test to Navajo and Anglo fifth graders. Results of this typical experimental design can be analyzed to determine which side of the brain is most active for processing different types of syllables.

An outspoken skeptic about cultural differences in brain hemispheres, McKeever got some interesting results when he expanded this experiment so that the children were tested not just by an English (Anglo) speaker but also by a native Navajo speaker. When the person who spoke the syllables was Anglo, the Navajo children did, indeed, register a right hemisphere pattern. When the speaker was changed to a Navajo, however, the same children registered with their left hemispheres! The experimenters, initially baffled by these results, hypothesized that with the unfamiliar (Anglo) speaker, the Navajo children's right hemispheres may have been responding not primarily to the language, but to the novelty of the speaker's voice. [47] Thus their pattern, while appearing to be different, was actually what would have been expected from anyone (as the reader may recall, the right hemisphere tends to respond to novelty).

This experiment is a good illustration of the danger of premature generalizations. On the whole, a considerable amount of support has accumulated for the possibility that individual members of different groups may show differences in cognitive "style" that may be attributed to different patterns of upbringing and language that are inextricably related to brain function. But exactly how much of a lasting effect they have on the brain cannot presently be measured. Since the way any child learns to use the two sides of the brain depends on many factors, it may be a long time before any final answers are available.

Who's Interested

Perhaps an even more important focus of research on brain and learning in different SES groups will be on the behavior-regulating and planning functions of the prefrontal cortex. At least one study published in a well-respected professional journal has shown differences thought to be related to SES in the rate at which these abilities develop during childhood. In this study, children from lower SES groups, particularly boys, were immature at school entry in skills of self-regulation. Fortunately, they showed the potential to catch up to their middle class peers if given time and good teaching. [48] Since the self-management and attentional abilities that go along with prefrontal development go right along with language proficiency in earning children stars in first grade, this entire area of research should deserve some follow-up.

Yet little effort is being made to clarify this entire topic. According to Dr. Waber, whose hemisphere study, published in 1984, is the best known of those described, no one seems to be concerned.

"You're the first person who has even called me about it!" she exclaimed when I phoned her five years after the study was published. "I was actually a little worried about publishing those results because I felt they might be controversial; I was amazed that no one seemed to be interested."

Dr. Waber believes that environmentally created brain differences may indeed be responsible for some of the achievement discrepancies between children of different social classes. Some differences stem from environmental hazards such as lead, but others may represent differences in "neural software" resulting from different types of cognitive experiences.

"Of course different environments could make a difference in the way the brain functions. Any effect of experience on behavior must ipso facto be mediated by the brain. The fact that reading to kids must facilitate left-hemisphere development is one obvious example," she said. "If you want to help children, you have to start looking at the brain; after all, they don't read with their kidneys!"

Dr. Waber feels that neuropsychological study of children's cognitive functioning is critical because it adds the "structural constraints of brain function" to other models of learning. ''The more accurate the model of cognition, the more likely one is to be able to build appropriate educational interventions," she says. This is the most constructive purpose that can be served by exploring the question of SES-related brain differences.

''The better you understand how the brain works, the better you know how to educate," she insists. "If anyone is really interested in educating these children, that is -- and I'm not convinced anyone is. It ought certainly to change the way we start instruction, especially in early childhood education programs. For example, I've considered training lower class children on computers to try and help them become more focally oriented -- to focus more and become more attentive. We're really talking about finding out how to teach them, not just how to unearth a wiring diagram." [49]

Dr. Waber now is directing more of her research toward prefrontal development related to attention and control because she feels that looking only at left-hemisphere differences oversimplifies the situation. Differences in control systems might even explain some of the variations now being attributed to the hemispheres, she suspects.

Even if we decide it would be useful to try to change these children's brains around somewhat, specific training programs will have to await more definitive research. In the meanwhile, many researchers have been investigating the effects of more general types of "enrichment." In the process they are beginning to unearth some interesting answers to an age-old question: How much can we change tested intelligence by changing children's environments?

SYNAPSE REMODELING: HOW MUCH CAN INTELLIGENCE BE CHANGED?

. . . aptitude is subject to change if the conditions are right -- if. . . the cognitive training begins early in life and continues for an extended period through the formative years and beyond, and if it is carried out in a continuously supportive and motivating atmosphere. -- Dr. William H. Angoff, Educational Testing Service [50]

Studies described earlier in this book showed measurable differences in the size of animals' brains as a result of living in "enriched" or "impoverished" environments. These findings have naturally inspired interest in the potential of enriched human environments to rebuild disadvantaged brains. The reader may recall that changes were observed not only at a physical level but also in certain tests of "intelligence," such as maze-running. In fact, several experimenters feel that higher-level problem-solving abilities are doubtless most susceptible of all to environmental effects.

Obviously, human environments are vastly more complex than experimental animal cages, and they cannot be similarly manipulated or categorized. Two types of intervention, however, yield important clues as to how much human intelligence can be changed. Adoption studies look at children who have been brought up in environments significantly different from those into which they were born, comparing them to both their blood relatives and their adoptive ones. Follow-up studies of early-education programs are also used to evaluate changes from an enriched setting. Both these types of studies have demonstrated that "nature" is a powerful determinant of IQ. But "nurture" also influences IQ and helps determine how that basic intelligence gets utilized.

Repotting the Seedlings

A number of carefully controlled adoption studies have forced researchers to recognize that the elastic of nature's genetic program will only stretch so far. IQ scores in particular seem to be constrained by genetic limits. Longitudinal studies have also shown surprising correspondence between variations in a child's intellectual skills, interests, and certain aspects of temperament (e.g., sociability, extroversion, level of activity) and those of the biological parents, even if the child has never lived with them. Curiously, the older the child gets, the more like the biological family he becomes, probably because he has more opportunity to follow his own predilections. No credible research has been completed on whether hemispheric "styles" have an appreciable genetic component.

Within this seemingly predetermined range, nurture takes over. Children who grow up in any type of deprived environment lack the opportunity to realize their potential and may not score well on an IQ test because they are unfamiliar with its expectations. A transracial adoption study looked at the IQ scores of ninety-nine black and interracial children who had previously been adopted by middle class white families and raised "in the culture of the tests and of the schools." Those adopted in the first year of life obtained an average IQ of 110, which is higher than the average for the white population and considerably higher than might have been expected had they stayed in their low-SES birth environments. Although the group as a whole was above average, relatively higher and lower scores still mirrored variations in the IQ level of their biological mothers more than it did those of the adopted mothers. [51] In other words, although the children, as a group, scored significantly better than did their mothers, the high scorers among the children's group had mothers who were the high scorers in the mothers' group, etc.

Dr. Sandra Scarr, who has produced the most blunt and realistic synthesis of the masses of information now available from early-intervention studies, confirms that children do benefit from "better-than-average home environments," but she is careful to point out "a genetic constraint on the degree to which individual differences in intelligence may be influenced." [52]

Other researchers believe that looking only at IQ scores is far too narrow a gauge of the influence of enriched environments. After all, it is a well-known fact that IQ scores are not terribly accurate predictors of success in adult life. A recent study conducted in Paris, France, looked instead at the incidence of grade failure in a group of eighty-seven children who were adopted before age three into homes of different social classes. By the time the adoptees were in late adolescence, there was a significant correlation between the social class of the adoptive fathers and the number of grades the children had been forced to repeat; children adopted into under class homes had repeated more grades. Their rate of school failure was also similar to that of biological children from the same social class. The one exception was that the biological children of upper class families tended to do slightly better than children adopted into upper class families. The author states that there is currently no way to tell whether genetic or environmental factors are responsible for this discrepancy. [53]

Overall, the experts continue to assign heredity and environment each about half of the responsibility for the final outcome of intellectual ability. Dr. Scarr points out that biological diversity is a fact of life, and individual differences add much to the richness of human experience. Nevertheless, while government policy cannot make an entire population into geniuses, the average level of an entire culture can be improved by social policy that raises the quality of early environments, schools, nutrition, and health care. [54] Some little-known research hints that such policies may have intellectual outcomes that extend farther beyond the present generation than anyone has yet realized.

An Intergenerational Shadow?

Can intellectual stimulation for parents have physical effects on the later learning abilities of their offspring? Recent studies have shown that enriching the cognitive environments -- and thus enlarging the brains -- of parent rats causes them to have smarter offspring, even when they don't raise the babies themselves.

In her book Enriching Heredity, Dr. Marian Diamond discusses the "lasting effects of both maternal care and enrichment in utero." As an example, she recounts some experiments in which parent rats lived in the sort of enriched cages described in Chapter 3 (in which food and water are kept constant and "enrichment" consists of cognitively stimulative toys and companionship). The parents were also trained in maze learning. Their babies were born with slightly larger brains than those of matched controls and also performed better on maze-running tests.

To our knowledge, our experiments provide the first evidence that the dimensions of the cerebral cortex can be altered without directly enriching the offspring, i.e., by enriching the parents before pregnancy and the female during pregnancy [emphasis added]. [55]

The Japanese have believed for centuries that "intrauterine education," "taikyo" (which consists mainly of maternal improvement, not prenatal pedagogy!), can have beneficial effects on the unborn child. In a recent set of experiments, Japanese researchers placed pregnant rats in either cognitively enriched or impoverished conditions. After their babies were born, some were separated from the biological mother, "cross-fostered," and raised in a standard, unenriched environment (i.e., pups from the enriched mothers were reared by the nonenriched mothers to eliminate any effects of maternal influences after birth). After weaning, the second generation was given a maze-running test; those whose real mothers had been enriched during pregnancy learned the maze significantly faster, despite the fact that their own environments after birth had contained no enrichment and some of them had never seen their real mothers. These results, say the researchers, "suggest that prenatal maternal enrichment has a beneficial effect on postnatal learning abilities of the offspring, although the mechanism remains to be solved." [56]

Extrapolating this limited data to humans is, of course, impossible. Most scientists would flatly deny that the intellectual "nurture" given one generation could become a part of the "nature" of the next. Nonetheless, these results do provide food for thought.

When the Iron Is Hot

Early is not the issue, timing is. -- Dr. Sandra Scarr [57]

Beginning with Head Start in the 1960s, many programs have attempted to better the chances of children at risk. Their successes and failures have been thoughtfully analyzed (see Within Our Reach by Lisbeth Schorr [55]); a careful look suggests that the most successful have respected nature's developmental pattern of plasticity. Different sets of neurons in the human brain get ready for different types of learning at different points in development. One key to future competency undoubtedly lies in making available the right kind of stimulation while each developmental iron is hot.

"There may be optimal periods or optimal amounts of stimulation depending on the organism's status, and too much or too early may be as detrimental as too little or too late," emphasizes researcher Dr. Ellin Scholnick. [59] Any kind of intervention may have varying effects on individual children at different ages. Some early-intervention programs, whose initial gains have not been as durable as educators had initially hoped, doubtless tried to paint on a veneer of skills rather than engaging the child's own need at the right time. For example, policymakers unfamiliar with the research on child development may think it is more desirable for children to learn to recite numbers to twenty than to engage in the type of structured play which builds cognitive skills for mathematical reasoning -- but which takes longer and has less directly measurable gains.

Following the Brain's Curriculum

The key to planning experiences for young children is to make available a wide variety of mind-engaging experiences and allow the child some freedom in following her own internal promptings. Of course, adults need to provide firm structure because children do not always choose what is best for them (e.g., nutritional sugar, as in too much candy, or mind sugar, as in too much TV). Within these limits, however, each developmental period offers many natural opportunities for choice.

Infants need manageable levels of varied sensory experience, along with good nutrition, freedom to explore the physical world, safety, and security. Personal interaction with adults is critical. Programs for toddlers and older preschoolers should include problem-solving, listening skills, and oral language development along with such activities as interpreting pictures, active manipulation of physical materials, music, dance, art, experimenting with nature, and the ever-important emotional and social needs. Sitting little ones down with workbooks and trying to teach them to read and do math is simply antagonistic to the brain's needs during those years, and particularly for children from "learning disadvantaged" environments. Yet these activities are increasingly seen in early childhood programs; no wonder some of them fail to show lasting improvement! Enrichment programs that have emphasized language understanding and expression along with basic reasoning skills, interesting experiences, and positive attitudes toward learning have had far better long-range results.

Helping Families Help

No matter how much time a child spends in an enriched setting, studies show much better long-term outcomes when families are also involved. Parents need to be taught how to talk to and play with their children; many parents in disadvantaged homes do not understand that youngsters begin learning before they go to school. When they, often themselves school dropouts, can be helped to help their children break the cycle of failure, everyone's prognosis improves dramatically.

In Venezuela, Dr. Beatriz Manrique has headed a massive national effort to "invest in human development" by utilizing television and outreach programs to teach new parents about health, nutrition, and the importance of emotional bonding from the moment of conception. Simple lessons in prenatal care and in talking to the baby and stimulating sensory and motor development have paid remarkable dividends in higher levels of infant mental growth. [60] Dr. Manrique reports that treated babies were significantly better in developmental tests; the researchers are now looking at differences in head circumference, which, she believes, will demonstrate a physical basis for this improved performance.

"You should see these children! They are so beautiful!" she exclaims. [61]

Consistent with findings in the United States, however, the improvements from enrichment that ended soon after birth washed out after the children were one year old. Another intervention at age one is needed, she acknowledges, particularly to teach parents how to continue language stimulation as different stages are reached. This imperative for appropriate and changing types of input all the way up nature's developmental totem pole has profound implications to which many schools have yet to respond.

BRAIN-DAMAGING SCHOOLS

Putting already disadvantaged children into preschool intervention programs and then sending them off to inadequate schools is like giving the brain a midmorning snack while neglecting breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Successful intervention must start before birth and continue during the entire time of the brain's major development -- well into adolescence. It is cruelly unrealistic to depend on early programs by themselves to effect significant changes in later learning. According to at least one authority, the years of eight to ten may represent a particularly crucial period when an "educational or psychological booster shot" is needed to sustain earlier gains. [62]

With older children, as with preschoolers, there is a strong temptation among adults who envision certain learning outcomes to try to "force" skills. Thus we have experienced cries for "competency" that are based on the idea that if everyone works hard enough at beating learning into children, and tests them often enough, we can "make" it happen. Of course it would be wonderful if all children could read at grade level or understand calculus when they are still in high school. But given the normal range of individual differences both in rate of development and in talents for different aspects of learning (true in "privileged" as well as underprivileged neighborhoods!), expecting all children to meet the same set of standards on the same schedule is absurd. At-risk children need more time and extra help to reach the same outcomes, and they can be badly harmed by assembly-line pedagogy.

Inappropriate expectations, however, may sound impressive, and curriculum dictators can misuse the whip of "standards" to flay tender intellects in any neighborhood. Advantaged brains are better buffered, however, and well-educated parents will only put up with so much nonsense. Studies comparing schools for upper- and lower-class children have shown that more privileged children are much less likely to be forced to subsist on the staples of what too often passes for "competency": a deadening diet of ditto sheets, workbooks, and rote-level memorization.

Misused "Standards": In the Inner City ...

In a recent series of visits to an inner-city school, I witnessed the destructive effects of forcing learning on children without building the necessary foundations. Schools in this large Midwestern city have an unenviable, but not atypical, record of failure: a staggering dropout rate, low achievement scores (half of last year's ninth graders failed the year), and little prospect of further education even for those who manage to stick it out. As of 1989, out of 3,146 students who had graduated from high school in 1984, only a single student had graduated from a four-year college, and 109 were still enrolled in one.

Taken to task for this lack-of-success rate, the school board and administrators imposed a series of "competency objectives" throughout the grades; each week a test would be given to see if specific material had been mastered. Teachers soon began to complain bitterly that the "skills" selected were neither worthy nor meaningful, that the goals could only be met by pushing students at a pace that precluded understanding, and that most classroom time must now be spent "teaching the test" by drilling students on material that they rarely understood.

"They could pass every skill on the test and still not have the foggiest idea of the meaning of what they read," one embittered fifth-grade teacher told me.

In my visits to the racially integrated classrooms, I saw discouraging confirmation of their concerns. In kindergarten, drill on recognizing and copying alphabet letters (even though many five-year-olds -- in the suburbs as well as the inner city -- are not developmentally ready for this task) superseded activities that enrich the classrooms of many "better" suburban schools: active social play and conversation, story-reading and storytelling, and the critical work on language and cognitive development that will later enable them to understand what they read and calculate.

The edges of my heart curled as I saw a lively, bright-eyed little boy disciplined (and embarrassed and angry) because he couldn't "pay attention" to the endless flash-card drill. How long, I wondered, will it take to turn this wiggly little mass of potential into an embittered "problem" child? The youngsters who retreated into their own boredom were deemed "good," but their silence was a clammy precursor of turned-off and tuned-out. Many were doubtless feeling "dumb" because they -- like their age-mates at all levels of the socioeconomic scale -- couldn't do tasks that are out of place in kindergarten.

"Why do you spend so much time on the alphabet when these children need so many other kinds of reading readiness?" I asked the teacher later.

"There's a big push for the kids to know it before they go to first grade," she replied. "We have to get it into them somehow."

The futility of these methods soon becomes apparent. In a third grade, twenty-five children, seated in orderly rows, were in their "reading" period. In this class, several children were still not reading as well as an average first grader, and few were at "grade level." Nevertheless, all the students were issued a worksheet on which they were given a list of quite advanced vocabulary words and asked to choose whether they were abstract or concrete. The teacher struggled to help them understand, but it was clear that only two or three were participating in the discussion. The rest sat, eyes glazed with boredom and incomprehension, waiting for the lesson to end. Even the active participants were puzzled. I, too, soon began to have trouble. Is quiver concrete or abstract?

"It's a concrete noun," said the teacher, consulting her study guide. "Just remember that until Friday."

This lesson took forty-five minutes. Reading time was now over.

Later, in the faculty room, I managed to express mild distress over what I had observed. "Do they ever read books?" I wondered.

"When we have time. But I have to cover these competency objectives for the Friday test," the teacher replied.

"Can they really pass the test? That's a difficult concept for third graders. And is it really important to spend time on this lesson when many of these kids need reading help so badly?" I ventured.

"Of course, it's ridiculous, and the math objectives are almost as unrealistic. Some of them memorize a clue like it's concrete if you can feel it or touch it, but they don't really understand it. I always teach concrete/abstract on Thursday so it will be fresh in their minds. Of course, they forget it by the time they take the test at the end of the month, so we have to review again. There's not much time left for reading -- and most of them hate it anyway. We mainly drill. The teachers have objected, but nobody seems to listen. Hey, I can't afford to lose my job!"

In a sixth grade, half the class was reading a story from a standard sixth-grade reading book. (The other half -- those now reading at third-grade level or below -- had gone down the hall for "remedial reading.") The story was a "tall tale" about a sea captain named Stormalong who sailed off the coast of Massachusetts during the eighteenth century. It featured not only concepts with which these children were massively unfamiliar but also words such as Nantucket, Squibnocket, schooner, brigantine, sloop, and keel. Although this particular selection is one with which I have seen many children get quite eagerly involved -- if the time is taken to help them understand the context, the vocabulary, and the abstract notion of what a "tall tale" is -- the teacher had so little time to cover this lesson that she acknowledged having done a sketchy job of preparing her class to understand it. The resulting struggle was not pleasant to watch.

The twelve children sat around a large round table, reading aloud in turn. These students had decent phonics skills, but inaccuracies in their oral reading betrayed a sad lack of understanding. One child read:

"These are all, um, ["sea-touched," supplied the teacher] places and since Storlong was a great season, he may have been bored in M ... M ... M ["Massachusetts," said the teacher]."

Another continued:

"Whatever it was, the ocean was right next door, booming and b-ou-n-cing against the store and sending salt spry over everything."

Teachers should know that when students make errors (e.g., season for seaman; store for shore; bored for born) that clearly denote lack of comprehension, it is time to stop and help the reader clarify understanding. ("What do you think that sentence means?" "Why would there be a 'store' in this story?" "Find something in the paragraph to prove Stormalong was 'bored.'") But with the pressure of the lesson plan, the sudden noisy malfunction of one of the steam radiators in the room, and the necessity to reprimand several boys who were not shy about expressing their distaste for the activity ("This is stupid ... who's this creep, anyway?") and started to throw paper wads, the teacher became distracted and the butchering of the text proceeded apace. By the time it had mercifully ground to its conclusion, we all breathed relief along with incomprehension. As the students returned to their seats, they took with them the fruits of the day's reading lesson: a renewed certainty that stories in books do not make sense and that expecting -- or caring -- to understand what one reads is not part of the game.

Why is this teacher required to use a text that few of her students can make sense of without intensive coaching -- for which she is not allowed to take the time? Because, she told me, the "Board" insists that every child read at grade level. ("But it's really 'frustration level,'" added a colleague.) The only way out is to fall far enough behind to qualify for remediation, and of course, more and more do each year.

In another sixth grade, behind a closed door, a new teacher who confessed herself already "fed up with the system" had scrounged up several copies of a well-known children's classic from local libraries. The level of this story, both conceptually and linguistically, was actually more difficult than the "tall tale," but she had prepared her students to understand it. As she read it aloud to them, her class, three children to a book, bent eagerly over the dog-eared pages. The level of excitement rose as she expertly drew out their questions and helped them relate the story and its historical context to their own experiences. Several children begged to read out loud. Some "sneaked" time to read the book themselves during recess.

''I'll probably get fired," she sighed, "but I'm going to take a chance that by the end of the year they'll do better on the tests. I just wish I had enough books to go around."

I recalled a remedial reading lab I had seen down the hall, where, starting in fifth grade, students go to be plugged into reading drills on a dozen new computers with quantities of costly software (whose effectiveness in improving comprehension, incidentally, is not well established).

"But they've spent so much money on remedial materials. Why can't they buy you a few books?"

"Oh, that's different money," she sighed. "The federal government funds the remedial materials."

. . . and in the Suburbs

The perpetration of this sort of intellectual abuse is not confined to schools serving the underclass. It just gets called by different names elsewhere. One week after the above experience I visited an exclusive private school in a suburb of another large Midwestern city. There, in a first-grade classroom, I saw a teacher trying to force a small group of children to learn a rather complex mathematical concept from a workbook page (the missing addend and subtrahend), part of the curriculum they were expected to master.

This particular bit of learning is extremely confusing for most first graders, even bright ones, and many teachers either skip this part of the workbook (yes, the children will have another chance to learn it; all hope is not lost when they enter second grade!) or use countable objects, such as rods or cubes, to teach the principle in a way children can understand. During this lesson a pile of rods remained untouched in the middle of the table while the teacher belabored her earnestly struggling charges, much to our mutual discomfort. As the lesson ended and the children, totally bewildered by this session of "learning," put away their materials, the teacher caught my eye and mouthed over their heads (but within obvious view of the rest of the class),

"They're all l-ear-ning d-is-abled."

No wonder.

The Sad Truth About "Competency"

One of our favorite adult conceits is that just because we teach children something, they learn it. Perpetuation of this myth by people who have little contact with real life in the classroom puts the quality of our entire educational system at risk.

On the other hand, the fact that children can learn something does not necessarily make it worth teaching. Even when competency objectives are more skillfully applied than in the cases described above, they lean toward "window dressing" instead of substance. Test scores go up as charts replace student artwork on the walls of the superintendent's office, but students may have learned more about how to pass the test than about anything else. [63] One catalogue of educational materials now features thirty-six workbooks on test-taking skills. Is this our society's latest contribution to world culture?

We have yet to solve the problems presented by students who do not learn what we choose to teach them. Attention to "standards" must be a national imperative, but a "quick-fix" mentality militates against meaningful and lasting learning.

It is no accident that scores on tests of higher-order skills have been falling just as those for basic-skills tests have risen, emphasizes Gerald W. Bracey, director of evaluation for the Cherry Creek, Colorado, schools. "Scores on the higher-order tests have been falling precisely because we have been overteaching for [standardized achievement] tests at the expense of the other skills. Teachers say they no longer give essay exams -- so they can prepare children for tests requiring them to respond to decontextualized, fragmentary bits of knowledge .... Teaching children in this way and hoping that they will learn to think is like teaching them when to slide into second base and hoping that they will get the general idea of how to play baseball. It won't work!'' [64]

Bracey advocates what he calls the "zero-based" curriculum: start from scratch and justify everything you let back in. While this alternative is not likely to glean much support, it may not be such a bad idea. We certainly need to rethink old approaches that are frankly damaging to all children, and particularly to the children of disadvantage, the most vulnerable of all.

TAPPING INTO THE RESERVOIR

"There is a reservoir of unused intellect in many economically disadvantaged children," states Edward Zigler in pleading for programs that will liberate children's individual abilities and motivation to succeed. [65] The poor clearly represent our greatest challenge, but all children need good teaching to draw on their own deep pools of potential. Trying to cram children's intellectual raw material into shallow molds of ersatz "competency" will not make up for gaps in previous experience or for the emotional complications of adult neglect -- at any socioeconomic level.

Schools cannot be expected to mend frayed social policy alone. Coordinated approaches to the overwhelming problems of disadvantage are clearly needed. Within their arena of intellectual development, however, schools must develop better means of responding to new sets of needs, different patterns of learning, and perhaps, even brains that have been shaped in ways that require revised teaching approaches.

Yet educationally disadvantaged children also come with talents that we too often fail to notice. To maintain real standards of intellectual competence throughout our society, we must seek new ways of opening up the intellectual potential of the real kids who are sitting in the classrooms. Writing idealized prescriptions works only in fantasyland, and the schools of today are a long way from that. In the next chapter we will consider some real-world alternatives.

[admin]

PART 1 OF 2

Part Five: MINDS OF THE FUTURE

CHAPTER 13: New Brains: New Schools?

If we wish to remain a literate culture, someone is going to have to take the responsibility for teaching children at all socioeconomic levels how to talk, listen, and think. If we want high school graduates who can analyze, solve problems, and create new solutions, adults will have to devote the time to showing them how. And they had better get at it before the neural foundations for verbal expression, sustained attention, and analytic thought end up as piles of shavings under the workbench of plasticity.

It appears that schools will have to assume a larger share of this responsibility. Students from all walks of life now come with brains poorly adapted for the mental habits that teachers have traditionally assumed. In the past, deep wells of language and mental persistence had already been filled for most children by experiences at home; an educational priming of the pump made learning flow with relative ease. Now teachers must fill the gaps before attempting to draw "skills" from brains that lack the underlying cognitive and linguistic base.

We care deeply about the "smartness" of our children, but our culture lacks patience with the slow, time-consuming handwork by which intellects are woven. The quiet spaces of childhood have been disrupted by media assault and instant sensory gratification. Children have been yoked to hectic adult schedules and assailed by societal anxieties. Many have been deprived of time to play and the opportunity to pursue mental challenges that, though deemed trivial by distracted adults, are the real building blocks of intellect. Thus schools must lead the way, acknowledging children's developmental needs as they guide them firmly into personal involvement with the important skills and ideas that will empower them for the future.

WHAT DOESN'T WORK

Schools, preschools, and day-care centers cannot slow the pace of adult life, alter changing family patterns, or eliminate media influences. Nor can they ignore these realities or the resulting differences in students. Kids today are no less intelligent than those of former years, but they don't fit the same academic molds. In many respects, children now come to school with more potential and a wider experiential background than children of a previous generation. At some level, the rapid pace of their lives may even prove to be adaptive for the constant scene changes of a new knowledge explosion. Yet this gloss of sophistication has been applied at the expense of important mental skills -- and arguably, their underlying brain organization.

Comments on "Competency"

As I hope became obvious in earlier chapters, the simple cry "Make them learn" soon runs afoul of the developmental reality that brains learn in different ways and on different schedules. In olden days, those who did not fit the pattern dropped out and got good jobs in factories, shops, or on farms. Now these options have diminished. If we want almost everyone to achieve solid levels of academic competency, we must accept the need to diversify instruction for learners with different styles and timetables for mastery. Such sensitivity does not imply that some are "inferior" or that they cannot learn; it simply acknowledges that just as all adults should not be expected to enjoy and master sculpture, journalism, baseball, or eye surgery with equal facility, all children will not learn math or rope-climbing with comparable ease.

"Competency" is deceptive. When children must resort to memorizing "tricks" to pass tests (on material they don't understand), they soon "forget." Difficulties compound themselves as children who lack basic concepts of addition and subtraction are drilled to mouth algebraic formulae, or as they uncomprehendingly "read" the words from books or neatly copy "reports" from encyclopedias -- without making mental contact with the content. Children who come from different linguistic and educational backgrounds are particularly at risk in this sort of curriculum.

Shallowly conceived "standards" also tend to fragment learning into inconsequential bits. Dr. Arthur Costa, who says he has "been through three back-to-basics movements" in his career as an educator, notes ruefully:

What was educationally significant and hard to measure has been replaced by what is educationally insignificant and easy to measure. So now we measure how well we've taught what isn't worth learning! [1]

Costa's personal vision of a school as "a home for the mind" is woefully different from current realities. He is convinced that we need change, and that education for workers of the future must emphasize more general thinking and problem-solving abilities along with the basic skills.

People in an age of rapidly changing technology will have to keep on learning even after they graduate, but the outlook in the United States is not bright, he warns.

"We're facing a critical time in history. For our nation to survive we have to realize that what's coming up is the smallest work force we've had in a long time; we've had a big population dip and our industries have a much smaller pool of talent. The small group is one of the most undertrained with the largest number of dropouts. At the same time, industry has the greatest demand for problem-solvers and thinkers, entrepreneurs and craftsmen, creative people whose products are so excellent and whose thinking is so forward that we can match the other countries for survival."

Because of the ever-shrinking pool of talent, industries are being forced to economize, Costa continues.

''To do so they're cutting out middle management. This means that blue-collar workers will have to know how to think for themselves so industry won't have to hire management to solve problems for them. We're at a time of great competition for creativity and thinking -- we've got to develop these skills in all our students. To do so we need a massive reorientation of what public education is about." [2]

No responsible critic denies that students -- and their teachers -- need to be held accountable for what is being learned. Tests are important, not only for determining the depth at which material is taught, but also in showing students what kinds of thought processes are important (e.g., simply memorizing facts vs. having to connect them together in higher-level thinking). In countries where thought and intellectual depth are esteemed, examinations consist mainly of having the students generate ideas, usually in writing, about the topic at hand. Someone recently observed that Europeans examine, while Americans only test. Examinations, in this sense, require students to have not only a thorough understanding of the facts but also a more general grasp of the subject and its important ideas as well as the ability to integrate and express them. It also means that someone has to read and grade the papers.

In the United States, the content of everything from English to algebra is currently being trivialized by machine-scored, multiple-choice tests. Why be surprised if students can't reason effectively -- or if they emulate their elders in looking for the easy way out? Of course, if I have 150 English students every day . . .

"But the Japanese Seem to Be Doing Something Right"

Despite the apparent success of Japanese public education in extruding a dutiful and well-trained work force, aping a misconceived model of that country's system won't work in America. Nor will the rigid traditions believed to characterize Japanese secondary schools impart the innovation and mental flexibility Americans claim to prize.

Japanese and American schooling are predicated on different philosophical views of the individual in relationship to the society. They also have differing traditions regarding the purpose of schooling itself, particularly the balance between conformity and original thinking. While it would certainly be a step in the right direction to accord comparable respect (and expectations) to teachers and to the intellectual enterprise in general, we must recognize that Japanese pedagogy is designed for children from a very different tradition of upbringing.

In that country, mothers assume that their primary role is to provide a full-time training ground for their child. Children are expected to sail from home into school on an unbroken flow of expectations and support -- not so much in terms of subject matter, as in the attitudes and mental habits for school success. Moreover, according to one careful observer, Japanese elementary schools (unlike those for older students) do not trade in the rote-level, robotic classroom scenes we imagine. Instead, their well-trained teachers (getting into this highly esteemed profession is a competitive business for which only the best are chosen) plan active, exploratory learning and take time to set the conceptual foundations in place. Whereas American second graders may spend thirty minutes on two or three pages of addition and subtraction equations, the Japanese are reported to be more likely, at this level, to use the same amount of time in examining two or three problems in depth, focusing on the reasoning process necessary to solve them. [3]

Ignoring the Reality ... and Missing the Vision

While lessons can certainly be learned from the Japanese, our schools cannot succeed unless they are supported in confronting the reality of the children they are trying to teach. They cannot change society, but they can stand firm as advocates, not enemies, of mental growth. American children should learn to work hard, in fact considerably harder than most are working now. But they need to work on important, meaningful learning at which they can succeed.

Classrooms where students are enticed into involvement with content along with essential skills, where they experience each day the satisfaction of intellectual accomplishment gained by personal effort -- such classrooms are a strong antidote to the anxieties and fragmentation that beset children in today's world. If schools direct their planning toward this goal, they have a much better chance to shore up shaky intellectual foundations while also infusing children with the ego-protective properties of well-earned success.

Is this simply more visionary claptrap? How can such lofty goals be accomplished in a practical classroom world? The first step is to take the pains to start where the children are. Another is to write the habits of mind, oral language usage, and thoughtful experience with important ideas into the curriculum along with reading, writing, math, history, and science. Instead of simply insisting that teachers stamp on the three R's in shallow transfer patterns, we must search for new ways to enrich young brains with the real "basics" -- language and thought.

I do not propose, in one chapter, to outline a total new plan for restructuring American education. As must be clear by now, my main suggestions concern teaching and learning. To fill gray areas in kids' gray matter, however, structural as well as curricular changes are in order. Let me first skim over a few ideas that have been proposed in the name of the former before moving on to a consideration of some new (or rekindled) ideas about what we might start dishing out in the way of mental fare.

SOME OF THE NITTY-GRITTY

Changing the Way Schools Are Structured: Only Part of a Solution

The growing recognition that our schools are out of step with changing social patterns has inspired some rethinking about the way they are structured. Alternatives now on the table include adding early-childhood centers to the public schools, adapting the school calendar and/or length of the school day to schedules of working parents, and allowing students to stay with the same teacher for more than one year, as is done in some European countries, in hopes of gaining the sort of close relationship with an adult increasingly missing at home. These proposals all have potential merit -- and potential problems. If what children get in school is ineffective or even damaging, simply adding more of the same will only exacerbate the problems.

Broader forms of restructuring, in which schools work closely with other social agencies, are also being proposed. Such teamwork appears to be necessary as increased needs for emotional and social support of even middle-class students drain instructional resources. Allan Shedlin, director of New York's Elementary School Center, feels strongly that schools should assume a more central role as "locus of advocacy" for all children. While not everyone agrees that they will be up to this task, most concur that some kind of coordination will be necessary. As we now stand, fragmentation of school time, facilities, and staff with nonacademic courses already threatens their basic role as academic institutions. Academic learning may well suffer when schools are compelled to add such extras as required courses in career, health, and nutrition education at all grade levels, as well as badly needed expedients such as group counseling for children with unsettled emotional environments at home (e.g., a course for children of divorce entitled "Who Gets Me for Christmas?").

It is indeed hard, perhaps even impossible, to teach well if students' nutritional or emotional agendas preempt their mental energy. But teachers' major obligation to students' emotional needs must remain to create classrooms and curricula where children are mentally as well as physically safe. This includes structuring academic demands so that students have a realistic chance of earning success as a buffer against other emotional stresses. Offering attainable academic goals and good teaching to reach them is the school's primary role in social service.

Changing the Way Children Are Taught

One potentially promising trend in this regard is a greater use of "collaborative learning" techniques, where more emphasis is placed on the types of cooperation and communication that will be needed in an "information age." [4] Inclusion of cooperation along with competition may have several effects: (1) making classrooms more success-oriented; (2) counteracting some of the social isolation experienced by children without old-fashioned "neighborhood" play experiences; (3) building oral language skills by teaching structured ways of talking together about what is being learned. Changes of this sort will not salvage academic learning, however, unless curricular goals are broadened to emphasize language and thinking skills. Since brains are shaped in classrooms as well as in homes, we cannot afford to overlook these growing needs during the hours children spend in school.

How Good Are the Teachers?

Another problem is how to stock classrooms with teachers who can -- and do -- read, write, and reason. Although none of the ideas to follow are revolutionary in scope, they all call for good teachers whose own intellects can be trusted, or at least developed. We cannot depend on workbooks and kits chosen because they are "teacher-proof" (a questionable, but all-too-common "attribute"). Such materials, by necessity, include little, if any, writing and reasoning.

It is beyond the scope of this book to solve the problem of where to find this band of angels who can simultaneously control twenty-five or thirty kids (someone very accurately compared it to trying to keep thirty corks under water all at the same time), inculcate the essential skills into a generation of unprepared brains, and also stimulate high-level reasoning and reflection. I would suggest, on the basis of school visits in many parts of the country, that many fine teachers are already in place. But they need encouragement, perhaps some additional training in language development and questioning strategies, and most often, smaller classes in order to do the job we demand of them.

Even (perhaps especially) elementary school teachers must be well grounded in the liberal arts and sciences as well as in the specific tools of their profession. They cannot expand minds to meet the demands of the next century if their own perspectives are foreshortened by pedagogical nonsense in place of substantive coursework. In my opinion, any teacher in a subject requiring students to read and write should be required to demonstrate the personal ability to read and reason intelligently, write coherently, and provide satisfactory models of oral language. The college years are not too late to effect changes in the habits of a human brain; it is certainly worth the considerable time and effort it would take to induce the ability to think in everyone to whom we delegate the charge of teaching it to our children.

Even the best teachers, however, can't do the foundation-building job alone. Many complain they now have to teach the parents as well as the children. Let us digress briefly to consider some issues surrounding this important division of responsibility.

The Changing Balance Between School and Home: Whose Responsibility?

If schools are to do a proper job, they cannot, with existing resources, also shoulder the major burden of their charges' personal, social, and emotional development. Yet school administrators and teachers are increasingly pressured to take on jobs they see as parental ones. Some assert quite vehemently that they are tired of spending so much time "parenting the parents"; even well-heeled professionals need frequent reminders of their responsibilities to their children. "I had to start sending notes home on Fridays asking parents to monitor the violent TV programs these kids were watching," went a typical comment from a kindergarten teacher in a middle class suburb. "I don't mind writing notes about a child's school progress, but do I also have to tell them how to be parents?"

"I wish I could sit down with every parent in America and emphasize how important they are to their children's education," stated Mary Hatwood Futrell, speaking for thousands of teachers nationwide. [5] Yet even filling a child's basic emotional needs is increasingly difficult for many families. Youngsters who have been caught in changing family patterns (e.g., divorce, single parenthood) have needs that may be difficult to meet. All children need consistent and realistic follow-through on standards for school achievement, but in the press of contemporary life, such consistency gets easily lost. Although many parents express concern about their children's progress, teachers also have trouble getting them to follow up on academic expectations at home. One of the reasons may be that parents feel alienated from the school.

Child psychiatrist Dr. James Comer, recounting his growing-up years in the 1940s, compares the informal neighborhood contacts between teachers and parents with the fragmented environments that now polarize parents and schools. ''The positive relationship between my parents and school staff -- and the probability of a weekly report [in a casual conversation in the store, or on the street) -- made it difficult for me to do anything short of live up to the expressed expectations." Comer argues that too many children today are deprived of the "sense of trust, belonging, and place" so essential to learning. [6]

Helping Parents Parent

Parents themselves are pressured, tired, and unsure of how much they should interfere with schoolwork. Many complain that the only time they are wanted in school is when their child develops a problem. Dr. Futrell suggests that educators must start taking the initiative in inviting parents into school under more positive circumstances. Blaming parents and denying the reality of different lifestyles does not change social realities. Administrators who have accepted the facts and reached out by scheduling academic and social events at convenient times and encouraging working parents to attend (e.g., family potluck suppers, book fairs, etc.) have been gratified by the response. Others who had the funds to hire local psychologists to offer short courses in parent education have also reported positive results.

The principal of a nationally recognized elementary school in urban East Cleveland personally holds regular meetings with parents to discuss practical ways in which they can help their children do better in school. He says he has obtained excellent results from using a computerized dialing device that calls everyone with a child in the class to remind them of the meeting. Since the machine started recording the number of anyone who hangs up on his message, he reports that attendance has improved even more!

Broader efforts than schools can provide are needed, however, to teach parents about the needs of young children. Even middle class families may be able to profit by such courses as Dr. Burton White's "Missouri New Parents as Teachers Project (NPAT)." Emphasizing language development, social abilities, small and large muscle, vision, and hearing skills for a large group of children from birth through the first three years of life, Dr. White's curriculum for successful parenting places first priority on "the quality and quantity of adult input into the [child's] stream of experience." White advocates that a parent or grandparent be on hand virtually all the time during the first six to eight months of the child's life to provide "prompt response" to the child's needs or attempts to interact.

Children with parents in White's program consistently score significantly higher on measures of intelligence, achievement, auditory comprehension, and verbal ability than a comparable group whose parents were not enrolled. [7] Although other specialists insist a well-trained surrogate can provide equally responsive care, the initial success of this program appears to make a case for more realistic parental-leave policies.

While our society, as a whole, needs to be reminded of the critical nature of the infant and toddler years, some critics claim that programs like White's lead to too much pressure for early academic skills ("superbabying"). Parent educators must be cautious about implying to parents, particularly well-educated, "fast track" ones, that their main job is to "teach" school at home. Even in an information age, homes still need to provide personal guidance, love, and security. Worried parents need to be reassured that having children talk and participate with them in household and play activities is probably their most truly "educational" role. A spokesman for an important international educational association recently summed it up:

If children are to become responsible members of society, they must not only be exposed to adults involved in meaningful and demanding tasks, but they must themselves begin to participate in such activities early in life. We need to involve children in undertaking genuine responsibilities that will give them a sense of purpose, dignity, and worth. [8]

Most parents have a natural instinct to "scaffold" their children's learning, but those who are sure of themselves and comfortable in their relationship with their child do a better job of it. [9] Parents need support systems; to the degree that schools must take on this extra job of providing them, they will need extra resources.

When children enter school, we have a chance to recast the die of early experience. The brain continues to grow and change throughout the school years. Even if the job is partially bungled in preschool years, much learning potential may be rescued. To do so, however, requires involving each child in meaningful, manageable experiences with language, listening, thinking, problem-solving, imagining, and creating.

LANGUAGE, LISTENING, AND LITERACY

Literacy and many other types of problem-solving demand more extended exposure to good uses of language than most children are now experiencing.

Tools of Language Meaning

Sorting Out the Sounds

We all know these children can't listen, but we seem to be operating on the theory that they're just like us and they ought to be able to, instead of building up programs to teach them how. -- Anna Jones, head, Charles River School, Massachusetts

One reason for declining reading and spelling abilities is that children now come to school with insufficiently developed abilities to listen to the sounds in words. Before reading instruction begins, teachers should be trained to determine a child's level of "phonological awareness," the ability to identify, remember, and sequence the sounds in words. Without this ability, common forms of "phonics" instruction are inefficient and may even be damaging, yet children do not necessarily "pick up" these skills without certain types of listening experiences.

Children who have missed out during the sensitive period for auditory discrimination especially need concentrated training in these skills. Although lack of early experience may still result in gaps, a good training program can probably make up at least some of the lost ground.

Home and classroom activities promoting pure listening and sequencing of sounds should be a major part of pre-reading training. Such simple games as "Pig Latin" or rhyming words give children a chance to manipulate the sounds at the beginning, middle, and end of words. Unfortunately, structured oral training by itself is not a focus in most reading programs (which use workbooks and/or worksheets). When it is, new studies suggest it may be very effective. In one such program first graders did not even get reading textbooks until January. Doing exercises in pure sound awareness in a format designed by Dr. Patricia Lindamood, these students rapidly overtook and passed children in control groups when they finally got their reading books. According to Dr. Lindamood, schools in Idaho, California, Michigan, and Florida have had similar results. The Michigan program reduced intake to special-education classes by 60-75%. Even high-risk students in first through third grades achieved significantly better reading comprehension and spelling scores than a matched group of controls. [10] Dr. Lindamood adds, by the way, that approximately 20% of teachers need remedial training in the same auditory skills. [11]

Two researchers in Syracuse, New York, tried out a seven-week program of similar training in "phoneme segmentation" with a group of kindergarten nonreaders. Their scores on a word-reading test were then compared with comparable groups who received either traditional "phonics" training or no special intervention. At the end of the seven weeks those in the auditory training group significantly outscored both other groups. The authors of this study, who are working on ways in which kindergarten teachers can be taught to use these techniques, recommend that training "to focus the child's attention on the internal sound structure of the word" be included in every beginning reading program. [12]

If Sesame Street producers really want to teach children the foundations of reading, they should take all the pictures off the screen for a while and get the kids to listen to the sounds. Skills of phonological awareness are the entry point to reading. Once children have "cracked the code," however, they need other language skills to move forward with comprehension.

"Somebody Just Needs to Teach These Kids Grammar!"

"The main thing that's wrong with these kids is that somebody ought to teach them grammar!" opined my (highly literate) seat partner on a recent flight. He is right, of course. Understanding the syntax, or grammar, of the language is critical for reading comprehension, for writing, and for many types of reasoning. Nowadays, however, teaching grammar is not as simple as it was when this man was in school and his teachers and people on the radio (and in the early days of TV) tried to speak intelligently and expected him to follow suit.

When overwhelming numbers of students grow up with adult and media models (the distinction is not unintentional) who immerse them in misplaced ideas ("Having trapped the killer, gunshots rang out"); confusion of subject and object ("Him and myself agreed ... "); mangled time sequence ("She had went ... "); and stumbling modifiers ("Tastes good like it should"), a time-consuming rebuilding job is called for. It is hardly fair to expect teachers to single-handedly "cure" the casualties of a frontal assault on proper usage!

The resulting desperation to get "grammar" into kids has resulted in its being taught (just taught, not usually learned, by the way) badly. Most students regard this subject as if it were some sort of great, green, greasy monster waiting to gobble them up. They usually hate their grammar lessons so much that a sure guarantee of good deportment in most classrooms is to threaten students with a grammar worksheet if they don't behave.

Antagonism added to ignorance bodes poorly for survival of the logical structure of language, but one can hardly blame the children for detesting something that has been taught so poorly. Because preadolescent brains do not cope well with abstract rule systems, grammar is best learned initially through exposure to oral language and/or reading good books.

Children naturally start learning grammar (syntax) from the moment they are born; even in a linguistically depleted culture most five-year-olds are quite accomplished users of its basic rules. As we have seen, however, the brain will not generate refinements and extensions of this knowledge unless the culture follows up with the appropriate types of stimulation.

Meaningful real-life experience, however, is quite different from the teaching and testing of abstract rules that has become a stultifying commonplace in American classrooms. For example, children in elementary, or even middle school, who can say, write, read, and understand "The sunset was beautiful," and who can differentiate between a "naming word" and a "describing word" should not spend valuable time memorizing and being tested on "A predicate adjective is always preceded by a linking verb." They should, instead, spend a great deal of time listening to and generating -- orally and in writing -- the richness of nouns, verb tenses, sentence expansions, sentence combinations, dependent clauses, and all the other shades of complexity that will take them beyond the media's sandbox syntax.

Abstract rule systems for grammar and usage should be taught when most students are in high school. Then, if previously prepared, they may even enjoy the challenges of this kind of abstract, logical reasoning. Only, however, if the circuits are not already too cluttered up by bungled rule-teaching.

One ninth-grade student who came to me last year for help with grammar was hopelessly confused about the simplest parts of speech. Although she was intelligent and could, at her current age, have mastered this material in a week, she had been a victim of meaningless "grammar" drills since second grade. As Michelle and I struggled on the simple difference between adjectives and adverbs, I often wished I could take a neurological vacuum cleaner and just suck out all those mixed-up synapses that kept getting in our way. It took us six months to dispose of the underbrush, but finally one day the light dawned. "This is easy!" she exclaimed. It is, when brains are primed for the learning and the student has a reason to use it with real literary models.

Immersing children in good language from books and tapes, modeling patterns for their own speech and writing, and letting them enjoy their proficiency in using words to manipulate ideas are valid ways to embed "grammar" in growing brains. Working with them on their own writing is especially important. No amount of worksheets or rule learning will ever make up for deficits resulting from lack of experience with the structure of real, meaningful sentences.

The Oral Tradition

It is folly to ignore the importance of oral storytelling, oral history, and public speaking in a world that will communicate increasingly without the mediation of print. These skills build language competence in grammar, memory, attention, and visualization, among many other abilities. At least equally important, they can be used to tap the richness of cultural traditions outside the "mainstream" -- and the talents of many children. Is it unreasonable to suggest that elementary teachers -- and perhaps others, as well -- take a course in storytelling? Many insist this training has made a big difference in their effectiveness in the classroom.

What's Wrong With Memorizing?

I personally believe, although I cannot cite any brain research to prove it, that helping students at all grade levels memorize some pieces of good writing -- narrative, expository, and poetic -- on a regular basis would provide good practice for language, listening, and attention. I do not mean reverting to a rote-level curriculum, but simply taking a little time each week to celebrate the sounds of literate thought. Memorizing can be done as a homework exercise so that not much classroom time is consumed.

Teaching Students to Listen

At the same time, schools must get into the business of teaching children to listen effectively because no one else seems to be doing it. Teachers cannot assume their students are attending to what they hear, because most are not. Unless we want to put on a three-dimensional, living-color dog-and-pony show every time we teach a lesson, listening training will have to start the minute they toddle into the school system.

Teaching kids to listen will probably consume a good bit of classroom time, but it will be time well spent. Good teaching of any of the basic learning and thinking processes slows down our relentless march through subject matter. But how much time is consumed by repeating directions, dealing with students who didn't do the homework because they didn't "hear" the assignment, and re-teaching material that was not mastered because they did not understand what they heard -- either from the teacher or from the author who spoke to them from the textbook?

A recent article in an influential educational journal advocated structured training in listening as a new part of the curriculum, teaching children "to participate in structured experiences that cause them to question, to sort, to organize, to evaluate, and to choose," so they may become "connoisseurs and rational consumers of auditory input." [13]

Programs have been designed to improve listening skills; although many of these were originally targeted for students with learning disabilities, they are now appropriate for almost everyone. Instead of adding still more worksheets, however, why not use daily lessons more effectively to accomplish the same purpose? Teachers continually tell me they have to repeat all directions at least three times; one reported she ends up giving separate directions to everyone in the class. And we wonder why students don't listen? Teachers should band together and agree to start -- from the earliest grades -- making reception of spoken language a priority. Examples:

"I am going to give two directions. I want you to listen carefully and then I will ask one of you to repeat them before we go on."

"I will start with a three-minute minilecture on the topic we will be studying in science class today. Listen carefully and then write down a summary of what you remember. I will not repeat anything. You can read your summaries out loud and compare what you remembered."

"Today we are going to play a game in which you work in teams to give each other directions and see if the other person can listen carefully enough to follow them."

Some children's learning styles make processing information through auditory channels more difficult, but research has shown that they, particularly, need practice in these skills. Adults who are sensitive to individual differences do not embarrass youngsters who have difficulty, but they continue to work toward high standards of attention.

Particularly important for today's students is making space for them to talk and listen effectively to each other. With more TV viewing, many youngsters lack skills for interacting positively with peers. Yet most teachers, sadly, do little to help the students learn to talk or listen. The classroom conversational ball gets tossed from teacher to student, then back to teacher, then back to another student, etc.

Teacher: "John, who was the main character of this story?"

John: "Samuel Adams."

Teacher: "Right. Ayesha, when was Samuel Adams born?"

Etc.

Meanwhile, the rest of the class is free to tune out until they hear their own names called. Alternate questioning techniques get all the students involved in group discussions where everyone asks and answers questions and discusses opinions and ideas within a structured format.

Teacher: "I want each of you to work with a partner and take fifteen minutes to list all the facts you can find in the text about Samuel Adams. Then we will compare your lists to classify important ideas and details. Then 1will show you how to make some sample outlines to guide you in planning the one-page biography you have been assigned for tonight's homework." (This teacher slips in a lesson on categorization skills as the students determine the major and subordinate categories for the outlines.)

Do students start bouncing off walls if given this sort of freedom? Not if teachers are trained in establishing firm rules and classroom structures and if they take the time to teach the rules of constructive interaction. Even young children, in fact, can become very actively and productively engaged in this type of lesson. Professional journals and trade books feature more and more such ideas. Paradoxically, students in schools with the most rigid discipline may have the most difficulty with the self-discipline necessary for this type of interaction, so it helps to have teachers from the earliest grades trained to make active, constructive student participation -- not robotic reception -- an inevitable part of classroom life.

If parents want to help, they can first of all insist on careful listening at home. They can also repudiate the fiction that children learn best when they are silent -- and support teachers who encourage active, but self-controlled, participation.

[admin]

PART 2 OF 2 (CH. 13 CONT'D.)

Battling "Um ... Like, You Know"

I find it ironic that something called "communications" seems to have become one of the most popular college majors. Last winter, at the wedding reception of a young friend, I struck up a conversation with one of the bridesmaids, a delightful young lady who informed me that she was majoring in communications.

"Oh, that's interesting," I replied. "I have never exactly understood what a communications major entails. What are you learning about?"

Since I did not have my tape recorder, I can only try to recreate the essence of her response:

"Well, it's, well ... we learn about, you know [hands grasping in the air for words], well, about how to communicate. It's like the kind of thing people need to know about these days -- you know, like on TV and things."

How can we teach students to express their ideas effectively? Harvard's Dr. Courtney Cazden feels strongly that all students should be encouraged to talk together in school because they do not tend to talk outside of school about school topics. [14] Even when they do, they use the language of their peer culture rather than "forms of academic discourse -- the special ways of talking expected in school."

Seating students in a circle so they can maintain eye contact with each other is helpful. Both at school and at home they can be encouraged to experiment with "exploratory talk" as they try to get their thoughts arranged.

Teachers and parents can help children clarify their thinking by asking questions:

• What do you mean?
• How did you do that?
• Why do you say that?
• How does that fit with what you just said?
• I don't really get that; could you explain it another way?
• Could you give me an example?

Cazden also emphasizes the importance of at least three seconds of "wait time" after a teacher or parent asks a question. This pause gives the child a chance to formulate an idea and the words to go with it. Most adults tend to wait only about one second after asking a question; few children can pick up their thoughts and tie them together with words in so short a time.

A New Hampshire middle-school teacher who finds her students have been conditioned to "linguistic passivity" writes:

It falls to me as a language arts instructor not merely to hone public speaking skills, but, even more challenging and difficult, to build an awareness of the demands of clear verbal communication on the most rudimentary interpersonal levels. My strategy is to counter the sociocultural condoning of passivity by demanding extensive and precise verbal expression. Students have opportunities to experience a variety of uses of oral language and to feel the gratification that results from having clearly conveyed one's exact meaning. [15]

Attacking the problem "with a combination of verbal modeling and demand," she is careful about her own vocabulary and usage and encourages a great deal of discussion from everyone. When students use vague terms and slang, she tactfully helps them find more appropriate words. Discussions are conducted in complete sentences only, a rule enforced from the first day of school in September. Often, particularly at the beginning, it is necessary to show them how.

Teacher: "How is Jody feeling in this part of the story?"

Student: "Sad."

Teacher: "Use a complete sentence, please. Jody is feeling ... "

"By the end of the first quarter," she reports, "this prompting is seldom any longer necessary and we are already working on extending the depth of answers to include reasons and verifications." Vocabulary and understanding grow as puns and plays on words are enjoyed and as meanings of words are examined and discussed.

How many verbs mean "to walk"?

Why is "a dirty old man" scary but a "soiled elderly gentleman" pathetic?

Many other teachers, including myself, have seen similar revitalization of language skills, interest, and understanding in linguistically passive students. Youngsters with relatively full language backgrounds may pick up the skills more quickly, but persistence should payoff for almost everyone.

While it is heartening to know that such growth is still possible in the middle school years, we should be ashamed that a teacher at this level has to start the process. Children are in schools from the time they are five years old (or younger), when the language areas of the brain are still quite plastic. Teaching priorities -- from preschool years on -- must include setting standards and modeling effective use of oral language. Show-and-tell is not curricular fluff; used well, it is one of many opportunities to develop oral language, listening, and questioning skills. But teachers, themselves, may need additional training in how to build youngsters' language skills, and they also need to approach subjects in sufficient depth to have something meaningful to talk about. Those who are propelled by administrative fiat through a fill-in-the-blanks curriculum will not be able to make it happen.

Writing builds on oral expression. Writing practice offers a golden opportunity to build expressive language skills and vice versa. Although students cannot all talk at once, they can all write at once. When a teacher asks a question, instead of calling on one student to give the answer, he can ask everyone to write a sentence about it and then share some samples. This simple expedient immediately forces all brains in the classroom into engagement with the material, gives valuable practice, and also provides a good index of student understanding. Even in math classes, teachers have been astonished at students' improved understanding and memory when they are required to write regularly about what they are learning.

Ways of Questioning

By engaging students only in a quest for the correct answer rather than for the interesting question, we condemn them to live inside other men's discoveries. -- Priscilla Vail

Students -- and their teachers -- need to learn better ways of phrasing questions. Many children come to school today lacking experience with the "wh" questions (who, what, when, where; why, and how), with the related thinking skills, and with reflective habits of inquiry in general. Unfortunately, when educational objectives are defined too narrowly, these abilities continue to be neglected, since interesting questions represent more of a threat than a challenge.

The types of questions a teacher asks sets the intellectual tone of the classroom. Studies demonstrate that educating teachers in specific questioning techniques can improve their students' reading comprehension, among many other skills, by moving their thinking up from literal repetition of facts into the realms of comprehension, application, and inferential reasoning. Here are samples of some particular types of questions:

Fact: "What did Goldilocks do when she got to the three bears' house?"

Comprehension: "Why did Goldilocks like the little bear's chair best?"

Believe it or not, almost 90% of all teachers' questions come from these two categories, which require little, if any, higher-order thinking. No wonder students are so deficient in these skills! Consider the following:

Application: "If Goldilocks had come into your house, what are some of the things she might have used?"

Analysis: "How can we tell which things belong to each bear?"

Synthesis: "How might the story be different if Goldilocks had visited the three astronauts?"

Evaluation: "Do you think Goldilocks had a right to do what she did? Why or why not?" [16]

The idea of asking, even allowing, children to extend their thinking in these ways is alarming to some adults who like to see them sitting in rows and filling in blanks where there is always a right answer. Oddly enough, the same people also complain when students can't understand history, geometry, or Shakespeare. They also blame the kids when they rebel, become "hyperactive," or turn off completely from the educational process. Children need, of course, to master the factual "basics," but the most pressing questions in tomorrow's world will not be phrased at the literal level. At this writing, approximately sixty-three patent applications have been filed for new varieties of animals -- genetically engineered by human scientists! Before they are approved, I, for one, hope someone will know how to ask the right kinds of questions!

Where will we get the time to implement all these ideas? First, we may have to sacrifice teaching some of the "data" we have cherished in the past -- which computers will be handling anyway in the real world of the future. Second, we must explore ways to integrate and extend thinking and basic skills all at the same time. This focus has many educators excited about some new/old ideas called "whole language."

WHOLE LANGUAGE FOR WHOLE BRAINS

The idea of getting the learner personally involved in the questioning process is one aspect of a quiet revolution termed "whole language," which is sparking a major rethinking of the way we have been teaching (or more accurately, failing to teach) children to read, write, and reason. The "whole language movement," for, indeed, as the term implies, its advocates promote it with genuine missionary zeal, is a scheme of teaching derived from research on the way children naturally learn language. Adopted a few years ago in the United States by a few school districts, it now promises to have a significant educational impact as its use spreads.

As with any new trend, some of its implementations have been more effective than others. Its strongest advocates are teachers who have invested the time and effort necessary to use its ideas well. They report students "amazingly turned-on" to reading and good literature. Moreover, "I would never have believed it, but they love to write!" is a typical teacher comment.

What is the magical formula? The essence of "whole language" is threefold. First, in accordance with current research in cognitive psychology, the learner is viewed as an active "constructor of knowledge," not merely a passive recipient of information. Second, reading, writing, speaking, and listening are taught as integrated rather than separate disciplines. Third, the materials used for reading, and thus as a basis for many writing activities, include fine children's literature and examples of good language in a variety of narrative and expository forms. [17-20]

1. Learners Construct Knowledge

Research on learning has demonstrated that students understand best, remember ideas most effectively, and think most incisively when they feel personally responsible for getting meaning out of what they are learning instead of waiting for a teacher to shovel it into them. Many people believe that such ideas are merely pie-in-the-sky pronouncements from the groves of educational psychology, but any teacher who has tried it both ways knows it is true. Many have told me their delight at finding out that students who are working to find answers to questions that are important and meaningful to them do better work. If the situation is structured correctly, the students also present fewer discipline problems.

This finding has direct relevance to the teaching of reading. The passive and even mind-deadening nature of reading instruction has rightfully received a share of the blame for our new generation of disaffected readers. In the past, we got away with numbing children's brains for several hours a day because most of them came to school already imbued with the idea that reading and writing were something terribly important to learn; they understood that literacy skills were required for success in life, and many of them read at home -- even if the favored materials were comic books. Having also learned that hard work and boredom are standard lumps in the road to success, they -- and their parents -- were prepared to put up with some bad pedagogy along the way.

The current generation of two-minute minds (don't blame them, folks, we did it to them) are unschooled in persistence or reflection; if they don't like something, they change the channel or persuade their dad to sue the school. Surveying popular models of "success," as well, I am not surprised that reading, writing, and oral expression do not have quite the cachet they once did. If the school dishes out dross in the name of reading instruction, today's young consumer simply will not buy.

Research has shown that good readers actively pursue meaning, carrying on an active mental dialogue with the writer. "What is this saying?" "What will happen next?" "How does that fit with what I already know ... ?" To be a good reader, a child cannot be in the habit of tuning out, either to the author's thinking or to her own. Poor readers, on the other hand, respond as if they are waiting for the text to give them the message; usually it doesn't. Many poor readers do not even realize they have not understood something. Good teaching, therefore, uses materials that students can understand (with some mental effort) and then always holds them accountable for the meaning of what they read. If the material is of some intrinsic interest to them, chances for a successful match increase.

In most American classrooms, children are issued a "basal" reading text; they meet in "reading groups" where they read out loud in turn and then return to their desks to write answers to questions and fill in worksheets or workbooks. When students get older, more reading is done silently, and sometimes "trade books" (children's fiction, biographies, etc.) supplement the basals. "Reading" time is carefully segmented from other subjects, and as this exercise is repeated for each of several groups in a class, most teachers have little time for extended discussion. Observational research in classrooms has unearthed the depressing fact that almost all reading instruction focuses on lower-level skills; little time is spent discussing and teaching students to comprehend what they have read.

In many classrooms, particularly large ones, the teacher has few opportunities to address the individual needs of students. I have been in many private as well as public schools where students were working with reading texts that they clearly could not understand -- and of which there was no meaningful discussion. The inevitable result is a habit of "reading" without understanding.

Students' reading abilities, in any normal classroom, usually span at least four years by the second grade and may span as many as ten or more by middle school (e.g., in a sixth grade, some students read more like average second graders and some like high school seniors). Unless materials are varied, some students are almost always baffled and others are frequently bored.

Even if all students in a class can read and comprehend the material, all still need to respond actively to it in order to become real readers. In one sixth-grade classroom in a suburban neighborhood, I saw a good example of how to turn kids off from the whole process. Eleven students (the "top group") sat around a large table, reading out loud in turn from Johnny Tremaine, a children's classic about a boy's adventures during the Revolutionary War. As each student finished reading a paragraph, the teacher said, "Good," or asked a question that could be answered in a word or a phrase. The turn then passed to the next reader. These kids were, in fact, proficient oral readers, rarely stumbling over a word, but their interest in the text was less than overwhelming. As each child read, the others sat passively, eyes wandering or glazed with the exaggerated ennui that is the forte of the preadolescent. When the bell rang, the teacher distributed a mimeographed list of questions to answer for homework.

As the students gratefully escaped into the hallway, I cornered several.

"How do you like this book?"

Shoulders shrugged. "Nyah, it's okay" was the most positive opinion expressed.

Whole-language teaching attempts to counter these trends by eliciting an active response from each child. Good children's literature is used, but instruction is aimed at understanding, discussion, and analysis, both oral and written.

"Skills" are taught in the context of meaningful prose. Sometimes each student selects his own book, for which he is then held accountable; at other times, groups of students read and discuss the same book. In kindergarten, teachers and children read and reread simple stories aloud, familiarizing students with the sounds and the meanings of the words and sentence patterns. Later, as language skills and reading vocabulary grow, the focus moves to independent silent reading, usually by second grade. Group lessons are usually an occasion for teaching phonics, reading mechanics, and comprehension skills in the context of the story that has been read. ("Can anyone tell me what the first sound of slippery is? How many syllables? What letters are used to spell that sound?" "What is this punctuation mark called? Why does this sentence need a question mark instead of a period?" "Who can say the exact words that are inside the quotation marks?" "Who is meant by the word you in this sentence?" "What do you think the main idea of this chapter is?")

In whole-language programs, part of the time that would have been given to worksheets and drills is devoted to independent reading, and because all the so-called "language arts" are taught together, more time is available. Teachers and theorists concur that children learn to read mainly by doing so. Since they are not doing it at home, they must have time to read in school. Students enjoy selecting books from a large classroom library (teachers have the responsibility of directing students into materials that will challenge without baffling them). They vigorously discuss books with each other as well as with the teacher (young readers love debating about plot outcomes and authors' points of view). Inevitably, they exchange book reviews, even when not assigned. ("You've gotta read this mystery story, it's so cool! The ghost lives in this weird old house . . .")

Some experienced teachers prefer to keep some of the structured lessons of a "basal" text and supplement them with literature-based units of study; the teaching still focuses on the learner's understanding and the importance of building all language skills in a related form.

In a curriculum centered on "whole language," writing is a cornerstone, and the child's own interest and active thinking is enlisted in teaching it. Children are encouraged to begin writing in kindergarten through specific techniques adapted for young children. In later grades, a variety of methods, including computer word processing, are currently in use to get students involved in learning about mechanics, content, and style.

2. Linking Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking

Instruction that links, rather than separates, the components of language learning is a natural vehicle for making up gaps in children's language backgrounds. It can also be an effective means of engaging them in thinking, making mental connections, and expressing themselves clearly. For some reason, classroom instruction has tended to segregate "reading time" from, "writing time" and "spelling time." In many schools, "English" and "reading" have been regarded as totally different subjects, with different textbooks (the publishers love this, of course), different lesson plans, and different teachers.

One of the biggest gaps in children's experience these days is in seeing connections between all the bits of information they have accumulated; teachers are frustrated because their students have difficulty linking ideas together meaningfully. A fragmented curriculum does nothing to remedy the situation. When larger blocks of classroom time are devoted to linking skills, children are asked to write about what they read, read what they have written, talk about both, and learn to listen to what others have to say.

In "whole language" classrooms the most commonly mentioned writing program is the "writing process," in which children work with classmates and teacher to plan, draft, revise, and edit their own writing. It has sparked renewed interest in writing -- as well as in the refinements of language -- where it has been well implemented. Since extensive personal writing improves reading abilities, double value is gained from the time spent.

I recently spent some time observing a fourth grade where the teacher was trying out some of these ideas. Since "whole language" is much more of an attitude than a prescription, each teacher uses the basic concepts according to the school's instructional goals. This class was engaged in a unit of study about Egypt. In addition to reading from many background sources, discussing, making projects, and collaborating on simple research reports, the students were also reading books of children's fiction related to the study at hand. One group was eagerly pursuing a story about some sixth graders involved in an Egyptian mystery; two other groups had tackled books of different levels of difficulty. Each group's homework assignments consisted of reading one or two chapters and writing a "response journal" in which they summarized the day's reading and then carried on a dialogue with the author about points of particular interest.

The teacher met with each group and listened to them read and discuss their journal entries. Meanwhile, the other two groups read silently. In the discussions, skillfully moderated by the teacher, the level of interest was high; each child had different views and different comments. I found myself astonished by the depth of understanding that these young students showed. Students presented opinions about characters, motivation, plot outcomes, etc. Occasionally, someone's point would be challenged, and pages quickly turned. "It says here. . ." "Yes, but on page twenty-four it also says. . ." (Observing this, I reflected ruefully on my own struggles to make eighth graders use evidence from a text to back up an argument!) Discipline was not a problem, since the children knew that if they were to continue this activity, which they enjoyed, they had to behave. When one child began to cut up, his classmates shushed him.

Clearly, this was a good teacher at work. To implement a philosophy that focuses on process as much as on product and that allows teacher and student to direct much of the learning, good training of teachers -- who themselves appreciate reading and writing -- is primary.

3. Using Real Books and Real Language

The "whole language" philosophy also implies the use of good models of written language from the earliest school years. It rejects many published "canned" materials. Children are, indeed, more motivated by real books than by many textbooks, as shown by the success of these programs in getting disaffected students turned back on to reading. (Interest in "whole language," incidentally, may get the credit for some of the recently growing market in children's fiction.) Good literature also readies students' brains for language and ideas that will be needed at higher grade levels.

Even if they do not choose to follow most of the ideas of "whole language," teachers should read aloud to their students from "good" books every day -- even through middle and high school years.

4. "Whole Language" and Motivation

The handful of teachers in my survey who wrote that students' interest and comprehension in reading had improved instead of declined were all using some form of literature-based reading program. Comments like the following suggest that there is still hope for the written word:

I am teaching reading by using novels as well as the basal reader. Reading comprehension is much better than it was when I first started teaching (thirty-three years ago). Children have a better background and storehouse of information that they bring to the written material. They also show greater interest in reading. In writing they share thoughts that children thirty years ago would never have shared.

-- Third-grade teacher, Tennessee

This lady also added that she has changed many of her teaching methods to accommodate shorter attention spans: adding more variety and challenge, allowing students to move more around the room, including many more writing activities, and using more games to convey information.

In our district reading-comprehension skills remain strong. Our children are avid readers. "Drop Everything and Read" periods are used a great deal in our school. My students have trouble speaking in complete sentences, but they have become more expressive since we started using the writing process.

I used to be a very teacher-directed lesson planner; now I let the students have a lot more input, and I try to make provisions for their different learning styles.

-- Fifth-grade-teacher, Connecticut

5. Misuses of "Whole Language"

As worthy as are its goals, these ideas have some implicit risks. It puts a great deal of responsibility in the hands of teachers, who may or may not be willing to invest the effort to do the job right. The difficulty in holding teachers or students accountable for important basic skills is a related concern. Some children, at least, will not master good word-attack skills unless they are taught more directly; children may learn to read initially "by sight," but have difficulty with accurate spelling or reading of long, unfamiliar words.

Children who have an inherited tendency toward reading and spelling problems ("dyslexia") are the most likely casualties of a system with no organized teaching of spelling rules. For this reason, many specialists recommend an approach that blends the demonstrated potential of whole language with good, systematic instruction in sounds and spelling patterns. For a generation with an overall weakness in listening skills, this is doubtless a sensible course -- as long as the phonics tail is not allowed to wag the literary dog.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of "whole language," and indeed, of all teaching that focuses on the process as well as the products of knowledge acquisition, is the necessity for adults to trust the child's basic desire to learn -- within a well-planned structure. Neuroanatomists who study the growing brain confirm two facts that bear on this point. First, the brain seems to have a fundamental instinct to seek the type of learning appropriate for its stage of growth; second, active curiosity and personal involvement may be the catalyst for increasing both the size and the power of the thinking apparatus. Animals who simply observe others pursuing mental challenges end up with smaller brains.

DISCOURSE AND DIFFERENCE

The forms of discourse internalized by children from different backgrounds may influence thought patterns and school success. Those who have absorbed verbal/analytic habits of thinking are often more successful in school, at least in early grades, than those who rely more on visual/holistic approaches. While the problem is greatest for children whose language backgrounds do not stress school-type reasoning, children from "traditional" backgrounds may also have linguistic deficits. It is a tragic error to believe, however, that these students cannot think effectively or that they cannot be taught to use verbal/analytic strategies to help them cope with academic demands. Moreover, students with skills in more holistic uses of language are often skilled in poetry, storytelling, or dramatics -- to which the classroom's more linear thinkers probably need exposure.

Many educationally "different" children are bright and potentially talented. Few, if any, are "unteachable," but there is ample proof that plunging them abruptly into the chilly, analytic waters of mainstream instructional practices is a prescription for failure, frustration, and a high dropout rate.

The schools appear to have three choices:

1. Keep the traditional "standards" and continue to cram children into them. Let prisons and the welfare system handle the overflow.

2. Throw out the standards.

3. Maintain the goals represented by the standards, but prepare students more effectively. Expand the schedule of expectation and the teaching methods to honor children's latent abilities.

The first two alternatives should be unthinkable. We are left with the third.

Prescriptions for the Linguistically Different

Obviously, culturally and linguistically different children require special approaches. Model programs so far showing the best results have tried to take into account both the children's "styles" of thinking and their own cultural backgrounds. [21] As a follow-up to her studies in Appalachia, Dr. Shirley Brice Heath was asked by parents and teachers to help them devise methods to give the "non-mainstream" children a better chance at school success. As she used her research to help teachers understand the social and language backgrounds of their students, they successfully altered some of their methods. First, they related lessons to content that was familiar to the children (e.g., starting a study of "community" in social studies with photographs of their own town). Secondly, they worked carefully to help them expand their language to include school-type questions and answers. The children responded enthusiastically to lessons and tapes that respected their own usage while modeling other patterns of response. [22]

Dr. Roland G. Tharp of the University of Hawaii has recorded the impressive results of two programs designed to help culturally and linguistically different children. The first of these, the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP), was developed over the course of twenty years as a model of a "culturally compatible language arts program for kindergarten through third-grade children of Hawaiian ancestry." KEEP classrooms now serve over two thousand children each year.

Traditionally, Hawaiian children in ordinary schools have been among the lower-achieving minorities in the United States, says Dr. Tharp, but in the KEEP program they approach national norms on standard achievement tests. Perhaps even more important, they pay better attention, work more diligently, and have a much more positive relationship with the school.

The magic formula for this well-documented success is a threefold approach: first, language development activities focusing on verbal/analytic problem-solving; second, "contextualized instruction," in which teachers try to relate all learning to something that is personally meaningful to the child; and third, revision of classroom organization and student-teacher interactions to reflect the habits of the child's own culture. For example, because Hawaiian cultures value cooperation, collaboration, and close social interactions, KEEP classrooms are structured so that children work most of the time in small groups, helping and talking with each other. The teacher engages in "intense instructional conversation" with one group before moving on to another; meanwhile, the other children work on their small-group assignment.

A second KEEP program described by Dr. Tharp has been in place for six years on a Navajo reservation in Arizona. It, too, has shown notable success in reaching children whose prospects for success in school were formerly clouded. The researchers, however, soon discovered that the initial format of KEEP was not effective for children from this Native American culture, where individualism and self-sufficiency are strongly valued and where adults treat children with respectful reserve. In these schools, children are allowed to work alone or in very small groups, with the teacher moving from child to child for "lengthy, quiet individual discussions." Because of research suggesting that Native Americans, overall, score better on visual/ holistic as opposed to verbal/analytic/sequential skills, says Tharp, the Navajo classrooms use more "observational learning." Teachers are taught to present material in more holistic, visual contexts and then let the children try it themselves. Tharp contends that "successive," or linear, abilities can also be strengthened by such approaches.

Minorities are not the only students who need broader approaches, maintains Dr. Tharp, because conventional schooling is also failing to satisfy many majority-culture members. He suggests that all students in North America need new teaching strategies, including "varied activity settings, language development activities, varied sensory modalities in instruction, responsive instructional conversations, increased cooperative and group activities, and a respectful and accommodating sensitivity to students' knowledge, experience, values, and tastes." [23]

Discourse Against Delinquency

Between classes at a large urban high school in Manhattan, a youth pushes through a group of four classmates who have gathered on a stairway. Tempers flare, and suddenly, knives are drawn. Other students intercede and the dean is summoned. Who is to blame? What can be done to forestall gang retaliation?

Normally, suspension or police action might result from such an incident. In this school, however, the dean has an alternative. He summons a student mediation team, whose members have each undergone a twenty-hour training course in how to listen, phrase questions, and get disputants to talk with each other to reach agreement in a structured format. A mediator is chosen; after the disputants meet with her and air their grievances, they sign an agreement stating that the matter is settled.

Similar programs are spreading rapidly in major metropolitan areas. New York City credits the mediation agreements, 95% of which are kept, for cutting fight-related suspensions by 46-70% in the nine schools where it is used. Because of the less violent atmosphere, attendance by other students has also increased. [24]

In Chicago, "conflict resolution" has become a mandatory part of the curriculum for ninth and tenth graders in all sixty-seven high schools. A similar program developed in San Francisco has spread into elementary schools in more than thirty states. [25] Acclaimed by educators who have tried it, this technique accomplishes more than reducing discipline problems. It teaches children the value of using language and listening to manage themselves. In terms of the brain, it may be no surprise that this technique is so effective, as this is thought to be one means by which prefrontal control centers are put in charge.

Another program called "Talents Unlimited" claims similar success in teaching younger children the values of talking through problems and planning ahead. In one classroom, for example, kindergarteners eagerly participated in planning a class party.

"First we told about our plan," explains an eager five-year-old, pointing to a bulletin board on which the teacher has listed the four parts of the plan. "Then we thought of all the things we would need and put them in a list. Then we had to think of what we're going to do and put down the steps of our plan. And then we had to think of things that might spoil our plan, like if people didn't behave." [26]

Organized extensions of similar ideas into suburban as well as urban classrooms are showing students how to use verbal strategies to generate ideas, make decisions, plan, forecast, and communicate. Sponsors claim such programs can not only improve student behavior but also integrate verbal and thinking skills into the academic curriculum. Some are convinced that practicing the techniques significantly increases students' higher-order reasoning abilities.

Dozens of similar programs are being discussed. Although everyone agrees that children need to learn to think better, educators nevertheless argue about how -- and even whether -- this goal can be accomplished. Let's continue our look at some of the alternatives.