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.