Steve Kinney

I think that, to an extent, learning disabilities are built from two angles. The first - and more traditional angle - is that the student possesses a cognitive impairment that prevents him or her from functioning normally in a classroom setting. I think that it is important to tack “in a classroom” setting onto the end of that last sentence. The learning disability may not have any tangible impact on the person’s ability to function in the real world - the job market in specific or life in general - but it certainly has an impact on the child’s ability to perform in the classroom environment.

And that’s the nature of the beast. The classroom is a litmus test for a learning disability. A child could have a myriad of cognitive abnormalities and assuming that he passed his spelling test and could read on grade level, no one would be the wiser.

This brings me to my second point. Learning disabilities are as individual as they are social. They have as much to do with the child’s performance on the task being asked of him or her as they do of the task itself.

We already know that different people are smart in different ways. Howard Gardner and other scholars have has waxed poetically on the nature of multiple intelligences. Some of us do better on visual and spatial tasks than we do listening to an hour lecture on organic chemistry - although you may argue that only a select few can survive the monotonous tone of a professional chemist for two hours straight. Things become a little more interesting when you consider that the scope of what we look for in schools is relatively limited when compared to the wide array of intelligences.

In his book - What is Intelligence? - amzn">James Flynn elaborates on the concept of a general intelligence factor - what he calls g. The main idea is that your general intelligence factor is the sum of all of the parts. He uses a decathlon as a metaphor. All of the events in the decathlon are not created equal. Some events attract more fan fare than others. The 100-meter dash is an excellent example of this. The spectacle of seeing the world fastest man causes a disproportionate amount of attention to be paid to this event ­- by both athletes as well as audience members.

If you have a penchant for writing expository essays, memorizing historical facts, and completing abstract mathematical equations on paper; you will do very well in school. Teachers and administrators will happily label you as “gifted and talented” or even as a “genius.” On the other hand, if you are unlucky enough to be born with a gift for illustrating your ideas or writing creatively, your trek will be much more difficult. If you were born to be a lawyer or a historian, then school is an excellent place for you to refine your skill set. If, on the other hand, you were born to be an artist painting in a Williamsburg loft… we’ll that’s a different story.

Everything in moderation. Flynn elaborates on the potential negative side effect of favoring certain events in the scholastic decathlon over others. The skills you need to excel at the 100-meter dash - if focused on in excess - can actually be a detriment to the other nine events. Too much speed can impair your ability to throw your body correctly for the long jump and it makes timing much more difficult. It also makes it more difficult to keep the steady rhythm necessary for jumping hurdles.

By focusing on only certain areas of intelligence in our schools, we are exacerbating the problem from two different angles. On a basic, general education level - we’re focusing all of our efforts on one or two events without regard to how this might affect their ability on the other eight. Secondly, we’re disenfranchising students who are excellent at the long jump, but terrible at the 100-meter dash.

It is important to differentiate between what I believe are two different types of “learning disabilities” (the quotes are intentional and not a stylistic hiccup). The first is what we traditionally consider - even if incorrectly - as a learning disability. That is a cognitive impairment that affects the student’s overall general intelligence. The second is a bit more nuanced and is the type that I think demands a paradigm shift in the way we approach education in the United States.

Students who fit this mold have the same general intelligence when you average all of his or her intelligence factors together, but it’s distributed differently. They possess intelligences that are not within the narrow scope focused on in schools and therefore fail the litmus test and are selected to receive special education services. Upon the initiation of those services, the student receives the narrow scope at a slower pace - which spins the wheels of everyone involved but doesn’t get anything accomplished.

I have two propositions - one modest and one a bit more lofty. I propose that we add to the already nebulous definition of a learning disability: it is a cognitive impairment that directly affects your ability to perform in school-related tasks. The second proposition is to take a Vygotskyian approach to education - to assess the individual needs of students in the classroom. Vygotsky argued that instead of assessing the student’s area of struggle and developing interventions that compensate for those deficiencies, we look for the areas where the student is strong and play to his or her strengths.

Any practicing teacher who read the previous paragraph is most like rubbing his or her temples to alleviate the pain caused by the idea of assessing twenty-five students and subsequently developing twenty-five different curricula and executing twenty-five different lessons. Education policy makers tend to make the same mistakes in perpetuity. Every time they come across a good idea - even if it is one from 80 years ago, as in the case of Vygotsky - they try to fit it into the current model. I believe that this is the case in the way we approach inclusion in contemporary schools. I am an advocate of inclusion, but not our implementation of it.

In order to positively impact the effectiveness of our schools, we need to take a step back and rethink the way in which we approach schooling and the labels we use. There are a lot of aspects that work. But there is no reason to believe that the currently educational paradigm, formed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, is still the best option as we enter the Information Age.

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