LD Resources

© 1997 Tom Hunt
thuntjr@aol.com

Recently, I read the following passage in a biology textbook. As one of the classic illustrations of natural selection, it may be familiar to you. It reads:

“Until the 1850′s, dark gray peppered moths were rare, and were treasured by British butterfly collectors. Almost all peppered moths were cream colored. Around 1850, however, dark peppered moths started to become more common, usually in heavily industrialized areas. By 1950, peppered moth populations near industrial centers consisted almost entirely of dark individuals. Why did the frequency of dark peppered moths increase? Darwin’s theory of natural selection suggests a hypothesis. The color change coincided with a great increase in the number of factories in England. Previously white tree trunks were blackened by heavy pollution from these factories. Perhaps dark colored moths sitting on soot-darkened bark escaped being eaten by birds because it was hard for the birds to see the dark moths against the dark background…”

At about the same time, I read in a recent issue in USA Today that the number of U.S. children and teens taking Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder more than doubled between 1990 and 1995. About 2.8% of people under 19–1.5 million–are on the stimulant drug. After I finished reading the article I thought about those dark gray peppered moths that started appearing in Britain at the dawn of the Industrial Age. Here we are at the dawn of a new age, the Information Age, and we are witnessing an explosion in the number of diagnosed cases of ADD. Could it be that the electronic landscape of the Information Age is changing human minds just as the industrial landscape “changed” the color of butterfly wings 150 years ago? If so, what are the features of modern life that may be contributing to the increase in ADD–and LD–minds? I would like to spend a little time exploring the landscape of our burgeoning electronic culture, the effects this landscape might have on the growing minds of those who are born into it, and the implications for educators.

When I was in high school in the mid-seventies, the landscape looked considerably different than it does today. We didn’t have a computer lab in school, nor did we have a computer department. We had a small room with two old computers staffed by nobody. The computers were there for the few students who were smart enough or interested enough to use them on their own. I don’t recall there being any computer stores, although I’m sure there must have been a few. There certainly weren’t the megacomputer stores, the Circuit Cities, that dot our landscape today. There were no software stores as you find in many of today’s malls. There were no video stores because there were no VCRs. There were no megatheatre complexes. There was no MTV because there was no Cable Television. I had never heard the word virtual reality much less seen any application of virtual reality technology. The only video games I remember were Pong and PacMan, the crude progenitors of today’s slick video games. The Macintosh, which made the personal computer accessible to the masses, came out in 1984, six years after I graduated from high school, and Nintendo, a year later. What I do remember is the huge General Motors Assembly Plant in Framingham, which my mother and I used to pass on the way to Stop & Shop, and which is now a large auction house.

So it is not surprising that there were few electronic distractions in our household. We had a stereo with old KLH speakers and a television with five or six channels. Because I had little difficulty reading to music, the television was the only gadget that took me away from my reading. More often than not, however, I didn’t allow it to. Having been read to at an early age and having seen my parents read most every evening, I developed an early love for reading. Having been exposed regularly to the written word when my mind was at it’s most plastic, my mind was literally wired for reading. I didn’t realize at the time that as my mother and father were reading to me, and later, as I began reading to myself, my brain was being configured into a reading machine. The complex web of neural connections that my reading produced laid the foundation for a lifetime of reading, reflecting, and attending. There was little in the culture outside our home that could exercise as powerful an influence over my developing mind as reading.

That would certainly not be the case today. In a recent issue of the Boston Globe, John Yemma described the difference between the “old world,” the world of my childhood, and the “new world:”

The old world was linear… Johann Gutenberg’s breakthrough invention of movable type didn’t just give us the means to tell the story of the past 500 years but reinforced the linearity of that story. Charles Dickens was the killer application of Gutenberg. The words march across the page, accumulating line by line, resolving every issue. The new world, says Mark Taylor, a professor of religion at Williams College, in Williamstown, is a riot of ideas, tangents, and experiences… Taylor calls this the “electrosphere.” The Gutenberg-style text is still around. It still tells stories and even attempts to explain the new age… But the full message of post- modern civilization can only be told, says Taylor, through what is known as hypertext. Hypertext is where words, images, sound, context, and feedback combine to convey information… Hypertext is what a really good CD-ROM or a powerful workstation with a superfast Internet hookup can provide–not just gussied up print, not simply TV via computer or the Web via television, but an appropriate application of media depending on content. Hypertext, Taylor says, is the way the story of our future will be told… The way people thought in the pre-Gutenberg era was very different from how we think in our half-millennium-old print culture. And the print-era thinking is going to have to yield to multimedia thinking.

As I read this, I thought again of Darwin’s dark gray peppered moths. Are many of today’s LD and ADD children the dark gray peppered moths of the dawning electronic age, possessing minds that are shaped by an image-laden, language-impoverished culture and uniquely adapted for that culture? Jane Healy poses the question in her book Endangered Minds. She asks Dr. Marian Diamond, a professor of neuroanatomy at the University of California, if the brains of children, like those of rats, can be changed by their environment. The professor’s response:

“To those of us in the field, there is absolutely no doubt that culture changes brains, and there’s no doubt in my mind that children’s brains are changing. Whatever they’re learning, as those nerve cells are getting input, they are sending out dendritic branches. As long as stimuli come in to a certain area, you get more branching; if you lose the stimuli, they stop branching. It is the pattern of the branching that differentiates among us.”

Later, she asks Dr. William T. Greenough, a professor at the University of Illinois, whether all language should develop almost automatically from a minimum of environment exposure, or whether higher-level language abilities might depend more on special amounts and types of input into the system. Greenough’s response:

“My opinion is that language development is heavily experience dependent and therefore would have a great deal to do with how a child is reared. Hypothetically, a child who grew up receiving a great deal of their input from television, for example, might be different from children who grew up getting input from an individual speaker.

Healy then asks “If they get different types of language input, could the language areas of children’s brains be subtly different from those of twenty years ago?” Greenough’s response:

“I think you can make a case for it, although our work can only indirectly say anything about that. What we know is that the brain very selectively can be shown to respond to it’s particular experiences; if an animal, for example, learns a motor task, you see very selective changes in the brain regions that govern that task; so that there is no question that these changes are highly specific to the events that produce them. It’s certainly conceivable that a major difference in the way in which kids grew up would lead to a major difference in brain organization for information processing.”

Anyone who has been in teaching for a while will tell you that students don’t pay attention as well, or listen as well, or read or write as well as students did twenty, even ten, years ago. We daily observe “an overall mental restlessness, an inability to persist in solving problems, reading ‘hard’ books, or doing work perceived as ‘boring.’ ”

If today’s students lack the neural structures necessary to read and write sophisticated texts and to listen well, what are their brains configured for? We know all too well what abilities they’re losing but what abilities are they gaining by immersing themselves in the interactive, multimedia, high speed, non-linear technology of our electronic culture?

In a recent issue of Business Week, the writer of a cover story on the video generation relates the following story:

“It was late October, and the lights had been dimmed in the Beckman conference center at the University of California at Irvine. The chief technology officer at Total Entertainment Network, which runs a popular game site on the Web, was demonstrating how a group of players in cyberspace could match wits in an animated shoot-’em-up called Quake.

Seated around the large projection screen were 62 computer-simulation experts from the Defense Department, the entertainment industry, and Silicon Valley. TEN’s David King was trying to explain the game and play it at the same time–and he was getting creamed. As embarrassment mounted, 13-year-old Fred Zyda, son of one of the meeting organizers, walked over and gently nudged King from the keyboard. He sized up King’s online opponents, then methodically set about blowing them away.”

The author then notes that

Fred and millions like him get more than amusement from intensive electronic game play: They acquire new ways of learning. They’re honing special graphics and motor skills. They can process huge amounts of visual information in parallel. On a daily basis they scope out new rules, grasp the operating rules, navigate bewildering 3D geographies, and jump through abstract mental hoops with concentration usually reserved for competitive test-taking.

William D. Winn, director of the Learning Center at the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology Laboratory says that “kids who absorb this technology early think differently from the rest of us. They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It’s as though their cognitive strategies were parallel, not sequential.”

Just as the darkened wings of the peppered moths was an adaptive change that increased their prospects for survival in the Industrial Age, in a similar way the reconfigured brains of today’s children might increase their prospects for “survival” in an Electronic Age. The author of the Business Week article continues:

The kids learn to embrace technological changes with equanimity. That’s critical because, in 10 or 15 years, they will bring their attitudes and skills into a workplace filled with fast-changing technology. We can’t predict exactly what they’re professional tools will look like, but they will be rich in graphical simulation and will be in a state of continual evolution. Good jobs will go to candidates who can respond with speed and flexibility. Says Sanjiv Patel, Motorola’s manager of advanced manufacturing technology “kids who grow up with electronic games develop coordination skills that let them navigate quickly in virtual worlds and carry out necessary tasks.”

What kinds of necessary tasks will these electronic whiz kids be able to carry out in the modern workplace? They’ll be able to operate the virtual reality tools that Motorola uses to drill manufacturing workers on virtual production lines before letting them operate complicated machinery; or use visual simulations to track portfolios, economic indicators, capital flows, and geopolitical risks on Wall Street; or use graphical software to test and order key components for companies like Boeing and McDonnell Douglass. Soon, with the help of new software tools such as virtual-reality modeling language, a manufacturer of ships, aircraft, or other large systems will be able to visit a supplier’s Web site, download 3-D models of parts, rotate them in space, and incorporate them into full simulations of the final product to see how they work, all before signing an order. Those adults who have grown up on sophisticated video and computer games will be the designers and operators of these new systems–and, in some cases, the owners of the companies that produce and or/use the systems. For although their ability to attend to several details at once and to act quickly may have gotten them labeled as distractible and impulsive in traditional school settings, in the high-speed world of computers, distractibility is “multi-tasking” or “parallel processing,” and impulsiveness is often decisiveness, both attributes of the successful entrepreneur.

It is not surprising that children should take to the multimedia environment like the proverbial fish in water, because as Stephen Jay Gould notes, we are highly visual animals:

“Primates are visual animals.” explains Gould. “No other group of mammals relies so strongly on sight. Our attraction to images as a source of understanding is both primal and pervasive. Writing, with its linear sequencing of ideas, is a historical afterthought in the history of human cognition.”

Unfortunately, many of the children who will someday thrive in the image-rich, hypertextual work environments of the Information Age must spend the prime of their youth in schools mired in the linearity of the Industrial Age. As a result, they spend lots of time learning in ways antagonistic to their own biology and come to believe they are defective. They become bored, apathetic, depressed, or angry, which merely confirms people’s impressions that they are flawed. How are we to help these children rediscover the joy of learning, and in the process, rediscover their true selves?

First, we should open our eyes to what’s happening. The litany of statistics the guardians of the culture routinely adduce as evidence of a moral failure–the declining SAT and GRE scores, the survey results showing that only 20% of 17-year olds can write an organized job-application letter or that 50% of students entering a particular community college are reading below the ninth-grade level–creates the impression that our culture is slipping when all it really shows is that it is changing. To be able to see and accept that the decline in print literacy is an inevitable and irresistible consequence of a cultural sea change in the way children process information, we need to let go of some of our deepest loyalties and examine our most cherished assumptions. For those of us who fell in love with reading growing up, who developed habits of attention and reflection reading great books, who were taught that one can’t get a decent job if one doesn’t read and write well or that one can’t think well if one doesn’t use language well, this won’t be easy. Thomas West, in a remarkable essay titled Images and Reversals: “Talking Less, Drawing More”, explains the difficulty of cultivating the “disinterested view” that people of our generation must cultivate if we are ever to meet our students on their own electronic turf:

I expect the new technology of computer graphics and data visualization to deeply transform our own culture, gradually shifting from a world based largely on words to a new world where images will have a much more important role–a new world where the real action will be in learning to develop deep and sophisticated understandings of complex systems by internalizing complex moving images. Building models in the mind. But how can we be confident that these new changes are taking place? Sometimes it is most useful to stand back a distance in order to see the picture whole. Calder points out that it is really quite difficult to cultivate the disinterested view. He notes that “even the most skeptical historians seem barely able to distance themselves from the assumptions of their culture.” Accordingly, nearly “everyone takes it for granted that reading and writing are blessings,” but our education provides us with little awareness of the “high levels of sophistication” attained by illiterate peoples–such as reading the stars and ocean currents well enough to navigate the Pacific. He notes that “skill in archery may have been as important as writing in shaping the course of history.”

It is to be expected, Calder notes, that there should be some self-promotion among the makers and users of books. Schools, in their own limited view, he says, measure the “worth of young citizens” based on their “facility in the cumbersome information technology displayed on the wafer of wood pulp in your hands.”

Our education gives us little awareness that “most humans have lived and died unable to read and write, and some bright individuals are dyslexic.” However, Calder observes that “new technologies may soon make the art as outmoded as oarsmanship for galleys.” So he concludes, the “emphasis laid upon literacy by scholars who earn their living with written words appears self-serving.” If we take a really long view, then perhaps we can see how even those who appear to be well-educated may have special difficulty in seeing what is actually taking place. It may be too close to home.

If seeing the situation clearly requires taking a “disinterested view,” then responding intelligently to the changes rocking our culture and shaping our students’ minds requires taking an “interested” view. In this case, the interests we have in mind are the students.’ Taking this view is an act of generosity. It is saying “I think I know how your mind works, and because I know, I know how difficult it must be for you to sit still and listen for an extended period of time; to remember huge quantities of information for a test; to read Shakespeare; to write a ten page research paper. So what constitutes an intelligent response? An intelligent response would be to teach traditional subjects in nontraditional ways–ways that reflect our understanding of how our students learn best. For most students this would mean reading the hypertext version of Hamlet rather than reading the book version; building a terrarium for the science fair or creating computer simulations of an ecosystem instead of memorizing a bunch of ecological facts; creating a HyperCard stack of a human cell instead of memorizing cell parts; creating books of original poetry; doing original research in the rain forest in addition to reading about the rain forest; reenacting the signing of The Declaration of Independence in addition to reading about it. Another intelligent response would be to add nontraditional offerings to the curriculum. Courses in Computer Aided Design, Landscape Architecture, Mechanical Engineering, and Computer Animation would appeal to those students who struggle with the demands of reading and writing and excel at pattern recognition, systems analysis, and other right brain tasks. There are many other intelligent responses we might make, but rather than elaborate on them here, perhaps it would be useful to list the characteristics of a curriculum that might work for the bulk of today’s children. All of the nontraditional methods and subjects I described above share at least some of the following characteristics: they are interactive, multimedia, experiential, constructive, and project-oriented as opposed to passive, text-based, regurgitative, and lesson-oriented.

There are of course some children who have not bought into the electronic culture. These children might enjoy and do well in a traditional curriculum taught by traditional methods. They will learn to write and read sophisticated texts and will use those abilities later in life to read voluminous law briefs or write blockbuster novels. At Forman, however, these students are few; the vast majority of our students will not make a living doing something that involves a high level of print literacy. Many have, after all, been hit with a double wammy. As the first generation to cut its teeth in a culture drenched in multimedia technology, their brains are not designed to produce or process sophisticated language; as a result many experience secondary attention deficits in traditional school settings. These are the children I’ve been focusing on in this talk. They have what Ned Hallowell calls “pseudo” ADD or “culturally-induced” ADD. Unfortunately, some of these same children who have culturally-induced attention deficits also have organic or primary attention and language deficits. These children find reading and writing difficult under the best of circumstances but to be born into a culture that no longer supports the development of reading and writing makes acquiring higher-level reading and writing skills especially difficult.

To say that these students probably will not make a living requiring sophisticated reading and writing skills is not to be defeatist. It is to be realistic. It is to to say that their minds are beautifully equipped to do things they have yet to discover because of the old guard’s stubborn insistence that the ability to read and write is important for everybody, even for those who must sacrifice their selves–their cheerfulness, their autonomy, their equanimity–in their struggle to learn something which comes easily to those who declaim it’s value.

Lest you think we are abandoning our mission to prepare your children for college, let me reassure you, we are not. As long as colleges continue to place heavy writing and reading demands on students, we will continue to provide the best possible reading and writing instruction for your child. As the Chair of the Language Training Department, it’s my job to make sure that is happening. At the same time, however, it’s absolutely critical that we provide opportunities for students to discover what their minds are made to do.

Up to this point, schools have made too little effort in this direction. Our response to children who have problems paying attention in school has been to label them with a disorder, put them on Ritalin and provide various accommodations. Perhaps this is the best we can do within the traditional paradigm. The alternative is to diagnose the schools with a disorder. We could call it dyspedagogia, a developmental delay that describes schools stuck in the Industrial Age. We would insist that schools change the way they teach kids because we recognize that today’s kids need a different approach.

I’m confident that they will change. When the great divide that separates those whose formative years preceded the electronic explosion of the 1980s (teachers and parents) and those who were born on the cusp of the explosion (students) shrinks; that is, when our students become teachers and school administrators and have children whose minds have been similarly shaped by the electronic culture, more decision makers will have experienced for themselves the stultifying effects of traditional classrooms on contemporary minds. And they won’t stand for it. The schools will be cured of dyspedagogia, and the students who once had deficits of one sort or another, will discover that they have been cured as well.