Learning is not just one of the things we do. Everything we do, in every moment of life, involves learning; every movement we move, every emotion we feel, every thought we think, every word we speak, and every belief we believe. Babies learn to become children, children learn to become teens, and teens learn to become adults. From gene expressions and brain wiring to social-emotional development, linguistic proficiency, abstract thinking, self-reflexivity, artistic expression, academic achievement, vocational success, professional development… and on and on… every aspect of human life involves learning. (see: Redefining Learning) Learning, far more than any other human activity shapes each and all of our lives (see also: “I” Am Learned, “We” Are Learned).
How well we grow through the traumas, challenges, and disadvantages we experience depends on how well we learn through the traumas, challenges, and disadvantages we experience. How well we rise to meet the opportunities and advantages we encounter in life, depends on how well we learn to rise to those opportunities and advantages. From our emotional health and maturity to our mental health and wisdom, our innermost growth and outermost achievement depends on our learning. Not just what we learn or how we learn, our lives depend on how well we learn in general – on the healthiness of our life-learning.
Learning can be profoundly unhealthy. Learning Has a Dark Side
Learning doesn’t care. Learning can be physically, emotionally, socially, linguistically, cognitively, intellectually, and academically maladaptive. Most of our unhealthy behaviors are learned (see: Unhealthy Learning). Children can learn in ways that misorient or mis-scaffold their learning (see: Maladaptive Cognitive Schema). Children can learn in ways that motivate them to avoid learning that might make them feel bad about themselves (see: Mind-Shame). Certainties and beliefs enslave our learning (see: Mental Models). Learning can be learning disabling; we can learn in ways that result in acquired learning disabilities (see: Institute).
Unnatural Learning. Natural and Artificial Modes of Learning
We only sense now. We only feel now. We only think now. We only learn now. We are naturally ‘wired’ to learn from what is happening on the living edge of now. But modern human life requires an unnaturally different kind of learning. Reading, writing, math, and all their abstract, conventional, and technological outgrowths, require our brains to process information in complexly artificial ways (like a machine). Whereas we learn to move, feel, touch, smell, taste, hear, emote, walk, and talk by reference to the immediate internal feel of learning them, in the artificial domains we learn from the external, abstract, authority of who or what we are learning from. In natural modes of learning, we learn from immediately synchronous (self-generated) feedback on the edge of participating (falling while walking). In the artificial modes, (other-provided) feedback can be way out of ‘sync’ with the learning it relates to (test results in school provide feedback far downstream from the learning they measure). Most of the children who struggle in school are struggling with artificial learning challenges. In reading, for example, our brains must process a human invented ‘code’ and construct a simulation of language. Reading requires our brains to perform in ways that are as artificial and machine-like as an MP3 player.
Today’s Unprecedented Challenge
than how well they can learn when they get there.
This site has four intentions: 1) to engage you and learn together; 2) to present elements of the neurological, cognitive, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, educational, vocational, social, economic, and political “case” for “stewarding the health of our children’s learning” – for becoming fundamentally concerned with learning to care for how healthily our children learn their way into becoming adults; 3) to present distinctions critical to differentiating healthy and ‘unhealthy learning‘, and 4) to introduce new models of virtual and real-world relationships that exhibit this ‘stewarding healthy learning’ orientation in action (click on any word on any page of this site (and keep clicking it) to experience one such model.
“We can no longer assume that what we think children should learn
is more important than how well they can learn.”
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Like your research. I live in Scotland with a respected education system but it unfortunately fails the children who do not just fit it. My son who took 7 years to get the diagnosis of Autistic Spectrum disorder has been out of education for 2 years and will be leaving the system with no qualifications which is so sad for me as he is intelligent and has a good memory for information. He has dyslexia which schooling wouldn’t diagnose until he was 11 years old teachers thought he would progress naturally so tests weren’t done and home work became an issue. I think you are correct and I believe if my son had had help with his dyslexia early it could have stopped him from avoiding education altogether because of lack of confidence. Just because a child looks able it doesn’t mean they aren’t struggling anf often the children struggling are embarrassed and just muddle on or drop out of education early. I personally think there is not the input or provision in place that there should be and educational experiences differ from school and teachers like a lottery, unfortunately my son was unlucky.
Thank you for sharing, Alexandra. I’m sorry to read of your son’s story. There are so many millions of children suffering from the learned delusion that they can’t learn and that their difficulties are somehow their fault. Your story exemplifies the acquisition and consequences of ‘mind-shame‘. But the reason this is so pervasively perpetuated is not specific to dyslexia. Our systemic incompetence in dealing with dyslexia is but one ‘tip of the iceberg’ symptom of our general ignorance and negligence about learning. Children are learning to be ashamed of their minds in a great many other social and educational situations (that are less obvious). If we cared about the health of our children’s learning – if that was our starting point and center of reference – your son’s story would be different. I’m not saying that some dyslexia isn’t innate, rather that the difference between the initially innate condition and how it manifests in actual processing is learned. The pathway from the innate condition to optimal performance is always learning. The best thing we can ever do is steward the healthiness of that learning. Everything else is a statistically contrived protocol – it will work for some and make things worse for others.
” “How, then, did our primate brain learn to read?”Consider that while we now only conedisr understanding words on paper as reading ,that the ability to understand natural marks in nature and develop a story and meaning was important to the primate and later man to survive. That pile of animal dung, temperature,smell, taste, appearance and composition in combination with specific shaped and size of marks on the ground could convey paragraphs of written material. By reading the signs that early man could know what animals passed, how long ago, what direction, how fast, how many, how big and what they had been eating and probably when they last had water.How long would it take a modern man to learn to read and understand that natural language? I would guess years.Man understood the need to read signs and symbols before writing and the better readers prospered more than the poor readers just like today.
Yes, very well spoken Muhammad…But the difference is that our English written alphabet is a technology that is NOT NATURAL to our immediate and intimate senses. Therefore the “poor/better” readers are now subject to an artificially contrived convention, Yes?
I don’t remember not being able to read eiethr. I read *all the time* though – I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t read! What’s really amazing is when you see a 4-year-old just pick up a book and read – that’s what my daughter did. I have no idea how she did it, and after the struggle I had with my older daughter, I just kind of watched in wide-eyed amazement. No one really “taught” her. She’s 5 now and reads over my shoulder, and except for longer words does pretty well with it (I have to watch what I have up on here sometimes!)The human brain is a wondrous thing, isn’t it? And the later readers do catch up – my older daughter (7) went from not being able to read on entering 1st grade to reading chapter books independently half way through that year.
I work at a professional level with pre-school educators and childcare services and it is an area where there is a huge gulf between theoretical understanding and practice of child development. I feel that there is a need for a massive paradigm shift in what we understand by “education” before nursery schools can begin to deliver healthy learning. I think the debates on these pages are so necessary. I do also have a personal story a bit similar to yours, Alexandra which brings home painfully how much our education systems fail our children. My son, now 17 was at primary school in Scotland and although on entry to P1 was assessed, it was never followed up for all the reasons you quote, even though he showed classic signs of dyspraxia – very poor spatial awareness and coordinaton. We left for France and since the age of 9 has been educated at French state schools. His school life was chaotic but he achieved passes at crucial moments just allowing him to squeeze through to the next stage. Now a year before his final school exams he has hit a wall. He has a positive diagnosis of dyspraxia (done without help or support from school – luckily I have a cousin who is a GP who gave me invaluable advise), and has quit school feeling a total failure. We support him and build his confidence but it feels like we are constantly having to repair the damage the education systems inflict on him …. this is the sad truth of it and it makes me angry and very determined to do what I can in my small way to open eyes and minds to how different it could be.
David, what you are doing is truly wonderful, and I appreciate all your work and effort. I love Rick Lavoie too and love all the work he does. I guess as a mom with 2 dyslexic children, the big question I have, can the system change? I don’t see it happening. Everything you talk about makes perfect sense, but those that hold the cards in education, I don’t believe have kids on their minds. Teachers are not even trained properly to teach reading anymore, they are forced to use the John Dewey ideals, which have been around well over 80 years. Accessability starts from the heart, there has to be a will from those that have the grip hold on the system to want to help our children. The biggest problem the parents have is the fight with their schools. We parents have to become lawyers, doctors, and teachers now. Most parents I know have to actually teach their children, because of all this learning through discovery methods. The fix is easy to me, just go back to the basics and lay that foundation down, and build from there, but if one has never mastered those basics, they will struggle in everything, and society views those folks as misfits, like there is something wrong with them because they don’t conform. Thank goodness parents can still homeschool for now, and Think, it’s not illegal, yet. Society needs to start preserving and protecting life, will it? I look at all these kids that struggle, and feel sick everyday, what have we done to our children? The value of life is getting less and less, it’s like these kids are just treated as animals. I hope and pray that someday we adults can change, and access how to better serve our children. Thank You.
Thanks for your comment Holly. Your question “can the system change?” is one of the key questions. But the problem isn’t reading or going back to basics. It’s much deeper and more insidious. In my view it’s how we have learned to think about ‘learning’ – how we compartmentalize it into the status of a mental utility rather than the central dynamic of being human. Like I said in COTC PHASE 2, “for every child and adult who struggles and for all of us as a society, ’reading problems are always a consequence of ‘learning problems'”. Having a misorienting view of learning infects everything about how we think about educating and parenting. We could never have gone to the moon or developed the modern digital world with Newtonian physics. We needed a revolution in our basic assumptions to take the next steps. Same for education. Most efforts to reform education are analogous to rearranging the litter box and expecting a new breed of cat to jump out it. Until we understand the vast and profound dimensions of learning in our lives (that we are currently oblivious too) our efforts to improve the ‘system’ will be misguided and only prolong our ultimate challenges. Your children are fortunate to have a mom who cares enough to learn how to help them. For every family like yours there are probably 20 that haven’t a clue what to do. As for ‘someday we adults’ changing… Yes, that is the tipping point and for me we could best describe it as “no longer assuming that what we think children should learn is more important than how well they can learn”. Thanks and all the best, David
Children learn to walk naturally, that is, without explicit instruction, simply because children are their own ready instruments-and-contraption. This is unlike both probabilistic spelling codes and really giant bicycles, neither of which are readily learned even by adults who’ve never experienced either kind of contraption. A one-to-one spelling code is like a scooter bike: such a bike is relatively easy to learn to ride, because its tipping altitude is only inches off the ground. Whereas, a probabilistic code is like that really giant bike: if you haven’t yet acquired the instinct to which riding a bike is a mere extension of the ability of walking, then, even without ‘bad’ instruction, being pushed into trying to learn to ride that giant bike is likely to be that much more frustrating. How badly can you be instructed in learning to blink if you already know how? Answer: not likely bad at all, and only if some/all of your own instincts about it are more-or-less prevented by the mechanics or manner of the instruction.
A probabilistic spelling code is not itself a disadvantage. At worst, it is the key point of opposition to a society which, both because of and in spite of its sheer economic success, is made up mostly of parents who far more effectively are concerned with whether their child is ‘admirably’ ‘keeping up with the Jones’s kid’ than they are with whether their child is keeping up with himself. These are not those parents in third world countries who live in such poverty-of-advantage that they do not expect their children ever to get a better life than they had growing up. No, these are parents who see worldly success so promisingly within reach that they become not only greedy for it, but feel themselves robbed of it at any point at which they get less of it than they expect.
David, I really connected with your “Children of the Code” segment. The interviews were wonderful. I could go back to many references to processing speed but that would take me too much time to ask about specific interviewees expressions. What can specifically be done to help my child with their coding issue, as in processing speed sub score on WISC-IV which is percentile at 5%. His vocabulary is (93%). Our son actually has very good comprehension even with the holes in the text he is able to read. He remarkably is able to figure out answers and is a good test taker because of this ability…but he will even tell you that he skims because he cannot read it all and it is easier for him to focus his mind on words he knows and make assumptions about the content, than to read comprehensively and try to figure out the jumble.
His struggles with reading, spelling and his greatest struggle writing have persisted throughout his schooling, currently he is in 6th grade. He has had extensive remediation, more importantly we have shared with him his great strengths and his core weakness’s…at this point the shame factor is somewhat controlled by our unwavering and unquestioned stance with him and his teachers that he is in fact trying his hardest with written words, that the breakdown in his processing abilities are pervasive and that we are doing all we can to find a solution to this. In the mean time we are quite clear that he can learn other ways, which are just as valid as reading to gather information at school. He maintains high grades but we know he suffers daily from not being able to read, spell or write with out tremendous frustration and concentration and effort. I really admire what he is able to accomplish even when it is generally illegible. He reads a novel every week or two using bookshare and he loves to read this way…text to voice.
What are your thoughts on his processing speed and what can we do to help build this area, or is it set and fixed? It seems to be the common denominator in his persistent inability to code and encode.
What are your thoughts on digital text that allows him access to books by way of text to speech?
What specific ideas do you have to adjust the learning environment to avoid the shame factor these kids experience?
Hello Robbi,
Thank you for sharing you and your son’s situation with me. Ben is very fortunate to have such a carefully learning oriented mother! To your questions:
What are your thoughts on his processing speed and what can we do to help build this area, or is it set and fixed? It seems to be the common denominator in his persistent inability to code and encode.
Yes. The brain machinery of reading must operate at or above a certain speed threshold or it just doesn’t work. Yet, remember, that speed is relative to processing efficiency. The worse the processing efficiency the greater the speed required (for any given time critical processing task). Using a computer analogy you might say that the user’s experience of a machine’s performance can be made more fluidly responsive by increasing the speed of the hardware or by increasing the efficiency of the software involved in processing.
I often suggest ping-pong and the Simon game. Getting better at ping pong exercises the speed of attention. Though more motoric, it is still exercising visual/attentional tracking and unconscious decision making. The Simon Game exercises auditory discrimination and auditory memory and stretches both into greater speed. You could use a number of other board and card games and add a ‘rapid naming’ component to how they are played. Similar to ‘eye spy’, you could engage in naming as many things as possible while out for a drive (things the car is passing by quickly).
FastForward and other neuroplasticity-science based products are also designed to exercise discrimination, speed, and memory. Though I appreciate the science principles in play in the design of such products I don’t have enough unbiased opinions about their effectiveness to recommend them. (see “Processing Distinctions” and all the “speed” points in the Brain’s Challenge chapter, and the video note from me about how the reading stream (constructed/simulated language stream) must move at a pace approximating the speed the brain is accustomed to understanding spoken language.
In addition to boosting underlying processing speed, the other area to explore is ‘processing errors’. For that you’d have to a good understanding of his high frequency mistakes and then use exercises that isolate and vivify his processing errors while providing him with real-time corrective feedback. As a prop for learning to cue him through his errors try this (open to the “cues”) If you try this, please share your thoughts.
What are your thoughts on digital text that allows him access to books by way of text to speech?
“Potentially addictive yet probably necessary training wheels” – I would certainly use them to help compensate for his reading inefficiency so he doesn’t fall behind in his classes. Everywhere possible I would have him read along with what he is listening to. I also recommend contextualizing the use of these as temporary conveniences. You don’t want to demotivate learning to read.
What specific ideas do you have to adjust the learning environment to avoid the shame factor these kids experience?
The learning environment must be careful with shame. Stewards (parents, teachers and other involved adults) should help children contextualize their emotional experience of the challenge of learning to read in a way that minimizes their propensity for self-blame. Generally speaking, everyone (family, educators, peers) need to learn about how learning disabling shame can be and become more careful with how they prompt it.
Thanks Robbi. Good luck and please so share more as you go forth learning to steward the health of your son’s learning.
David
NO email to write to you? MY comment is for the experts in education, not for all readers.
You can email us through our ‘contacts’ page
Learning Activist: I love what you are doing, but I think you have left out a significant portion of the population by focusing exclusively on children in a educational setting. I believe the greatest educational setting is the home where mother, father, and siblings are the major teachers, Do we eliminate them from the educational system or include them in the process? I suggest we start with the recipients of our passed ignorance, the primary caretakers of a new generation (parents) in order to insert a missing piece of a healthy human environment experiment.
We couldn’t agree more about the home. Have you seen Magic Ladder’s “Home and Family” portal (https://mlc.learningstewards.org/parents/) or any of the comments from parents (https://bit.ly/3opB9F3). We’ve also developed a parental learning event designed to help parents reorient how they learn into stewarding their children’s learning. If you are interested in collaborating along these lines let us know. Thanks.
Hi, My comments are about more then simply “The Home”, although it includes “the Home”. My comments are more about the individual living environment in which a person grows and develops, particularly the environment created by Mother and Father each of whom grew up in a separate and different environment.
It seems, in my initial reading, your philosophy and programs are more oriented towards “Children” at the beginning school level and their ability/inability to read and learn. You do not seem to be talking to adults (Parents) about the causes of the ability/inability to read and learn.
I believe their stewardship is contingent upon this knowledge. But maybe your “parental learning event designed to help parents reorient how they learn” is what I’m talking about. I have not seen enough of this program to understand what is included or how it addresses my ideas and concerns.
Thank you for listening. I appreciate the conversation.
Jim
Thanks Jim. We seem kindred. We are very concerned with the healthiness of EVERYONE’s learning (or better said, reducing the unhealthy learning that perpetuates so many human crises). Have a look at the “Keys” pages (in the menu bar) to get a sense of our breadth. We focus on children’s reading as it exemplifies so many misconceptions about learning in general and because it’s a fulcrum for change, but we are concerned with so much more. Also the broader societal / adult views expressed here https://learningstewards.org/2020-vision/ might interest you and if you haven’t read it yet, please try “1st person learning”https://learningstewards.org/first-person-learning/. Thanks again.