by Jan Hunt

Imagine for a moment that you are visiting a plant nursery. You hear a commotion outside, so you investigate. You find a young assistant struggling with a rose bush – he is trying to force open the petals of a rose, and muttering in frustration. You ask him what he is doing, and he explains, "My boss wants all these roses to bloom this week, so last week I taped all the early ones, and now I’m opening the late ones." You protest that every rose has it’s own schedule of blooming; it is absurd to try to slow down or speed this up; it doesn’t matter when roses bloom; a rose will always bloom at its own best time. You look at the rose again, and see that it is wilting. But when you point this out, he replies, "Oh, too bad, it has genetic dysbloomia. I’ll have to call an expert." "No, no!" you say, "you caused the wilting! All you needed to do was meet the flowers’ needs for water and sunshine, and leave the rest to nature!" You can’t believe this is happening. Why is his boss so unrealistic and uninformed about roses?

Such a scene would never take place in a nursery, of course, but it happens daily in our schools. Teachers, pressured by their bosses, follow official timetables, which demand that all children learn at the same rate, and in the same way. Yet children are no different than roses in their development: they are born with the capacity and desire to learn, they learn at different rates, and they learn in different ways. If we can meet their needs, provide a safe, nurturing environment, and keep from interfering with our doubts, anxieties, and arbitrary timetables, then – like roses – they will all bloom at their own best time.

My heart goes out to those children who have been labeled "ADHD" ("attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder"), the latest "learning disability" label. Many educators and researchers believe that these children and their families have been cruelly deceived by the use of these labels. Dr. Thomas Armstrong, a former learning disabilities specialist, changed professions when he "began to see how this notion of learning disabilities was handicapping all of our children by placing the blame for a child’s learning failure on mysterious neurological deficiencies in the brain instead of on much needed reforms in our system of education." Dr. Armstrong turned instead to the concept of learning differences, and wrote In Their Own Way, a fascinating and practical guide to seven "personal learning styles" first proposed by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner. Dr. Armstrong urges us to abandon convenient but harmful labels such as "dyslexia" and focus on the real problem of "dysteachia". He warns that "our schools are selling millions of kids short by writing them off as underachievers, when in reality they are disabled only by poor teaching methods."

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