Dyscalculia

Never heard of dyscalculia? According to this article by a dyscalculia expert:

Dyscalculia is a collection of symptoms of learning disability involving the most basic aspect of arithmetical skills. On the surface, these relate to basic concepts such as: telling the time, calculating prices and handling change, and measuring and estimating things such as temperature and speed.

I am more than a little bit skeptical about this label. Screening for dyscalculia can cost hundreds of dollars, as can specialized tutoring. Students who are diagnosed with dyscalculia can receive special education through the schools, and a new market in educational materials targeting kids with dyscalculia has sprung up out of nowhere. The cost of education just went up again, and for what? Does this label actually help a kid learn math? Well, maybe it does, if it's the only way a child can receive decent math instruction in school. The expert column I cited above goes on to say:

Dyscalculic learners lack an intuitive grasp of numbers and have problems learning number facts and procedures by the usual methods of teaching. Even when these learners produce a correct answer or use a correct method, they may do so mechanically and without confidence; they are anxious about it.

One objective of remedial instruction should be to improve learners' self-esteem by giving them real-life exposure to mathematics as a part of everyday life: ingredients needed in baking a cake, checking the change after purchasing something, or making estimations.

First of all, read that first sentence again. Why do we diagnose the child with a disability rather than questioning the teaching methods, if the problem is caused "...by the usual methods of teaching"? Secondly, how is it that we classify relating math to the real world (as in Family Math) as remedial instruction? Why should we expect most kids to learn math without real world context?

In spite of the assembly line expectations of mass schooling, some of us will not learn math as easily or at the same age as others. What's the big deal? We all have strengths and weaknesses and our own developmental timelines. John Gatto wrote, in an essay in the Wall Street Journal:

David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first—the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel "learning disabled" and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, "special education" fodder. She’ll be locked in her place forever.

In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.

That’s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints.

Treating deviation from the average as a disease or a gift depends upon this cultural idea we have that everyone can meet the norm, the average, the median. Just as 98.6 is not the normal temperature for all people, and only 5% of babies are born on their due dates, not all of us will learn arithmetic in kindergarten or grasp phonics by 1st grade. Testing kids once a year to check that they aren't "falling behind," often labeling them as disabled if they are too far behind the norm, ignores human variability. This is not a quality control process, in which a child is deficient if they haven't learned X by point Y on the conveyor belt.

Of course, I'm swimming against the tide, here. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Neurology classify dyscalculia as a neurological disorder, currently estimated to affect 4% of the population. You just wait, though. As soon as the term catches on, that prevalence estimate will rise, and every other mom at the park will know a kid with this neurological disability.

Consider this excerpt from Gatto's The Underground History of American Education:

Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about "the perfect organization of the hive." He said standardized testing was a way to make lower classes recognize their own inferiority. Like wearing a dunce cap, it would discourage them from breeding and having ambition. Goddard was head of the Psychology Department at Princeton, so imagine the effect he had on the minds of the doctoral candidates he coached, and there were hundreds.

During the first two or three decades of the 20th century, wealthy industrialists and other elites created our current assembly line system of education. Our societal expectation that all students should follow some "normal" educational path comes from an extremely dehumanizing era in the industrialized world, in which standardized testing, marketing, eugenics, behaviorism, and "scientific management" all came to the fore. Why haven't we thrown this age-segregated, prescribed, inflexible system out the window? Why is western education dominated by ideas that were in vogue right alongside eugenics? Why do we think it's okay to manage our children the way Henry Ford managed the manufacture of cars?

As Einstein said: I believe in standardizing automobiles, not human beings.