SPENGLER How America made its children
crazy By Spengler
Now
we know that computers don't help children learn
and that drugs don't help them concentrate,
because the establishment mandarins who sold us
the computers and drugs have conceded failure. In
the January 29 New York Times, [1] a prominent
professor of child development shows that
attention-deficit-disorder drugs only harm the
three million children who take them. One out of
10 American children have been diagnosed with
so-called Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
and most of them have been medicated. [2]
Some months ago, the Times reported that
test scores lagged in school districts that
invested massively in digital education. [3] It
does not seem to have occurred to the mandarins
that computers cause attention deficit disorder.
The brain is a machine, in the enlightened secular
model, and so-called brain science teaches
us to tweak its
functioning with pharmaceuticals, or stimulate its
development through digital approximations of
intelligence. The grand result of a generation's
worth of brain-science application is a generation
of schoolchildren who are disproportionately
illiterate, innumerate, anxious, angry, and
unhappy.
Professor L Alan Sroufe's
debunking of ADD medication in the New York Times
contains this admission:
''Back in the 1960s I, like most
psychologists, believed that children with
difficulty concentrating were suffering from a
brain problem of genetic or otherwise inborn
origin. Just as Type I diabetics need insulin to
correct problems with their inborn biochemistry,
these children were believed to require
attention-deficit drugs to correct theirs. It
turns out, however, that there is little to no
evidence to support this
theory.''
That is an astonishing
statement: in the mainstream view of the academic
psychologists, the brain is another pancreas,
except that its function is to secrete thoughts as
opposed to insulin. That is to say that the
psychologists have a pancreas where their brains
should have been.
One really wants to
light a torch and march on Frankenstein's castle,
also known as the psychology profession. Until the
passage of the 2005 Individuals with Disabilities
Act, schools had the power to force children to
take ADD drug, namely amphetamines, or bar them
from classrooms, even when parents objected to the
medication. I don't know how many children were
harmed by the sorcerer's apprentices in school
psychology offices, but the new research might
provide grounds for some exemplary lawsuits. It
turns out that the mainstream was dominated by
cultists and loonies. The religious day schools,
the home-schoolers, alternative schools like the
Waldorf movement turn out to have been islands of
sanity in a sea of delusion.
The
psychologists of the 1960s also advocated instant
gratification in all aspects of life, particularly
sex, with the silly presumption that all
individual and social problems were to be blamed
on suppressing our urge to be gratified. Once
children had limitless opportunities for
gratification, abetted by ever-more-realistic (and
ever-more violent and perverse) computer
simulations, the psychology profession observed
that attention spans shortened drastically, and
presumed that a genetic deficiency was to blame.
It sounds like bad science fiction, but it is
standard operating procedure in every public
school in the United States.
Learning how
to learn is the point of education. We will forget
the great majority of specific things we were
taught: Euclidean proofs, the polynomial theorem,
Roman emperors, French grammar, atomic weights,
the poems of Browning, and whatever else was
stuffed in our heads as schoolchildren. What we
learned, if we learned anything, is to memorize,
analyze and explain. If we know geometry, algebra
or French today, it is not because we retained our
knowledge but because we re-learned the subject.
School, in short, taught us to concentrate. The
most successful people are not the cleverest in
terms of sheer processing power, but those who
multiply cleverness with persistence.
The
psychology profession, by contrast, thinks that
the brain is a machine, and the best way to engage
it is to use another machine, namely a computer.
Computers, to be sure, do not kill brains; people
kill brains with computers. Computers in the hands
of people who believe that gratification is the
highest human goal, and the quicker the
gratification, the better, have devastated our
mental landscape. Our children do not read; they
only surf. They do not write; they only text. They
do not plan and strategize in games; they react to
visual and aural stimuli while inflicting
simulated mayhem. They do not follow a plot: they
cut among disjoined images in the style of rap
videos. And when they fail to concentrate, we give
them Adderall and Ritalin.
It is
mouth-foaming, howling-at-the-moon madness, and it
is our mainstream culture. The wired classroom
hasn't worked, so the educational establishment
recommends more of the same quack cure. The New
York Times reported last September that
computerized education has produced no measurable
results, except for some negative ones (test
scores fell after massive investment in
computers). Yet the education gurus remain
undeterred. ''The data is pretty weak. It's very
difficult when we're pressed to come up with
convincing data, ''Tom Vander Ark, the former
executive director for education at the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation told the Times. Reporter
Matt Richtel wrote: ''And yet, in virtually the
same breath, he said change of a historic
magnitude is inevitably coming to classrooms this
decade: ‘It's one of the three or four biggest
things happening in the world today.'''
The obsession with digital classrooms goes
back to president Bill Clinton, who called for
more computers in the schools in 1997. After 15
years of failure, the Barack Obama
administration's National Education Technology
Plan ''calls for applying the advanced
technologies used in our daily personal and
professional lives to our entire education system
to improve student learning.'' [4]
The
American elite, to be sure, does not subject its
own offspring to this kind of digital treatment.
New York City's most exclusive private schools,
the ones with an acceptance rate lower than Ivy
League colleges, do things the old fashioned way.
Brearley School, sometimes considered the best of
the private schools for girls, requires every
student to learn an instrument and play in the
orchestra (the only other New York school with
this requirement is the Rudolf Steiner School).
The Dalton School teaches chess to every student.
Acoustic instruments, classical music, and ancient
games with wooden pieces teach concentration span.
In Silicon Valley, Times reporter Matt
Richtel observed in an October 22 feature, many of
the Silicon Valley types who make weapons of mass
dementia send their own kids to a school that bans
computers until the 9th grade:
The chief technology officer of eBay
sends his children to a nine-classroom school
here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants
like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.
But the school's chief teaching tools are
anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting
needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer
to be found. No screens at all. They are not
allowed in the classroom, and the school even
frowns on their use at home. Schools nationwide
have rushed to supply their classrooms with
computers, and many policy makers say it is
foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian
point of view can be found at the epicenter of
the tech economy, where some parents and
educators have a message: computers and schools
don't mix. [5]
That is the local
Waldorf school, part of an education movement
founded by the German mathematician and mystic
Rudolf Steiner. Some of Steiner's ideas were
strange, but his educational method - learning by
doing - is robust. At the New York Steiner School
my children attended, for example, 8th-graders
learned the Renaissance by making copies of
16th-century scientific instruments, singing
four-part Renaissance vocal works, and staging a
play about the 17th-century physicist Johannes
Kepler. The 9th-graders studied Shakespeare's
"Twelfth Night" by staging the complete play,
rotating the cast so that every child memorized a
couple of hundred lines. Waldorf schools require
parents to promise to forbid television to their
children in any form through elementary school.
At a showcase classroom in Arizona's most
wired school district, Matt Richtel reported,
A seventh-grade English teacher
roams among 31 students sitting at their desks
or in clumps on the floor. They're studying
Shakespeare's As You Like It - but not in
any traditional way. In this technology-centric
classroom, students are bent over laptops, some
blogging or building Facebook pages from the
perspective of Shakespeare's characters. One
student compiles a song list from the Internet,
picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to
express the emotions of Shakespeare's lovelorn
Silvius. [6]
Somehow, I don't think
that's what Shakespeare meant by "as you like it."
Web access in this case is simply a pretext to
help seventh-graders to reduce Shakespeare to
their own level, rather than allow Shakespeare to
lift children up to his.
The Waldorf
movement diverges radically from the mainstream.
It tends to recruit crunchy-granola rebels against
urban civilization who love acoustical instruments
and handicrafts, as well as philosophy graduates
of major universities with a deep interest in
metaphysics. Some of the classical curriculum of
the German Gymnasium of a century ago is preserved
as if in amber. And the fact that so many of the
Masters of the Universe of the digital age send
their children to this countercultural throwback
is a fair gauge of the degradation of mainstream
learning.
Adderall and Ritalin, by the
way, can't be found in any Chinese pharmacy
(although expatriates can find small amounts of
Ritalin at a couple of locations in Shanghai). It
appears that Chinese children, who must memorize
several thousand characters in order to complete
elementary education, do not suffer from Attention
Deficit Disorder. Two-thirds of Chinese children
graduate secondary school, which involves a
grueling exercise in memorization. As I reported
earlier in this space, 50 million Chinese children
are studying Western classical music (see China’s
six-to-one advantage over the US, Asia Times
Online, Dec 2, 2008). That's the same number of
children aged 5 to 17 in America. Nothing builds
attention span better than playing classical
music. Granted that much of China's educational
system teaches rote memorization, and that the
majority of Chinese may not receive top-quality
schooling, it is still the case that the absolute
number of Chinese kids mastering high-level skills
is a multiple of the American number.
America is the greatest country in the
world, a unique and blessed land, while China
remains under the rule of an authoritarian regime
that alternates between benign and brutal. But we
Americans have consigned our children to the
purveyors of an alien ideology - the absurd
doctrine that the brain is a machine - with
consequences so devastating that the liberal
establishment itself no longer can defend its core
policies of the past half century. Worst of all,
we have papered over our spiritual deficit by
doping millions of our kids with amphetamines.
If China replaces us at the pre-eminent
world power, it will happen because their children
are smarter, more persevering, more ambitious and
tougher than ours. And we will have no-one to
blame but ourselves for handing our kids over to
quacks and snake-oil salesmen.
Spengler is
channeled by David P Goldman, president of
Macrostrategy LLC. His book How Civilizations
Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) was published
by Regnery Press in September 2011. A volume of
his essays on culture, religion and economics,
It's Not the End of the World - It's Just the
End of You, also appeared recently, from Van
Praag Press.
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