Skyearth Letters

My daughter and I were perusing the home-schooling section of books a month ago, when I found this gem of a book. Published eight years ago, I wondered if it had gotten the attention it deserved. It certainly deserves attention now, as education departments across the country keep reporting poor test results and legislatures lament about the loss of "the basics." Unfortunately, the focus seems to be on making schools teach "better," rather than finding out why children no longer have the capability to learn.

Healy is a long-time educator, having been teacher, professor, and school principal at various times. The first chapter opens with a repeat of a conversation in a faculty room, which began with her comment, "Kids' brains must be different these days." As other teachers expressed their teaching frustrations yet thought that brains couldn't really be different than previous generations', she realized that it might not be such an unrealistic concept. She listened to veteran teachers speak about modifying their teaching methods because students simply could not understand the classic reading material and the textbooks that had been appropriate for their particular grade level years earlier.

Healy began attending professional meetings of neuroscientists to find out if, indeed, brains could change and how. The researchers spoke again and again of how "experience-even different kinds of learning-changes children's brains." But she was also warned that the changes couldn't really be proven because the technology wasn't available to measure them.

She began with a questionnaire to get anecdotal information from teachers on the cognitive changes they had observed, and then she reviewed the trends of SAT and GRE scores and achievement test scores from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). She found that NAEP tests showed a decline in abilities already beginning in the 1970s, with average eighth graders in 1977 having fallen a half-year behind similar students of 1970.

Healy then researched all the information available on the process of learning, from neurological findings on brain development to reports on developments (or lack thereof) in education. There are reports that are unsettling:

One study conducted by two Kent State University education professors in a children's literature course found surprising changes in prospective teachers' attitudes. "Many students enter our courses with negative attitudes toward reading in general and, more specifically, toward the types of literature that make up the main content of courses" (i.e., "good" books for children and adolescents). More than one-fourth of these potential teachers confessed to a "lifelong discomfort with print," and many acknowledged that they made it through English courses by relying on "Cliff Notes, book jackets, or cursory reading to supply them with just enough information to pass tests or to prepare book reports." Others of us who are teaching teachers can unfortunately confirm that this observation is not an isolated one.

Healy reports that a New York University professor did a survey of a large, typical fifth grade group and discovered that, on the average, 90% read four minutes or less a day but watched an average of two hours and ten minutes of TV a day. The professor observed that "our society is becoming increasing aliterate," meaning that they know how to read, but don't want to. And they are understanding less, finding comprehension, recall, and application difficult, if not impossible.

Educational tests themselves come in for criticism, as Healy notes that "there has been a major 'dumbing down' of reading tests since the 1960s." She refers to a Dr. James Cannell who pointed out that the 1987 "reading comprehension section of the California Achievement Test for second and third graders was a full grade level below that of the 1977 version of the same test." Education administrators, Healy points out, generally want to make their schools look good, and choosing the test that students can do well on, rather than tests that would accurately measure students' grade level ability, is the best way to accomplish looking good. Unfortunately, test developers fall right into place filling that demand.

Why does Healy think that children's brains are not functioning in the same way that they did before the mid-1970s? She steps back and describes how the brain develops from the first differentiation of cells in the earliest fetal stage to the final laying down of dendrites in the frontal cortex (the "executive" of the brain) and the corpus callosum (the communication roadway between the brain's two hemispheres) in the teenage years. Her descriptions are clear as she refers to various research results and discussions with neuroscientists, including the effects of various environmental toxins such as lead.

What she discovers is that the brain has enormous plasticity in the early years from birth to eight or ten. And what is plasticity? It is the ability to learn new stuff, which is fairly obvious. But what exactly does happen in the brain when a child experiences new things?

Dendrites sprout many new branches and grow heavier as they reach out to receive messages and develop synaptic connections. Second, supporting glial cells increase in number. Both of these developments appear to respond directly to the types of stimulation sent in by the environment. In addition, axons, or output parts of neurons, gradually develop a coating of a waxy substance called myelin, which insulates the wiring and facilitates rapid and clear transmission... Myelin continues to develop slowly all during childhood and adolescence in a gradual progression from lower- to higher-level systems. Its growth corresponds to the ability to use increasingly higher-level mental abilities... While the system, overall, is remarkably responsive to stimulation from the environment, the schedule of myelination appears to put some boundaries around "appropriate" forms of learning at any given age... Before brain regions are myelinated, they do not operate efficiently. For this reason, trying to make children "master" academic skills for which they do not have the requisite maturation may result in mixed-up patterns of learning. (Emphasis added)

That's it in a very brief nutshell. One thing more: we are born with many more neurons in the brain than we need, and they spend much of their early lives building dendrites to other neurons and creating the synaptic connections. The ones that don't connect eventually die. It has been found that environmental experiences are the spurs for dendritic growth, and repeated experiences strengthen the dendritic connections in the particular area of the brain which hosts those experiences.

So, why are children less able to think critically and to follow directions these days?

If one type of experience occurs in significantly greater quantity than others, the synapses for that experience become greater in quantity and heavier. Unfortunately, that also means that another area of the brain loses neurons as dendrites wither from lack of activity.

Consider how children spend their time. Young children spend a lot of time passively having their visual brain areas stimulated by television and videos. They are hearing language that doesn't require them to respond, that is, if they even understand all that is said. They are shown images that flash by quickly and hearing short verbal phrases that lack complexity. All of which causes their brains to lay down patterns that will respond to this, but young brains are easily over-stimulated and frequently cannot process the information that it receives.

Healy doesn't have any kind words for Sesame Street for exactly that reason. Her research shows that children need to have slow, connected visual and verbal input, and that program is definitely cut from the flash-and-shout pattern, whereas Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood is much better for pre-school understanding. (Remember Captain Kangeroo? I liked the show and so did my kids, and the Captain was in the Mr. Rogers' style.) Sesame Street encourages the premise that children require entertainment. As Healy says:

Its substitution of surface glitz for substance has started a generation of children in the seductive school of organized silliness, where their first lesson is that learning is something adults can be expected to make happen for them as quickly and pleasant as possible.

Healy reports that many teachers say that children of all grades seem to require this entertainment of flash-and-shout in order to get any response from them. Otherwise, they simply tune out. Unfortunately, tuning out has also tuned out language skills that are necessary for functioning well in the world. They don't know how to analyze problems; they lack reasoning skills; they don't even know how to compose questions to get the answers they need. They can't put together sentences that don't include the words "you know" umpteen times yet never specify what it is we're suppose to know. When it comes to writing, teachers weep.

"Who's teaching the children to talk?" Healy asks. She then states that "Language shapes culture, language shapes thinking-and language shapes brains. The verbal bath in which a society soaks its children arranges their synapses and their intellects; it helps them learn to reason, reflect, and respond to the world." She emphasizes that children need to talk, not just listen.

So, who is teaching children to talk? Day care providers and school teachers give children instructions, but the responses they ask for are usually short phrases or one or two words. She reported one psychologist's experience of walking into a daycare for infants in the same building as her office. There were three caregivers for twenty infants, each placed on a blanket with no toys, no nothing, and no English spoken because none of the caregivers spoke English. And these were children of English-speaking parents considered intelligent professionals.

In her discussion of how language changes brains, she quotes researchers who found tentative evidence that there is a "critical window" in language development. One of them, Dr. Arnold Scheibel, warns:

I think it would be very important to tell parents they are participating with the physical development of their youngsters' brains to the exact degree that they interact with them, communicate with them. Language interaction is actually building tissue in their brains-so it's also helping build youngsters' futures.

I consider that particular piece of advice to be information that every current and future parent of young children should know. But is it?

Healy goes into detail about learning disabilities and hyperactivity diagnoses that seem to afflict so many children these days, a section that would be helpful to parents of children so diagnosed. She notes that most children's environments are so full of visual stimulation that important neural wiring, normally encouraged by children's careful listening to the language of adults and by adults careful listening to their children, just doesn't occur. She points out that a child's early experience of relatively complex conversational language "can dramatically improve auditory processing, listening comprehension, and in turn, reading ability."

She believes that Ritalin is over-prescribed for hyperactive children, particularly because it doesn't actively change the brain patterning that is the cause of the problem. And it doesn't effect long-term change. When the prescription stops, the problem recurs.

When it comes to research on the effects of TV and video games, she discovered:

(1) good research on TV is hard to find, (2) much of what is purveyed as "fact" has not been thoroughly documented, (3) according to the most recent studies, television's effects may be more subtle, but also more powerful and pervasive than most people believe and (4) virtually no research is available on the effects of video tapes or computerized video games on children's mental development. Moreover, because more children now spend more hours with all video media than ever before, effects which might not become apparent in previous decades may just now be showing up in schools.

As to why such research is so scarce, she concluded that funding just wasn't available. Most of the research she found turned out to be funded by advertisers to discover the best "hooks" for their products. One might surmise that the huge video/entertainment industry would prefer that nobody know for sure what happens to the brain under the influence of excessive visual stimuli and minimum verbal exposure.

There is much more intriguing information in Endangered Minds, and Healy writes with a sense of humor and also touches of gentle sarcasm. Such as when she was visiting a neuroscientist whose three-year-old daughter could match names and pictures of dinosaurs in a computer program. He lauded the computer, how his daughter loved it and spent lots of time working it, and how his wife and he would rather have the child playing on the computer than watching TV. After asking if the child ever just played and being assured of course, Healy then asked "What do you think that computer is doing to her brain?" The neuroscientist replied, "You know, I never thought about it. I haven't a clue." This, from a scientist who probes the workings of the brain, shows that even the most knowledgeable can be oblivious.

She ends with a chapter on "Expanding Minds" where she discusses where future needs for thinking and relationships with computers might go. Ultimately, she believes that:

Unproven technologies and changing modes of living may offer lively visions, but they can also be detrimental to the development of the young plastic brain...Human brains are not only capable of acquiring knowledge; they also hold the potential for wisdom. But wisdom has its own curriculum: conversation, thought, imagination, empathy, reflection. Youth who lack these "basics," who cannot ponder what they have learned, are poorly equipped to become managers of the human enterprise in any era.

I found the following thought of Healy's to be worthy of distribution, far and wide: "For children, habits of the mind soon become structures of the brain." Let's keep that thought in the forefront of our adult minds in our interactions with the young children of the world. And don't forget: "garbage in/garbage out" holds true for adults brains as well.

Cherie Staples
Skyearth1@aol.com