The word intelligence at its root means reading between the lines, a phrase which means pretty well the same as I get the picture–the pattern. In reality, the human brain is not so much about reading as it is about pattern recognition. Reading and math themselves are forms of pattern recognition.

I could be persuaded to exchange the term IQ for PRQ, Pattern Recognition Quotient. Compared to IQ, which many people assume is unchangeable from birth, PRQ is plainer language and seems to include the possibility of improvement.

Visual thinking, although an improvement over the term critical thinking, still doesn’t cover the multi-sensorial ground. A blind person needs to recognise patterns, too, albeit by building on the remaining senses. Why? Because we can’t do science without these skills, and science underlies all learning, whether we are baking a cake, mixing cement, writing a song, or designing a starship.

Calling this set of underlying skills pattern recognition, however correct, is long and awkward. Moreover, it doesn’t yield an easy term for a lack of these skills. Would we call it pattern unrecognition? Pattern-recognition Disorder—PSD? In the other areas of functional learning, we can speak of literacy or illiteracy and numeracy or innumeracy. Pattern unrecognition doesn’t have the same ring to it. PRD is catchy but seriously, do we want to create yet another "disorder" for the medical industry to target? A lack of pattern-recognition skills is not a disorder any more than illiteracy or innumeracy—it’s just a lack of skill. The reasons for such lacks of skill might be usefully referred to as a disorder, as in Functional Learning Disorder, because the underlying problem is disorder—the failure of the brain to create order out of chaos. That incapacity must be fixed before the brain can acquire the missing skills, whether it’s math, reading, or pattern recognition.

Now we know what we are talking about, but we don’t know what to call it. We’re talking about the skills that are essential precursors to critical thinking, not critical thinking itself. Back to the dictionary, then, on the prowl for a word that accurately describes proficiency in pattern recognition and a sister word that communicates a lack of proficiency..

Science is derived from the Latin scire, to know. Nescience, a little used English word,means not knowing. Scient, also little used nowadays, means knowing, learned in science. Why not use these fresh, plain terms for this important field of functional learning?

For example, I was nescient until my fifties with respect to direction. When giving directions, I had to touch my left arm before I could get the words Turn left out of my mouth. Often I confused right and left. Now, after practising cognition therapy for ten years, I’m quite scient in this area. And I’m sure my PRQ went up, too!

One more puzzler: Why does the set of Persons with Learning Problems (PLPs) overlap so much with the set of Persons with Messy Rooms (PMRs)?

Report cards and IEPs (Individual Education Plans) wrestle this bundle of behaviors to the ground by resorting to the term *critical thinking*—one of those phrases that seem simple enough on the surface but, on definition, leave you feeling as if you’re nailing jello to a tree.

What is this *critical thinking* of which the educators speak?

The internet is better than most of us at nailing jello to trees. Here’s a sample of what an online search of *critical thinking* comes up with as definition.

• Critical thinking, in its broadest sense has been described as "purposeful reflective judgment concerning what to believe or what to do."

• Ability to use and manage intelligence and skills appropriately for tasks or goals across all four domains of knowledge.

• Logical thinking that draws conclusions from facts and evidence.

• The disciplined ability and willingness to assess evidence and claims, to seek a breadth of contradicting as well as confirming information, to make objective judgments on the basis of well supported reasons as a guide to belief and action, and to monitor one s thinking while doing so.

• Evaluating claims, assumptions, and implications of a particular point of view without simply accepting them as facts.

• Ability to make a judgment, consider merit or worth, accuracy, relevance, and logic. It involves analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Other aspects of critical thinking can include metacognition, problem-framing and resolving.

Whew! We’d all love to have kids who indulge in "logical thinking that draws conclusions from facts and evidence"—at least when it suits our purposes—but does anybody have kids who "monitor thinking while making objective judgments"? With four and a half degrees, I still struggle every day to achieve meta-cognition, problem-framing, and resolution. This is major stuff! Can we require nine-year-olds to be good at it?

Notice something about this potpourri of definition. It’s a little of this and a little of that, isn’t it? It assumes we have underlying skills that could support critical thinking—if only we would put our minds to it. But isn’t there something we need to know, some skills we absolutely must have under our belts before attaining such pinnacles of rational thought?

The definition of the term *critical thinking* seems not only messy and blurred at the edges but also negative and pejorative—even political. Just saying the term aloud makes people hyperalert, reaching automatically for their metaphorical swords. The word *critical* implies judgment: you can hear the word *should* as its subtext. *Critical* carries a negative connotation because it implies either crisis, a situation which entails anxiety, or analysis, which means taking things apart. Have you ever met someone whose favorite word is *critical*? I thought not. In fact, we complain about people who are always *criticising* and we breathe huge sighs of relief when a *critical* situation is defused.

Taking things apart is not a big part of functional learning. Synthesis, putting things together, feeds functional learning better than analysis. The term *synthetic thinking* might be more useful than *critical thinking*. Aside from literacy and numeracy, what, exactly, do we want our brains to be able to do automatically, besides read and cipher, when we tackle a bundle of content learning?

1. We want our brains to measure magnitude—to realise some things are greater or lesser than others, to compare more to fewer, louder to softer, lighter to heavier, brighter to darker, hotter to colder, faster to slower.

2. We need to recognise direction, position, sequence, distance, similarity and difference. Our brains should recognise basic shapes in two and three dimensions and feel how they fit (or fight) with one another.

3. We want to be able to conclude instantly that one thing is exactly like another—congruent—or exactly opposite to another—mirrored or symmetrical. When things seem *cattywompus*, as one salty wit described disorientation, we need to determine whether elements are rotated, flipped, or turned inside out, and how much.

4. We want our brains to relate parts to a whole, to recognise what is a subset of what. As part of pattern recognition, our brains should be constantly making their own maps and diagrams to fit new material, figuring our what fits into what, which things overlap, and which are separate.
5. Finally, we want our brains to alert us when our senses may be lying to us, to make us aware of illusion.

Just imagine the mess your brain would make in a kitchen if it did not possess these skills. In fact, half a century or more ago, when there was usually at least one adult in the average North American kitchen much of the day, that’s where many children learned to pour, measure, count, sort, mix, balance, sequence, estimate, tell time, use heat and chemistry, observe and predict. If you weren’t in the kitchen at age three, you missed a lot of fun—the sheer joy of recognising pattern after pattern, so basic a pleasure to the human brain.

Maria Montessori, the Italian educator whose schools now flourish all over the globe, thought society was missing a great opportunity in not addressing the learning window at age three. My daughter began her Montessori days while still two years old and there were more memorable occasions in those first three years of her education than in all the following years put together. Two shine brightly. One, on her tryout day, her excited face when she was allowed to handle the multisensorial equipment designed for pouring, measuring, counting and sorting. Two, the glow of accomplishment as, about a year later, she brought her parents a tray, carefully balanced down the long hallway, perfectly laid with hot tea she had made all by herself.

Once upon a time, schools could rely on most children arriving for first grade with many pattern-recognition skills in place. When society forced all adults to get jobs to make ends meet, children were robbed of that early education. The set of skills that had been easily and naturally provided by homemakers were not nearly so easily supplied by sitters, daycares, preschools or indeed any organisation other than the family of origin.

Early childhood became an individualised experience, different for each child. To teachers, a first-grade class was no longer like a box of chocolates, where each child shared at least the qualities of chocolate with children in the surrounding compartments, but more like a bag of Hallowe’en swag that would take most of the autumn to sort out.

When I began teaching in the Seventies, public schools still wanted to rely on children’s arrival in first grade with appropriate levels of pattern recognition, and passed a sad judgment on the homes of those who could not muster what was called *reading readiness*, as lacking somehow in moral or cultural fibre. I will never forget one recess when I flopped down on a chair in the teachers’ lounge, worn out and recounting some minor classroom disaster, only to hear a colleague say, in all seriousness, "Those brats should all be taken out and shot." I didn’t speak to this teacher, who "taught" my SpEd kids science, a class in which they learned nothing besides how to keep silent, for the rest of the year.

Those of us actually doing the SpEd teaching—mostly young, energetic, idealistic teachers who hadn’t burned out yet—quickly became aware of certain truths, like the fact, loudly obvious by ten-thirty in the morning as tummies rumbled, that only four of my twenty-eight junior-high SpEd students ever ate breakfast. The breakfasted four were the deaf students, who lived in an institution and arrived at class punctually every day with bigger smiles than I thought either the school or I deserved. I asked the others why no breakfast, and then threw the files out of the big drawer in my desk and filled it up with food. First things first! Oh, yes, there was something wrong at home in twenty-four out of twenty-eight SpEd students’ homes, all right, but it wasn’t lack of culture or morality—it was absence! Nobody was there when they got up to come to school. The adults were either sleeping some substance off or gone to work. It was a miracle the kids made it to school at all, although the goodies in my file drawer doubtless boosted my attendance records.

Pattern recognition is easily learned in early childhood at home—if someone’s there. It doesn’t happen by itself, although our education system still seems locked in belief that a form of osmosis should result in a child’s acquisition of these skills outside school. If this were true, then perhaps, yes, we could expect children to indulge in critical thinking and meta-analysis. But it’s not true. What is true? The learning brain must *grok* those pattern-recognition skills before it can go on to content learning without driving itself crazy.

The father of one of my young-adult clients figured I saved him money after only half the cognition-therapy sessions. "My father loves your course," my student said, "because I’ve stopped running into things with my truck!" I had to puzzle that one over for quite a while. Then it dawned on me: recognition of shape, size, distance, direction, position, speed…duh! Cattywompus not a problem any more!

Why does the kid with the learning problems have an unbelievably messy room? Because parts are not being related to the whole, things are not being correctly compared to one another, and basic dimensions and shapes are not being sorted out. (And maybe not much of early childhood was spent in the home kitchen.)

Somewhere deep inside, you knew that!

Are we rare Earth creatures rational?

Is the medical model a rational response to learning problems? Or are human beings creatures of chemistry? Adjusting private life to the pace of unconditional love is the better response.

By Eva van Loon – Saturday 06 Aug 2011
natural solutions for learning problems, neurochemistry, ADHD medication, medical model, learning problems, ADHD

An expert in learning disorders posed me a puzzler: faced with kids’ learning strengths or weaknesses, do we parents and educators react as rational or irrational beings?

I had to think about this question. About the educators’ language of “strengths” and “weaknesses”, leading inevitably to the tried and true solutions of accommodations and modifications, contrasted with the philosopher’s dry discussion of whether humans are thinkers (rational) or just animals (irrational).

Neither of those languages really takes us anywhere useful, does it?

In my experience as a cognition therapist, a “strength” refers to something that has been well learned. A “weakness” refers to something that somehow has not been learned although, by this time, we all expected it to have been learned.

Then, irrationally, indeed, we usually grab for the medical model and blame the “patient” or learner, or kid, for being “sick”, “disabled”, or “deficient” or for “having” a disorder. This reaction is reminiscent of the story of diseases like tuberculosis or AIDS, where at first poets or gays had only themselves to blame for their illness. The first chapter of the learning-disability story is also all about how the student, or maybe the parents are culpable.

Is medical diagnosis a rational response to learning weaknesses?

In spite of the fact that medical offices often render diagnoses found in the DSM-IV (the “bible” of psychiatry), ADHD is not a disease or disorder in the true medical sense. It’s order that never happened. Was never learned.

That brain has no hope of learning it, either, until the personal climate of that person undergoes a change.

In the term “personal climate” I include what’s going on, chemically speaking, inside the bag of water and gunk and electricity, slung on movable sticks, that describes the rare Earth creatures we are.

Remember GIGO, one of the first anagrammatic rules of computers? “Garbage In; Garbage Out.” Humans are not magically exempt from that rule of science. (It pays to recall that we created computers in our image, not the other way around.)

Manage the chemistry. Monitor the stuff that goes into the bag of human flesh through the mouth, the nose, the ears, the eyes, the skin. What you see, hear, feel, smell and taste alters your chemistry. (If you’ve ever fallen in love, you know this all too well!)

Especially in the very young, you want to promote acetylcholine and discourage adrenalin during learning times. You do this by promoting peace, love, security and regular routine. Remember: for little kids, learning time is all the time. Don’t let up on the peacefulness-and-unconditional-love theme for a minute. You want the brain to be governed by a resting heart beat—60 beats per minute. That’s when order is learned and disorders are avoided.

TV does not move to 60 bpm. Pop music very seldom moves to 60 bpm. Traffic does not move to 60 bpm (except in small towns, where it often seems like 40 bpm). Cellphones do not ring at 60 bpm. Busy busy busy! Our accepted adult lifestyle is not good for children’s brains.

Reduce the frazzle factor. Take the time to cook real food—the stuff that comes together from ingredients instead of emerging from a box or a can. Stay home often. Slow down the music, your speech, your speed, your food, your breath! Where are you going that you’re in such a hurry?

Remember, wherever you go, “there” you are, and you might as well get “there” in a state of calm alertness. As successful parents know, that state is the key to keeping children safe and nurturing them to adulthood.

Are we irrational or irrational creatures? Sometimes one, sometimes the other and often we use the rational to justify or explain the irrational. But we are always…chemical.

Obviously CCD has to do with human activity. Seven billion talking apes surely affect the entire ecology. After several years of frantic research, it seems neonicotinoid pesticides are what has wrecked the life of bees.

Bee die-off increased since the 1980s, but we ignored it. Recently about 80% to 90% of honeybees disappeared, just when humanity began changing its mind—in a good way—about the importance of green living. If Einstein is right, we must fix this mess by, well, now-ish.

What about human immune systems? Can ironically self-named homo sapiens sapiens withstand its own hyperactivity?

In the 48 years I’ve taught, the education system has stopped working for many students. Vast numbers of our youth cannot read well, cannot cipher, and cannot think their way through simple problems of logic. If Einstein’s right, my work as a cognition therapist will end contemporaneously with the final demise of so-called “universal education”.

Humans can’t see the beehive for the bees, it seems.

The biggest underlying mental deficit people now suffer is auditory processing: the ears work fine but the brain can’t hear. It all boils down to mega-stress on the organism. Poisonous air, over-processed food, chemicals in everything, mega-electro-magnetic radiation, clutters of imagery, floods of sound bytes, sundered families who can’t afford their lives, and violence everywhere. Today’s harried, hurried, anxious children have no idea how to be quiet in themselves, much less communicate with others or notice nature. Since they are often the third generation of dysfunction, frantic families cannot help them find the way. Our society can’t find home any more than the honeybees can get back to the hive.

The slogan of American Special Education is “No child left behind.” Huh? Where did we think we were going? Eternally onward and upward? Towards still more power, calories, gewgaws, entertainments?

We’d profit from listening to organic beekeepers. They report less or no CCD. Some wild bees are also doing fine. The implications are plain: humanity is not smart enough to mess with honeybee genetics or, for that matter, its own. We don’t yet think to the seventh generation, and we’re addicted to thinking ourselves exempt from nature. By submitting our young to unparalleled stress, doubtless we impair their growth in multiple ways.

In antiquity, bees were revered, and not just for their honey, often a society’s only sweetener, but for the marvelous ways in which they ran their lives. The Delphic oracle and goddesses were associated with bees, and the island of Crete was a veritable bee heaven. It now appears our patriarchal ways have imposed unnecessary stress on bees, stress that may have increased their vulnerability to disease, much as a straitened, restricted human life often sickens and creeps away into a corner to die. Those boxes bees have lived in since the 1800s, for example, were imposed on bees to replace their hanging, rounded structures. Normally, a hive lasts in one place for years, for generations, but nowadays the entire colony is transported to new places every few days—piece work, it could be called. All for profit, of course. However, ultimately, a life that is a commodity exploited by another being cannot flower and bear good fruit.

Out of the mouth of babes, it is said, comes wisdom. We must listen, really listen, to the alarms coming from the mouths of our children. It is coming, they warn. Human colony collapse is just around the corner.

Still can’t multiply? Maybe this is why…

A cognition therapist from the Boomer generation shows how a simple old technique engages the brain’s auditory and visual processors to produce fast, permanent results in math.

By Eva van Loon – Thursday 11 Aug 2011
cognitive training, multiplication skill, math difficulty, learning problems, special education, cognition therapy

We Boomers were children in the Fifties, impossibly long ago as that now seems. Like many children of European origin, my little sister and I learned multiplication while standing in a stepped row with our mother at the sink after dinner, washing, rinsing and drying the dishes while chanting, “One times seven is seven; two times seven is fourteen; three times seven is twenty-one…” and so on to, “Ten times seven is seventy!” And there we stopped.

It was a peaceful, rhythmic way to get through the chore of dishes. Our only reward—and it was reward enough!—was the satisfaction of nailing every one of the ten multiplications correctly without hesitation. I remember feeling jealous because my baby sister, almost four years younger, had an earlier opportunity than I to acquire this learning.

The other satisfaction was the realisation that we also had division in the bag, so to speak, because obviously, it was the same thing as multiplication—just a different way of expressing this knowledge.

It didn’t take long to get through all the tables. The eleven-times table, with all the “cute numbers”, as my daughter famously dubbed them many years later, was the most fun, followed by the nine-times table with its perfect symmetries. Malcolm Gladwell’s theory, that 10,000 hours of practice is required to become expert at something (The Outliers), doesn’t hold true for children and multiplication. It’s really quite a quick job for a young human brain.

When I became a teacher in the Seventies, I didn’t much notice the change happening in math teaching, since I was focused on teaching language and theater. Returning to education at age 50, however, I was astonished to find myself in a wasteland of mathematical incompetence, even arithmetical incompetence. What on Earth had happened to prevent perfectly wonderful, normal young people from grokking the basic four operations?

My new students in the learning center showed me how they had been taught multiplication. The seven-times table goes like this, apparently: “Seven, fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight, uh…” ending with “Eighty-four.”

“Eighty-four? But that’s twelve times seven, not ten,” I protested. “And why can’t you remember the ones in the middle?”

“There’s always twelve in the tables,” they assured me ungrammatically. “We’re just too dumb to remember them all.”

“You never had to say the whole thing out loud? Like Seven times eight is fifty-six?”

“Nope. Is it?”

They told me that they had had a lot of flash-card practice, but it had not noticeably helped. Nor had computer math games which flashed random multiplication questions in very engaging ways.

On a hunch, I asked, “Do you know the number that is the basis of our number system?”

They shrugged. “Twelve? Isn’t this the only math system there is?”

I reflected that the advent of the dishwasher may have substantially impaired people’s ability to multiply, but didn’t fully understand why until I became a cognition therapist. I soon realised that the most prevalent underlying learning deficit is an inability to process sound. Then I saw how it works—and what doesn’t work.

First, random flash cards and computer games don’t build structure in the brain with sound or sight. They’re fine for testing oneself or having some fun, but they don’t teach the brain anything except frustration and the non-existent rules of luck.

Second, those dishwashing chants in childhood set up permanent little jingles in our auditory processors. Every time the visual processor sees a multiplication question, it joggles the appropriate jingle, and bingo! The answer comes back to me in a second or less. But, if all one memorises is a series of answers, there’s no accompanying jingle, no joggled sound. The visual processor is left hanging without a clue, thinking, “Where does that fit, again…?” Back to square one, over and over.

Third, stopping at ten times left us with the sense of ten-ness in our number system. We still acquired the multiplication by eleven, twelve, and even thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, but in a structurally correct way: by memorising the eleven-times table, the twelve-times table, and so on—not by adding a confusing two-number coda onto already perfect tables. How can we ever introduce our minds to the beauty of mathematics, of the infinite, easy, luxurious structure of tens, after messing it up with such patchwork learning?

More practically, how do we expect our minds to appreciate the ten-ness of decimals, per cent or even fractions when we’ve been teasing it with twelve-ness?

My mother and sister, both brilliant women, are gone, their mathematical acuity with them, but I still remember with a smile the damp waistbands of our aprons, the sight of all those clean dishes piled in multiples on the counter, and the feeling of harmonious closure when we chanted a table perfectly in unison as the sun went down. Thank you, Mom.

When I finally get grandchildren into my clutches, my little dishwasher is going to experience a good deal of down time.

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines an innumerate as someone "unacquainted with the basic principles of mathematics and science."

When I was in primary school, there were few innumerates among us. I recall a sense of balance among school subjects, specifically of equal concentration on mathematics (which we called arithmetic) and language. There were, of course, a few luckless non-starter students, derisively called ree-tards, who displayed early signs of illiteracy and innumeracy and consequently escaped school only when too big for the biggest desks.

Then came [New Math](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math). The word arithmetic, formerly well understood as a synonym for ciphering—addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and a few extras like telling time and Roman numerals—disappeared. Bye-bye, rote learning and chanting tables. Memorisation was bunk, apparently. It was all Mathematics now, each chapter of our texts prefaced by philosophical discourse that mystified the teachers and parents almost as much as the students. As a new teacher in the Seventies, I remember thinking we’d perhaps thrown the baby out with the bathwater, as the saying goes.

New Math had the unexpected result of opening up an entirely new field of academics, the what’s-wrong-with-our-kids-that-they-can’t-do-math? field. Sheila Tobias’ 1978 book, Overcoming Math Anxiety, made math incompetence a political issue, claiming it was not failure of intellect but a failure of nerve. A decade later, mathematician John Paulos assigned the growing math disaster its correct name in [Innumeracy; Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences]( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_(book)). He suggested innumeracy is a failure of a process he called "critical thinking".

Innumerates, Tobias had noticed, have no mathematical frame of reference and no basic understandings to build on. They’re afraid. The infamous word problems terrify them, and they’re convinced they’re dumb. Paulos, while admitting, "These feelings constitute a formidable block to numeracy," insisted, "The truism that one learns how to read by reading…extends to solving mathematical problems." He suggested techniques like explaining problems clearly, working backwards from solutions, drawing diagrams, and all the tricks good tutors use.

Paulos was onto something, but he wasn’t onto it far enough to prescribe the missing element: automaticity. As every educator knows, the past two decades have witnessed a surging need for math help and a corresponding shortage of math tutors. Tutoring hasn’t fixed innumeracy. And never will.

Today many students have little sense of how numbers relate, such as how 4 fits into 8, or that 10 underlies everything. There’s little automatic pattern recognition going on. Yet the math needed for daily life relies not on philosophy but simply on pattern recognition.

For the innumerate, fractions are a jungle. Without automatic pattern recognition, percentages, decimals, and fractions look nothing alike. It all ceases to make sense. There’s no subconscious foundation on which to build what is now facetiously called pre-algebra skills.

How to fix? There’s one way: multi-sensorial drill fitted to the individual brain to create rhythm and pattern in the subconscious. Then push one arithmetic pattern at a time down into that mysterious but indispensable reservoir of knowledge.

Don’t try to fix innumeracy at home without training or a well-trained cognition therapist. If you have toddlers, however, you can put their feet on the road to math competence by turning off the TV and engaging them in all kinds of rhythm and pattern training instead.

You’ll shine as a parent. The benefits in math class will be…incalculable.

Great stuff! But those flashes of insight are not composed entirely of learning, and not all of transformative learning, either. Sure, going to India and experiencing Tamil village life will change your life, but it won’t teach you to read better.

Decades of teaching have taught me there are two areas of learning. One, there’s the stuff you think about, sometimes long afterwards, chewing it over until finally it finds its place in your organism—or passes out of your life, like food you’re done with. Call that *content learning*.

Two, there’s stuff you have to struggle to make part of you, like riding a bike or driving, before the powers that be will even let you on the road. It must be second nature to you before it’s safe. Then you get a driver’s license, a transformative experience in just about anyone’s book. Suddenly, you can move around your world with ease, just because this riding or driving skill has lodged itself unforgettably in your subconscious. I’d call that transformative, wouldn’t you?

It’s *functional learning*, too. Down there in your depths, in the subconscious, where you never have to work it all out again, it’s become automatic, like walking.

Imagine your brain as a two-storey office: content learning happens upstairs in the conscious; functional learning happens downstairs where the shipping dock is and nobody sees it.

Reading is supposed to be like walking: automatic. A functional reader sees a sign and comprehends it without needing to remember the words or shapes. Basic math, same thing. Basic logic, same thing. It must be automatic. Immediate. A subconscious, unforgettable skill. If you have to think about how to do it every time, it doesn’t work right and is too slow to serve you.

You see the page, the problem, or the situation—and you understand instantly what it’s all about. This is the true definition of literacy, numeracy, and basic thinking, the tripod of skills on which all content learning ultimately depends.

Content learning is made easy once functional learning is in place. The flip side of that truth—which schools find difficult to recognise—is that content learning is sheer hell for a brain which has not yet achieved the basic levels of functional learning.

The lightning flash that made me a cognition therapist was the realisation that functional learning happens in a manner entirely different from content learning—and in a manner virtually impossible to install in our schools. The brain does functional learning in an environment neurochemically different from the exciting, engaging group climate of content learning that schools generally seek to create for their students. Excitement and teamwork won’t do the job.

Functional learning happens in a manner unique to each individual, in a calm, safe environment much like the ideal home during idyllic baby and toddler years. That kind of environment, however, has not been the norm for our youth for decades, as the need for every adult to work has turned homes into way stations full of constant motion.

Small wonder Special Education faces such enormous obstacles: times have changed drastically, and the children who come to Grade One with large parts of functional learning already in place are pitifully few compared to fifty years ago.

This article is part of a forthcoming book by cognition therapist Eva van Loon, *R U Speshul, Ed? Growing the Learning Brain*.

"Blow up your TV; throw away your paper;
Go to the country; build you a home.
Grow a little garden; eat a lot of peaches;
Try and find Jesus on your own."

I jig this verse a little for inquiring parents who want to know what they can do to prevent – or cure – learning "disabilities" in their kids:

"Blow up your TV; throw away your sodas;
give away the chill pills; try to be home;
get some music lessons; do a lot of dancing;
memorise the tables on your own."

Many parents, already suspicious about drugs anyway, are quite ready to hear they’ve been right all along about piano lessons, having a parent at home, memorising, and the infamous "new math" of the 70s. But I admit it’s perverse fun to watch them blench at the mere notion of _Doing Without TV_.

"But we only let the kids watch a little bit," they invariably protest. "Only the good stuff."

There is no good stuff. Seriously. It’s not so much the content, about the quality of which any adult can make up one’s own mind – it’s the screen itself. Recent research vindicates what many of us have sensed all along: TV, no matter how good the content, is toxic to children and other living things. As a cognition therapist, I’ve long suspected that somehow screens prevent visual and auditory processors in the brain from developing as they should in early childhood.

One study has concluded that, for every hour of TV a child under age seven watches daily, on average, there’s a 10% greater likelihood of developing ADHD. If that’s the case, for a child watching ten hours’ TV per day, it doesn’t matter if parents turn off the commercials and restrict content to education and nature channels. Soon, they’ll be dealing with ADHD (and paying therapists like me to fix it).

Another study concludes that the human brain makes more high-confidence errors in a cluttered environment. *Huh?* you say. *So what?* That means a kid making a zillion mistakes on a video or computer game will still enjoy the game, but a kid making an error on a piece of paper or on a single problem on an educational TV screen at school will be scrambling for self-esteem. The game is a cluttered environment: the player makes an error but is immediately confronted with a fresh situation. A classical educational exercise, on the other hand, is an invitation to spectacular failure, rather like one solo skating competition after another.

Finally, since 1974 my experience with kids diagnosed with "LDs" tells me that the vast majority have had significant exposure since early childhood to TV and/or computer screens – and those are by and large the kids who haven’t developed what my generation would consider normal visualisation skills or auditory comprehension. No wonder so many kids would rather take out the garbage or eat anchovies than read a book.

A reasonable conclusion? Young human brains and half-formed personalities should be severely restricted in access to TV and computer screens. Brains are not finished at birth – they develop to about age 18, and the earliest years are the most crucial. Under seven years old? No screens at all, please. Forget baby’s computer-learning programs – you, the parent, are far more important to your young than Einstein or any teacher ever can be. (And there’s plenty of time after age seven to master keyboarding).

My daughter lost TV to our post-divorce poverty. She was only eight but knew enough to refuse an offer to have it back. "I’ll never get my homework done," she explained. Yes, the first three weeks had been hell, but 16 years later we cannot imagine letting the goggle box back into our homes to sap our lives.

Go ahead. Blow up your TV. You must, because there’s another study that says humans can’t *not* watch TV because of the way our eyes and brains are built. So let’s have a TV-blow-up party. Take that, Military-Industrial-Corporatocracy! One small step for a family – a giant step towards reclaiming our brains.

Great stuff! But those flashes of insight are not composed entirely of learning, and not all of transformative learning, either. Sure, going to India and experiencing Tamil village life will change your life, but it won’t teach you to read better.

Decades of teaching have taught me there are two areas of learning. One, there’s the stuff you think about, sometimes long afterwards, chewing it over until finally it finds its place in your organism—or passes out of your life, like food you’re done with. Call that *content learning*.

Two, there’s stuff you have to struggle to make part of you, like riding a bike or driving, before the powers that be will even let you on the road. It must be second nature to you before it’s safe. Then you get a driver’s license, a transformative experience in just about anyone’s book. Suddenly, you can move around your world with ease, just because this riding or driving skill has lodged itself unforgettably in your subconscious. I’d call that transformative, wouldn’t you?

It’s *functional learning*, too. Down there in your depths, in the subconscious, where you never have to work it all out again, it’s become automatic, like walking.

Imagine your brain as a two-storey office: content learning happens upstairs in the conscious; functional learning happens downstairs where the shipping dock is and nobody sees it.

Reading is supposed to be like walking: automatic. A functional reader sees a sign and comprehends it without needing to remember the words or shapes. Basic math, same thing. Basic logic, same thing. It must be automatic. Immediate. A subconscious, unforgettable skill. If you have to think about how to do it every time, it doesn’t work right and is too slow to serve you.

You see the page, the problem, or the situation—and you understand instantly what it’s all about. This is the true definition of literacy, numeracy, and basic thinking, the tripod of skills on which all content learning ultimately depends.

Content learning is made easy once functional learning is in place. The flip side of that truth—which schools find difficult to recognise—is that content learning is sheer hell for a brain which has not yet achieved the basic levels of functional learning.

The lightning flash that made me a cognition therapist was the realisation that functional learning happens in a manner entirely different from content learning—and in a manner virtually impossible to install in our schools. The brain does functional learning in an environment chemically different from the exciting, engaging group climate of content learning that schools generally seek to create for their students.

Functional learning happens in a manner unique to each individual, in a calm, safe environment much like the ideal home during the idyllic baby and toddler years. That kind of environment, however, has not been the norm for our youth for decades, as the need for every adult to work has turned homes into way stations full of constant motion.

Small wonder Special Education faces such enormous obstacles: times have changed drastically, and the children who come to Grade One with large parts of functional learning already in place are pitifully few compared to fifty years ago.

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines an innumerate as someone “unacquainted with the basic principles of mathematics and science.”

When I was in primary school, there were few innumerates among us. I recall a sense of balance among school subjects, specifically of equal concentration on mathematics (which we called arithmetic) and language. There were, of course, a few luckless non-starter students, derisively called ree-tards, who displayed early signs of illiteracy and innumeracy and consequently escaped school only when too big for the biggest desks.

Then came New Math. The word arithmetic, formerly well understood as a synonym for ciphering—addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and a few extras like telling time and Roman numerals—disappeared. Bye-bye, rote learning and chanting tables. Memorisation was bunk, apparently. It was all Mathematics now, each chapter of our texts prefaced by philosophical discourse that mystified the teachers and parents almost as much as the students. As a new teacher in the Seventies, I remember thinking we’d perhaps thrown the baby out with the bath, as the saying goes.

New Math had the unexpected result of opening up an entirely new field of academics, the what’s-wrong-with-our-kids-that-they-can’t-do-math? field. Sheila Tobias’ 1978 book, Overcoming Math Anxiety, made math incompetence a political issue, claiming it was not failure of intellect but a failure of nerve. A decade later, mathematician John Paulos assigned the growing math disaster its correct name in Innumeracy; Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences. He suggested innumeracy is a failure of a process he called “critical thinking”.

More later on that hateful term.

Innumerates, Tobias had noticed, have no mathematical frame of reference and no basic understandings to build on. They’re afraid. The infamous word problems terrify them, and they’re convinced they’re dumb. Paulos, while admitting “These feelings constitute a formidable block to numeracy” insisted, “The truism that one learns how to read by reading…extends to solving mathematical problems.” He suggested techniques like explaining problems clearly, working backwards from solutions, drawing diagrams, and all the tricks good tutors use.

Paulos was onto something, but he wasn’t onto it far enough to prescribe the missing element: automaticity. As every educator knows, the past two decades have witnessed a surging need for math help and a corresponding shortage of math tutors. Tutoring hasn’t fixed innumeracy. And never will.

Today many students have little sense of how numbers relate, such as how 4 fits into 8, or that 10 underlies everything. There’s little automatic pattern recognition going on. Yet the math needed for daily life relies not on philosophy but simply on pattern recognition.

For the innumerate, fractions are a jungle. Without automatic pattern recognition, per cent, decimals, and fractions look nothing alike. It all ceases to make sense. There’s no subconscious foundation on which to build what is now facetiously called pre-algebra skills.

How to fix? There’s one way: multi-sensorial drill fitted to the individual brain to create rhythm and pattern in the subconscious. Then push one arithmetic pattern at a time down into that mysterious but indispensable reservoir of knowledge.

Don’t try to fix innumeracy at home without training or a well trained cognition therapist. If you have toddlers, however, you can put their feet on the road to math competence by turning off the TV and engaging them in all kinds of rhythm and pattern training instead.

You’ll shine as a parent. The benefits in math class will be…incalculable.