When my oldest daughter was in 6th grade, she came home almost every afternoon with a book that had been assigned to her whole class along with a set of questions to answer as she read. There never seemed to be fewer than 50 questions, all of which were focused on the most basic surface comprehension: the color of a character’s hat; the exact words that were said in some snippet of dialogue; the weather conditions. I watched helplessly as these lists of questions sucked the life out of her love of reading until I couldn’t stand it anymore and made an appointment with her teacher to ask some questions of my own. “But the meaning is in the text,” he told me. I looked at him and said, “Oh no. The meaning is in the reader.” He smiled kindly. And I waved good-bye over the vast canyon between us, mourning the loss of my child’s experience of school as a place where her ideas and questions mattered at least as much as the written word. Those homework assignments made learning and reading as dead as the author was. They turned anything the reader might think or wonder or connect with or feel or be concerned by to a bag of dust to barter for scores and checkmarks and the freedom not to have your parents called to report your lack of initiative.
These kind of assignments amount to a sustained practice of seeking meaning externally. Though largely unintended, the effect is to alienate and estrange us from our internal world order - to learn to labor for someone else. With this practice, we begin to accept a trade of our attention to our internal world (our connections, wonderings, observations, concerns) for gold stars and good grades received when we respond to a question someone else has asked with an answer they already know. We are so deeply inured to this process that we typically accept it without a second thought.
This week, the New York Times ran a video with commentary from a variety of opinion writers sharing reflections on the first 100 days in the United States under the MAGA regime. Tressie McMillan Cottom said that she was most surprised about how willing we are to trade our freedom for performative power. About this we should not be surprised.
Our traditional approach to education is the mechanism through which we learn to accept the trade. Our pharmaceutical companies have created medications that make it easier on children who have a more difficult time coming to terms with that acceptance. Children who find it more difficult to trade away their freedom to move, to daydream, to joke, and to deeply focus on the things that interest them most, can be deemed deficient and handed a prescription. At the risk of digressing more than I should, let me share with you some from the recent article, Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong? By Paul Tough:
“Historically, this is one of the main reasons people have taken amphetamines: They make tedious tasks seem more interesting. During World War II, the American military distributed tens of millions of amphetamine tablets to enlisted men for use during the many boring stretches of war. The pills were given to Air Force pilots flying long missions and to Navy sailors who had to keep watch all night. In the 1950s, suburban housewives took amphetamines to get through the boredom of endless days of housework and child care. Long-distance truckers have for decades used them to tolerate the tedium of the road. For the college students Scott Vrecko interviewed, term papers were just as boring as laundry or a long-haul truck route — but they became more bearable with the help of stimulants.”
In other words, amphetamines make us more willing to give up our freedom to control our own attention. Tough continues:
“Cap, a suburban teenager on the East Coast, told me that he began taking Ritalin the summer after his sophomore year of high school. In the affluent neighborhood where he grew up, SAT prep was an important rite of passage, and that summer, his parents enrolled him in a prep course at a local tutoring center. Cap (a nickname) told me that he found studying for the SAT to be ‘very boring’ and that every time he went in for tutoring, he felt unable to concentrate.
“Then he was prescribed Ritalin, and his experience of test prep changed. ‘I used to hate doing the SAT reading,’ Cap said. ‘But if I took the medication, I could read through it all and, like, comprehend it really well. I would actually enjoy reading it.’
Because your score on the SAT represents one of the highest stakes attention trades you can make, there’s a pill you can take that ensures you’ll have more attention to pony up. Turns out that making the trade - your attention to other people’s questions and answers for a score - really is all those pills are good for. In his article, Tough cites research from a group of Florida scientists who’ve found through a series of research projects, “Although it has been believed for decades that medication effects on academic seatwork productivity and classroom behavior would translate into improved learning of new academic material, we found no such translation.”
Tough pursues the obvious question: “So what’s going on? If these studies are accurate, stimulant medications don’t do much to improve cognitive ability or academic performance. And yet millions of young Americans (and their parents) feel that the pills are essential to their success in school. Why?”
Well, because they are (often) essential to a system that is grounded, unquestioningly, in the belief that the meaning is in the text - not in the reader, or writer, or mathematician, or scientist, or historian, or artist. Not in the thinker, the maker, the doer. Not in the human being. There is good reason to support the decisions that parents make for their particular children in particular circumstances to medicate or not to medicate - in all cases, the child is not responsible for the quality of the environment in which they find themselves. That part is up to us.
Edmund Sonuga-Barke, a researcher in psychiatry and neuroscience at King’s College London seems to be turning to a set of questions that might lead us to become more aware of the possibilities we have. He asks, “I’m just saying I don’t think that’s the right target. Rather than trying to treat and resolve the biology, we should be focusing on building environments that improve outcomes and mental health.”
Yes. What might those environments for learning look like? This was an experiment that Matt and I were involved in for a couple of decades at Opal School. Because of our research, I had some images and memories and trust in the possibility that an approach to education can be built on the experience of the unique learner within a unique group. And I carried those images with me to the edge of that canyon where my daughter’s 6th grade teacher stood on the other side. There was no way to cross over in the short time we had that year.
Our work now at The Center for Playful Inquiry is to engage in the long project of designing and building that bridge. We start with the adults - adults who deserve to find their way back to their own sense of agency, participation, and construction of meaning. Because until we do, it will be impossible to help create environments where children do not have to pay their own precious attention to a society that is selling them false promises, lies, and drugs that cure problems that creativity and imagination (and determination) might do more to solve.
This month in The Studio we’ve been focused on our own state of play. What does it feel like? What brings us there? What do we notice about our personal experience of play as adults, as educators, and as caregivers? That’s it. What do you notice? That’s how we reacquaint ourselves with the meaning we make. Where does your attention go?
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