The Methodology

From time to time I will wander from my usual conversation topics of videogames and interesting places I have farted venture into territory of more substance. On one such occasion I found myself in the company of teachers of the special education variety, and it didn’t take long for me to become infuriated with the bass akwards approach our society takes concerning what should be the most sacred responsibility a society can engage in – the education of the next generation.

Now when I say “society”, “responsibility”, and “education” in the same sentence it can make some of my right-of-center friends cringe a little bit, but for the life of me I don’t know why. I am not saying that parents don’t or shouldn’t play an indispensable and active role in the education of their children; it’s simply a question of skill sets. Just like I don’t know anything about fixing my air conditioning, I haven’t the foggiest idea of how to instruct a child on a concept and give it any kind of staying power. Educators are trained professionals, they have done some fancy schoolin’ on such methods and I am more than inclined to letting them do what they do. No, my bone to pick is more with the governing educational philosophy that I thought would have atrophied since my waltz through the public school system.

I was diagnosed with a learning disability early in my scholastic career, and as such I spent two hours every Thursday with a series of frayed and overworked special education instructors. And I wasn’t alone either, these classes tended to be huge, even by public school standards. It seemed like everyone of these students had different maladies ranging from mild dyslexia to dementia, and all of it would be presided over by one –maybe two – Special Education Instructors doing their level best to address the individual needs of their students. Although the name Special Education Instructor would make it seem that they where well respected professionals in their field when in reality they where more like glorified caretakers of ‘problem children’. They would spend the lion’s share of their time caring for the least functioning of their charges or arguing with the students with authority issues, whilst the other children where sort of left to their own devices. I didn’t realize it at the time but I would look to my left and my right, consider my company and surmise that my mild aberration with number comprehension was an educational deal breaker every bit as crippling as the tragic cases all around me.

It wasn’t until I got to middle school that I some of the same yearly test that confirmed me as a sped also recommended me for some accelerated courses. And having been Sheparded into the Shangri-la of the collage prep courses I saw just how lopsided and cruel my schools approach to the student body actually was. Because I looked to my left and my right in those classrooms and saw very little difference! These kids where just as screwed up as the Thursday crew, only for some reason they where labeled as eccentric and their every utterance was nurtured like potential wisdom. Whatever you where interested in, you where free to pursue and so knowledge came to you in a much more fluid and natural way. It was Jeckyl and Hyde approach to my education that shed the harshest light yet on our cirque du learning; In a society that prides itself on finding the individual solution to our important problems – re: Starbucks coffee or customer service counters – we apply a generic and wholly inefficient method of education to our youth , involving the memorization and regurgitation of trivia, and anyone that doesn’t fit that mold is either squirrled away into the boiler room where they will be forgotten about until graduation or put in the clean room in the library where they can be spoon fed SAT answers.

It is a broad approach that is meant to shoot right down the middle of the educational spectrum, applying to as many kids as possible. But the truth of the matter is that not all kids assimilate knowledge in the same way. Some kids who are just as capable of learning and using that data in productive ways don’t get that opportunity because they fall outside that spectrum and are branded (seemingly at random) as learning disabled. So they are removed from the larger educational continuum so that they don’t gum up the works for the rest of the student body. Kids that don’t deserve it are getting thrown over.

The fix to this of course, is more teachers that are skilled at deducing the students individual need and using their professional expertise to help that child reach certain benchmarks. But, as the old adage says, everything cost money, and it would appear that there are things we would much rather spend our money on. Whenever one of my projects puts me into contact with a government agency and I spend half my day calling a dozen or so extensions within the Federal Redundancy Department of Redundancy my mind would sometimes wonder to those frayed Special Education Instructors.

The only other public entity that I know of that applies the same kind of generic approach to the training and using of people is the military - and that institution is properly funded. The irony is not lost unto me that we use a powerful standing armed force to protect the interests of client states –states with excellent education systems, I might add- by feeding the personal pools of that force with the kids that didn’t make the grade in our cash strapped school systems. When someone joins the military to improve themselves I feel proud for them (that is part of what the military should be all about) but if someone joins it because they had the misfortune of falling outside the lines of how we drill reading/writing/arithmetic into people, well then a very different feeling wells up in me.

If you are a special education instructor come and find me and I’ll buy you a drink, because you are doing something that Ebner so far hasn’t gotten around to doing…make the world a better place.