There is no shortage of possible stressors: They range from war, cycles of global weather change, and Riane Eisler’s theory that the violence associated with heating domesticated animals has required a change in the brain, to the theory first presented by Walter Ong3 in 1982 and Robert Logan4 in 1986, and later brilliantly developed by the physician Leonard Shlain in his 1998 book The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image,5 that the development of the alphabet created a rewiring of the brain, which led to hierarchical behavior when the alphabet was taught to children younger than seven years old.
Books have been written about how World Wars I and II were caused, in part, by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century German childrearing practices that advocated violence toward children to break their wills and teach compliance. In the 1950s psychologist Erik Erickson wrote a brilliant analysis of how the early American Puritan practice of “breaking the will of the child” prior to the age of two led to a generation of violent, angry, and even paranoid Puritans who were so incapable of living and working together without strife that they sowed the seeds of the end of Puritanism.6
But the pattern can be—and is being—changed. In 1946 Dr. Benjamin Spock first published his groundbreaking Baby and Child Care, a book that contradicted the remnants of American Puritan conventional wisdom that believed that children should have their will broken at an early age. Instead, Spock persuasively argued, children should be treated with respect and shouldn’t be subjected to physical violence as a way of guiding or controlling their behavior.
Spock didn’t have the benefit of the knowledge we now have about the impact of stress on the developing brain. He didn’t realize that the growth of the uniquely human prefrontal lobes can be slowed or even stunted simply by angry words or regular spankings from Mom or Dad. But he knew intuitively that for children to grow to their full potential, they must, from the earliest age, receive recognition of their humanity and personhood.
Schools May Be the Key
In the huge body of literature on stress, cortisol, and childhood brain development, there is virtually no mention of the single largest presence in a child’s life: school. Thousands of studies have been done over the past 50 years on the consequences of child abuse and neglect and on how substance abuse changes brain structures, but the only publication I have been able to find on the topic of the impact of school stress was published in India.
When I asked a physician and researcher about this (who asked that his name not be used), he said:
I wouldn’t touch that topic with a 10-foot pole. You can’t get funding if there’s any indication that your study is going to end up suggesting that our schools need to be changed in a way that may be more expensive. Government won’t support it, industry won’t support it, and true foundation support that’s not promoting a specific agenda is nearly invisible…. If you want to do a study that will probably conclude that giving schoolchildren drugs is a good idea, I can get you cash tomorrow from a dozen sources, mostly in the pharmaceutical industry or the government agencies that respond to their lobbying. But even the people who criticize our schools as a device to support their advocacy of school vouchers don’t want anybody looking into how much it might cost if we were to really provide both teachers and children with a high-quality, stress-free educational environment. Forget it.
We know about the impact of the hour or two the average family with a school-age child spends together. We’ve even begun to discover—although it’s not widely publicized on television—the neurological impact of the four hours per day that the average school-age child spends watching TV or playing video games. But when was the last time you heard about a study on the neurological impact of the six hours a day the average child spends in school?
Children attend state-run schools six hours per day, nine months per year, from, on average, ages five to 18—the largest chunk of time in the most neurologically critical developmental period of their lives. (Throw in daycare, and the amount of time becomes even more significant.) By simply looking at the time spent in school—and considering that it’s the time of day of peak awareness and brain activity—it would be impossible not to conclude that school must have a huge impact on how a child’s brain forms, on the neural pruning process, and on whether he ends up as an adult with a dominant reptile brain or dominant prefrontal lobes.
That said, I want to be on record as a strong supporter of public education and our public school system. There are many excellent teachers in our schools and much innovative work being done, but this institution that is so critical to a free society is under daily attack by radical so-called conservatives who want to privatize education, destroy teachers’ unions, and starve government assistance to public education. While I philosophically object to “compulsory” education, I strongly agree with Thomas Jefferson that one of the most important functions of government in a democracy must be to provide a high-quality, comprehensive, and free public education—from the earliest years up through college—to any student who wants it. My goal is to improve public education, not destroy it.
School as Torture
I’ve noticed an interesting pattern in all three of my own children, in my three younger brothers, in many of the children we’ve had in our care, and even among the many teachers we’ve had as friends, acquaintances, or employees over the years.
The pattern goes something like this: When kids (and new teachers) start school for the first time, they’re incredibly excited. They can hardly wait for the year to get under way; they believe it’s going to be new, stimulating, and exciting—a wonderful opportunity and a great new experience. By the second or third year of school, however, both kids and teachers are beginning to balk. The teachers are tired and frustrated; the kids are stressed and wounded.
Somewhere in the middle of the 13 years of their public school incarceration, some children begin to complain and rebel. And after their first decade of teaching, many teachers I have met have become complete cynics.
Condemnation
Some of the nation’s most well-promoted ADHD researchers have stated that people with attention deficit disorders have “stunted” frontal or prefrontal lobes, implying that these stunted prefrontals are the cause of ADHD and similar problems involving self-regulation and self-control. They further suggest that the reason why stimulant drugs help such people increase their self-control is because they increase blood flow to this particular part of the brain.
But the most recent science shows that these stunted prefrontals (and the lack of inhibition that comes with them) may well be the result of children’s being psychologically harmed by the mismatch between the way they learn and the way some of our schools teach. Scientists now know that when a child receives predominantly punishment, criticism, and other fear- and anxiety-inducing feedback from the world around him, the development of his brain’s prefrontal lobes is stunted. Research demonstrates that such cortisol-producing negative input causes a child’s brain to emphasize the development of the survival-oriented reptile brain and sacrifice the development of the emotional and intuitive prefrontals involved in inhibition and higher function.7
So, a child who’s developing normally but who may have some differences from others—perhaps she takes a bit longer to understand questions or to process language, or she needs to mentally rehearse her answers before giving them—may find herself in a school environment that doesn’t tolerate those differences. Unlike the adult world, in school generally what is most valued is the ability to quickly memorize and instantly repeat things that may not even seem to have any value or context.
While a number of our schools emphasize rote memorization and test taking, the real world rarely demands these as primary skills. Anyone who’s been to a twentieth high school reunion knows that there are many surprises—late bloomers as well as people who did well in school but went nowhere in life. The fact is, very few careers require sitting in one place for hours a day, switching topics ever
y hour or two, although our schools seem locked into this as their singular model of education.
One result can be that the child who functions differently is criticized or condemned for her learning style. The condemnation produces stress in the form of the disapproval of teachers, the jeers of classmates, and the disapproval or concern of her parents, and this stress increases cortisol levels. This in turn slows the development of her prefrontal lobes with their regulatory system and increases development of her instinctual, rapid-response reptile brain. After a few years of this daily stress in school, the child’s brain has been sculpted into something different from what it could have been: It’s more functional for survival—fight or flight—and less functional for deep or long-lasting thinking processes. She now has attention deficit disorder.
School as Work
Some of you may know how hard it is to sit, day after day, through a job you hate. A number of things could be making it difficult for you: Maybe your boss constantly puts you down—and your co-workers know it. Or perhaps you do your work poorly every single day because it isn’t something you know how to do well, even though there are other jobs you can do quite well. Maybe you’re a petite woman with exquisite handiwork skills who’s trying to move hundred-pound sacks of cement all day. Or perhaps you have to solder miniature components on a circuit board, but your fingers are thick and you don’t see very well.
Imagine that everybody knows you’re no good at your job and many of your co-workers make fun of you for it. Maybe your boss reminds you of it all the time and even regularly reports to your family on how poorly you’re doing. But if, after all this, you try to quit this job, the police will come and get you and take you back to it; and when you protest, they say that you are being oppositional and give you drugs to eliminate your reaction or put you in jail. How would you (or do you) exist in such an environment? What kind of attitude do you have toward the world after a few months in this situation? How about after a few years?
This, in reality, is the world many of our children face each day: It’s daily life for Edison-gene children in many public schools. On the first day of kindergarten, they’re so excited to go to school that they can hardly wait. In the first days, weeks, or months, they love school.
And then the mismatch starts to show up, the difference between their learning style and their teachers’ techniques. And they begin not to like school. They beg not to be sent, but they’re sent anyway (with the best intentions). Being in school begins to hurt, to be unpleasant; they’re being wounded by it. Whether it takes months or years, they begin to hate school. And out of those wounds come all sorts of problematic behaviors.
Of course, there are some teachers and some students who love our schools just as they are. Their genetic profile and neurology matches up perfectly with the instructional style required in most modern educational environments, and they have fun. But school becomes little more than imprisonment for those teachers who thought they could innovate to make their work positively transformational and for those children who began by seeing school as a wonderful new opportunity for learning but then realized they would be criticized, punished, and given what they experience as painfully boring work to do for no apparent reason.
The predictable result for an Edison-gene child whose learning style is mismatched with our public schools’ teaching style is stress and its accompanying flood of cortisol, hour after hour, day in and day out, year after year, through the largest part of a child’s developmental years.
Comorbidities
When Edison-gene children have trouble in school, they’re often described as oppositional (argumentative), or having a bad attitude, or behaving as if they think the world owes them something. Having been treated as misfits and outcasts by the school, such children may have problems making and sustaining friendships among peers. These become additional diagnostic criteria for psychiatric conditions, and in the delightful language of the medical world the new behaviors are called comorbid conditions or comorbidities.*
School can be hell for a child who doesn’t fit in and can’t perform as well as his peers. The experience can leave scars that last a lifetime. In my experience, however, these comorbidities are a natural and predictable result of the daily wounding these children receive in the classroom environment.
Cultures determine which behaviors will be considered good or bad, which will be rewarded and which will be discouraged, and then they impose those determinations on their children.
When I went into the advertising business in the 1970s, I learned that the first job of effective advertising is to tell a viewer (child or adult) that he’s incomplete or imperfect and thus unhappy. Television images flash so quickly between product shots and smiling faces that even preliterate babies can get the idea: You’re unhappy now, but this product will bring you happiness.
An Edison-gene child faces a double whammy in that he’s also confronted with a school system that says he must fit in with the teaching and testing style in common use in order to be accepted. Failure and the blame associated with it, Schore’s research shows, can produce a stress-driven cortisol response that inhibits the normal maturation process of the prefrontals and other structures in the most recent (human) parts of the brain and strengthens the fight-or-flight reptile brain.
The result is that the child’s intellectual development is slowed—which produces more stress that further slows the process of brain growth, which leads to more developmental delays. Ultimately, the child becomes clearly and definably both different from and developmentally inferior to his peers. The “different” part is something he was born with and, in another time and place, could be a great asset to him. But the “developmentally inferior” part is a tragedy: it’s the result of the mismatch between his learning style and the school’s teaching style, and it doesn’t have to happen.
Breaking the Loop
When Edison-gene children are misunderstood and endure years of stressful negative experiences, they are at particular risk of stress-induced developmental brain damage. When allowed to continue through school under such circumstances, it’s just common sense to infer that they’re at greater risk of drug abuse, promiscuity, antisocial behavior, relationship troubles, and a whole range of failures and problems in the teenage years and adult life—the range of problems that are usually attributed to their genetic difference but in fact are more directly the result of that difference colliding with a hostile school environment.
It’s particularly critical, then, to break the cycle of damage to these children as early and as quickly as possible so that their normal brain development can continue through their early twenties. There are two actions we can take: we can create for a child a new way of interpreting events, and we can put a stop to any wounding he may be experiencing.
Offering a New Story
To begin creating a new way of interpreting events, the first step is to offer a new story, a new way for the child—and the adults around her—to view what her behavior signifies: Instead of thinking of an Edison-gene child as having a genetic mental problem or “disorder,” tell her—and yourself—that she is the descendant of the explorers who moved across the world discovering and populating new lands and of people like Thomas Edison, who invented all sorts of ways to make life better, healthier, or easier. Then tell her about the latest research that shows that this is more than just a story you’ve made up. Children love hearing this and begin to view their inner tendencies in a completely new light. Instead of being seen as an evil from within, the itch to be active begins to feel glorious. Think of the difference!
Point out the positives of his genetic trait: energy, enthusiasm, creativity, fearlessness, and the ability to think on his feet. Suggest that such things are a skill set that will suit him well in adult life if he can learn to channel them well and to perform basic “farmer” tasks; remind him that “You don’t have to change how you are.”
One of the most primal of human instincts is to form
a tribe, an instinct that’s subordinated only by the need for family. Tribes are rightly self-centered: I’ve sat with Apaches who made jokes about the Hopi, and with Hopi who told unflattering stories about the Navajo. Tribalism emerges in our culture in sports and sports talk—“my” team is better than “yours” is—and in politics. And it’s powerfully visible among genetic and religious minorities in our culture. It holds them together, makes them strong, and keeps them going in the face of adversity.
Tribalism is healthy when one tribe says, “Our tribe is better for people like us than your tribe would be,” but it becomes unhealthy when one tribe says to another, “and therefore we have the right to invade or harm your tribe.” Thus, frankly and openly, I’m recommending that you tell your child about the noble tribe of hunters, of Edison-gene people, she has descended from and how, from her viewpoint, they’re better than those farmers. Tribal pride is not a bad thing: it’s a social and psychological survival mechanism.
As for putting a stop to any wounding an Edison-gene child may experience, when you catch yourself wanting to criticize or punish him for Edison-like behaviors, reframe his actions in terms of the positive message you’re trying to instill. Thus, “Johnny, quit running around knocking over the lamps!” becomes, “Johnny, you have a lot of energy! Someday you’ll use it to change the world. But your energy shouldn’t be indoors where there are so many things to break! How about going outside to play or finding some other way to let it out if you want to be inside?”
The Thom Hartmann Reader Page 14