Teaching 2nd grade summer school Reading and Math, I cannot help but reflect upon my own elementary school education. I was always considered by pretty much everyone, including my teachers, to be a very intelligent child. Any bad grades were considered to be laziness on my part.
One area in which I struggled throughout my career as a student was math. I particularly had a very hard time with word problems. I also had some problem with certain areas of multiplication, and fractions made no sense whatsoever to me until I took high school chemistry. I failed 8th grade math, made a C in Algebra 1 (Freshman), Cs and Bs in Geometry (Sophomore), a B in Algebra II (Jr), and an a in Calculus and in Trigonometry and Analytical Geometry (Sr). In college, I made a C in Calculus I, and I failed Calculus II so miserably that I managed to make a fairly low F even doing all of the extra credit.
Math in elementary school has now gone almost completely over to word problems. When I was in elementary school, tests would have almost all numerical problems, and only about 2 word problems. That meant I could miss the word problems (which I almost inevitably did) without failing the test. But today, the quizzes I have had to give involved nothing but word problems. Meaning there's a very good chance that I would have been failing math well before 8th grade.
While there is no question that we need to teach children how to formulate problems (which is what word problems do), it doesn't make a lot of sense to teach formulating math to children who cannot add, subtract, multiply, or divide. That is, you absolutely must have the mathematical skill in place before you can move on to mathematical reasoning and formulation of problems. The latter may be most important overall, but you cannot skip establishing the foundation.
Now it may be that this way of doing things is the best way for certain students. I won't deny that possibility. But it's coming at the expense of other children. And if this is true, then the way I was taught it came at the expense of the kinds of students who do well in the way math is taught today. There are trade-offs. In this particular trade-off, I would have been the one traded, from doing well enough in math to pass to failing very much earlier on.
Another thing I have noticed about education today is that it's designed to be much more social. There's more group work and "shoulder partners" and sitting together on a rug and so on. None of this is exactly inviting to anyone on the spectrum, and I certainly wouldn't have liked school nearly as much if it had been run like it is today.
Indeed, though I was perhaps seen as highly intelligent but quirky (to put it nicely) as a child in the 1970s, I think there is little doubt that in the current school environment that I would have been identified as having something "wrong" with me. I would have been seen as refusing to participate and I probably would have had some quite negative reactions to a lot of this forced sociality (something perfectly fine for neurotypicals, who don't find it forced at all). I would have likely been identified as having ODD, if not Asperger's/autism. I probably wouldn't have been identified as having ADD/ADHD, because I was never outwardly hyperactive (inwardly, I'm in a dead run almost all the time), but I would have likely been sullen and I wouldn't have liked the classroom environment at all.
In other words, I think I would have done worse in school today than I did in the 1970s.
If it's true that I would have done worse under the way teaching is done today, then we may have some explanation for why none of the education reforms we've tried have ever worked to improve scores. It's because while the reforms help some children learn better, it ends up acting as an impediment to others. It also may explain the "rise" in ADD/ADHD and autism, since the way students are taught today seems to draw out many of their identifying factors.
But we ought to be a little disturbed that someone like me would probably no do well in today's system. The system I went to school in put me on the path to succeeding in college and graduate school. I fear that this system would have had me identified as a problem student and perhaps even having the autism I do in fact have. That is a problem because even though there is a lot of rhetoric around people with disabilities being able to succeed, the fact is that nowadays we are put on a pathway to "succeed" outside of a college trajectory--mostly because we are left unprepared to go. My brother, who has dyslexia, was discouraged from going to college in high school--and he now has a B.A., an M.A., and an M.F.A. You cannot tell me that autistic children aren't discouraged, directly or indirectly, from going to college.
What is worse is that, if I am right that the majority of advancements in the world were made by autistics, then we are doing a terrible disservice to the world at large by creating an educational system that educates perfect copiers well, but leaves reformers/inventors/creators on the sidelines.
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