Education and Learning

Neuro-Linguistic Learning Center

Helping Children, Teens and Adults Succeed in the 21st Century

ADHD: Education and Learning

Our educational system, our culture and our environment have all undergone tremendous change in recent years. Life in the 21st Century seems to be placing more and more demands on adults and children to adapt and change.

Less than 100 years ago, 90% of Americans lived on either farms or ranches. If a child or adult struggled with a particular aspect of learning, for example reading or listening, there were plenty of other ways in which the child or adult could learn and express him or her self successfully.

Even as recent as 20 years ago, there were ample opportunities in manufacturing, construction and other hands-on type trades for these “non-verbal” thinkers to succeed. Many of these trades required the specific visual and spatial processing skills in which these non-verbal thinkers excelled.

In contrast, today’s workplace offers limited opportunity to anyone without moderate to advanced verbal and symbolic processing skills. Today’s educational system has responded by requiring extensive verbal and symbolic processing skills.

In addition, these skills are being required of children at earlier and earlier ages, hence the pressure to see children as young as 4 and 5 years old reading and writing.

Statistics show that as many as 80% of children and adults will naturally adapt to this pressure. These “verbal thinkers” quite naturally process the auditory (spoken) and symbolic (written) information thrust at them every day. They are served quite well by our current educational system.

However, for the remaining 20% of children and adults, this verbal/symbolic environment may pose significant difficulties. Their excellent visual and spatial processing skills are often of little use in processing the symbolic “languages” of reading and mathematics.

In most cases, the verbal thinker is well suited to classroom life while the visual thinker is left to struggle with a set of skills that are generally unappreciated and often provide poor results in the classroom environment.

Their ability to multi-task (parallel processing) and their reactive nature quickly often prove to be a distraction and detriment in today’s restrained and muted learning environment. And their once valued energetic and curious nature is the antithesis of modern classroom life.

Consider in today’s public educational system, more and more children are forced to spend more and more time sitting quietly in the classroom than ever before.

In today’s pop culture, children (and adults) are bombarded with sensory input via television, radio, IPods, cell phones, computers and video games. They struggle with social change, increased testing and the pressures of life in the 21st century.

Meanwhile, our environment is changing at record pace. The air we breathe, the homes we live in and the foods we eat have all changed dramatically in recent years. Even now we’re just beginning to learn about the health effects and long-term consequences of these changes.