I’ve had it. I can’t take this anymore. No matter how hard I try to pretend that students with learning disabilities represent a minority group that is separate and apart from me, I always end up in the same frame of mind: wanting to jump off a cliff.
Don’t worry; the cliff I speak of is a philosophical one (not that this makes it any less dangerous).
You see, I wanted to write a simple piece about how great it is that more and more learning-disabled students (those with conditions such as dyslexia or attention deficit disorder) are getting the help they need to succeed in college despite the fact that a lot more progress still needs to be made in this area. And, truthfully, I do think it’s great.
My problem, however, is that I can’t help but feel that this issue touches more than just the 11 percent of college students with some form of disability. My gut says it touches all of us (albeit less directly)—and that we’d better pay attention.
Humanity is at a crossroads. People the world over now seem so fragmented in their beliefs and ideals that it’s easy to conclude that the big picture itself is broken into matching pieces. In spite of numerous common problems that threaten to end life as we know it for all of us—such as climate change and economic turmoil—we continue to latch on to a status quo of competition between countless splinter groups, each with their own special interests.
We view the world through lenses marked “Us” and “Them.” We feed off the battles. We delight in the judging. We love the righteous satisfaction we feel from being part of a particular group (the one that’s “right”). But the more distance we create between each other in this way—the more we allow ourselves to indulge in politics of identity—the more vulnerable we all become. A growing population of ever-more-competitive egos is unsustainable. At some point, the civilization collapses.
We can do better. We must.
A Madman’s Manifesto?
“So,” you ask, “what the heck does any of this have to do with disabled students?”
Everything. The issues faced by learning-disabled students represent a microcosm of what occurs in society at large. It starts with education but goes far beyond it.
The very fact that we choose to categorize a group of people who are different from what we believe to be the “norm” (and then must work hard to include them in social, educational, and economic systems designed for that “norm”) strikes me as absurd. It relates directly to how we interact with each other and the world around us, the opportunities we have as individuals, and whether or not the human race as a whole will ever learn how to advance into the unknown future peacefully.
Thus, instead of just looking at students with disabilities and wondering what they are capable of learning (and congratulating ourselves when some of them succeed), I think the better approach is to examine why we call them “disabled” in the first place while, at the same time, asking ourselves what we can learn from our behavior—both as individuals and as a society.
I acknowledge that this is an ambitious task. But I can no longer pretend that what affects those who are different from me doesn’t affect me also. I can no longer pretend that the increasing tensions and inequalities in the world are beyond my ability to comprehend or do something about. It’s time we all started thinking a little differently about each other. At the very least, we need to explore some new perspectives and try them on to see how they fit, even if they feel uncomfortable at first.
That’s why I’ve started the following manifesto. I’m jumping off the cliff. Whether I land gracefully in the water below or shatter my bones upon the rocks isn’t really the point. It’s about having the courage to question the beliefs that I take for granted, beliefs that many of us operate our lives by (even if we aren’t consciously aware that we do so).
Think of this manifesto as an open-source work in progress. Share it, shred it, edit it, build upon it. Challenge its ideas. Participate. This isn’t about me or “them.” It’s about all of us. It’s about exploring the forgotten frontiers of cooperation rather than the pockmarked homelands of competition.
Here are five principles to get us started:
1. Labels Create Artificial Paradigms (and Vice Versa)
You can call me a filthy hippie for my ideas, but that doesn’t change the truth of what I really am.
Words help to shape our perceived reality. It is often our language—our vocabulary and how we use it—that determines what we see. Other times, it is our strict adherence to what is “normal” that defines how we react to things that don’t fit nicely into our chosen paradigms.
Think of the green lawns that line the roadsides of suburban North America. In such artificial landscapes, anything other than grass within a manicured patch of lawn is seen as an intruder. Dandelions cease to be pretty, harmless flowers; they become “those damn weeds” (pests that must be eradicated because…well…because they are weeds). But a “weed” is only a weed if that’s what we choose to call it or have blindly accepted it to be.
Dandelions, when they aren’t being made toxic from herbicides or roadside pollution, are actually impressive plants. Not only do they add color to a boring patch of grass, but they also have medicinal and culinary uses. In fact, dandelions have more overall nutritional value than broccoli or spinach. (They are an excellent source of calcium, iron, vitamin A, potassium, and vitamin C.)
Yet most suburban lawn warriors drive themselves crazy trying to keep these beneficial (and resilient) plants out of their grass. After all, what would the neighbors think if they did otherwise?
People with disabilities have, in the past, shared a similar plight as that of dandelions. Many still do. Many of us often treat “disabled” people only marginally better than we treat “weeds.” We will tolerate them if we are forced to. We might even talk to them if our conscience speaks up and makes us feel guilty for trying to ignore them.
But is Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s most brilliant scientists, a weed? As he sits in his wheelchair and uses assistive technologies to speak with us, is he any less human than the rest of us? Do we only value him because we were lucky enough to discover how smart he is?
Thomas Edison, the inventor of countless technologies we now take for granted, was thrown out of school and labeled “dumb.” He had dyslexia, a “learning disability.” Clearly, though, he could learn just fine. He just had to do it differently. Thankfully, he chose not to view himself as a dunce his entire life.
And he’s not the only one. The past and present are filled with example after example of brilliant people with “unconventionally” wired brains. Leonardo Da Vinci had dyslexia and is thought to have had attention deficit disorder as well. Pablo Picasso was dyslexic. So is Richard Branson, the highly creative billionaire entrepreneur.
In nearly all cases, these famous people with “learning disabilities” had difficulties in school. The education systems they tried to participate in arose from a narrow concept of “normal” that didn’t account for more than a slim band of learning styles from a spectrum that we now know is incredibly broad. Sadly, though, this still happens.
How many gifted minds have we discarded or ignored because they came packaged in a “disabled” body?
This problem extends to the rest of us. The labels we assign to people become our blinders.
When all we see is the surface identity that we’ve assigned to someone (whether based on politics, lifestyle choices, physical differences, or spiritual preferences), we give ourselves permission to ignore what he or she has to offer. We sometimes even reject any good ideas the person might have, believing that such things are not possible from those we disagree with. Instead, we ready our pesticides and shower our “enemies” with labels like “moron” and “idiot.”
We shortchange each other’s potential when we choose labels designed to make us feel more comfortable in our own artificially constructed paradigms. The result is a world full of pointless, isolated monocultures of stubborn cynics.
We can do better. We must.
2. Mindful People Make Bad Robots
The institutions we’ve erected to govern society place great value in things that are absolute. They prefer simple machines that can be easily programmed and controlled rather than dynamic human beings full of mystery and complexity.
That’s why we have absolute laws and ideals and social norms. People inject so much chaos and unpredictability into the system that, in order to have a civilized society, our institutions must impose some kind of order (or so most of us believe).
In our quest to control the unknown, we end up with institutions that don’t reflect the full spectrum of human diversity and potential. We get arbitrary standards. We get schools that don’t know what to do with students who can’t learn to read or do math from traditional teaching methods. We get companies that don’t know how to identify or utilize the broader talents of their employees.
The more we allow our institutions to measure us, track us, and reduce our lives to bits of data, the less human we allow ourselves to be. Our individual desires for control of the world around us only feed a system that, by its nature, seeks to dehumanize us.
The more we casually buy in to this programming—the less we stop to question our use of language and institutions—the closer we get to a mechanical society devoid of nuance and rich human qualities. Identifying certain individuals as “disabled” only reinforces a paradigm that is about producing ever-more-efficient models of robots that can do more with less, faster. Anyone who cannot (or refuses to) keep up with this system gets sorted out, labeled, and set aside for refurbishment or thrown into the scrap pile.
Good little robots don’t feel. They don’t question. They just act.
We can do better. We must.
3. Imagination is the Engine of Human Progress
All too often, school is where imagination goes to die. It makes outcasts of people who can’t sit still long enough to learn by rote memorization, boring lectures, and bubble tests. It segregates knowledge, separating the world into disconnected parts called “subjects.”
Most of us are able to grind our way through this tedious educational model. Some of us even excel in it. But few of us have any real fun doing so because we aren’t given many real chances to develop our best gift—imagination.
Humanity’s greatest leaps forward have come out of the minds of people with powerful imaginations—people with the ability to connect the dots between things that the rest of us could only see as separate.
Highly visual thinkers like Albert Einstein (another “dunce” in school) and Nikola Tesla (an under-appreciated genius) had the ability to see the world as a whole. Their minds were wired to recognize the intimate connections between everything.
They could visualize complex concepts with ease and work out the solutions to difficult problems entirely in their heads. But they are just two examples of the incredible diversity in the wiring of human brains.
Dyslexia is not a disorder. It is the result of a brain that happens to be wired differently. The same thing can be said for many people with “attention deficit disorder.” They are not stupid. We should not be classifying people as “disabled” simply for having brains that are challenged by text and numbers or that fail to be stimulated by the teaching methods of a narrowly conceived system.
Someone who appears to have a disorder may actually have an incredible gift. The diversity of human brains means that we have countless opportunities for discovering new ways of perceiving the world and finding answers to life’s biggest questions. By tuning out people that don’t fit an artificial “norm,” we might be missing out on what they could teach us about the universe and ourselves.
Specialists alone cannot solve the problems of the world. We need the creative thinkers. We need the people who can make the connections between the specialties. We need an educational and economic system that values imagination above all else.
In our quest to shoehorn everybody into a standard model, we pretend that every human brain is the same. It is silly and irrational.
We can do better. We must.
4. Productivity is a Stupid Religion
We trumpet productivity as if it is the path to heavenly rewards. Our schools exist to give us the tools to become “productive members of society.” We compete with each other to see who can be most the productive.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I personally find this to be one of the least inspiring visions for humanity I can imagine. Is this really the most we can aspire to—“productive” citizens?
The cult of productivity creates a dull paradigm into which some people fit neatly but many others fit poorly or not at all. One does not need to be “disabled” in order to feel isolated by society’s obsession with production.
We are effectively being told that our human worth is derived from our ability to work and to help create profits for an economy measured only by its growth. Should you have trouble doing this, you are looked upon as flawed or inferior.
Who the heck decided that “productive” is the trait we should all possess, the ultimate thing to describe a good citizen?
What about “creative,” “inventive,” “compassionate,” “loving,” “happy,” “fulfilled?”
Who decided that to be “unproductive” is to be a blight on society?
Right now, it seems as if the world has no operating vision other than the one that says we all must participate in an economic paradigm that frequently rewards excessive greed and the exploitation of others. We have no collective sense of going anywhere inspiring. The only vision, it would appear, is of a mundane system based upon attaining different levels of consumption—for the sake of consumption.
We share no purpose other than mindless growth. Produce, produce, produce so that we can consume, consume, consume.
Companies emphasize productivity and work to measure it and increase it. But how many companies emphasize imagination and work to increase that? How many companies really have a sense of where they are going beyond the next fiscal quarter? How many companies are actually doing something that matters, something worthy of humanity’s precious existence and the limited amount of time that each of us has on this earth?
My problem is not with productivity itself. It is with the belief that human beings should do things only for the sake of doing things. Lost in this mindless religion is any uplifting sense of the “why.” Lost are those of us who aspire to something more meaningful.
We can do better. We must.
5. We Are All Disabled (Because “Normal” Does Not Exist)
Physical normality is a myth. Every single one of us is impaired in some way. If there is a “normal,” it is that we all will die. Our mortality is inescapable. We are all inherently vulnerable.
Yet we perpetuate a false division between those who are “normal” and those who are “disabled.” We carry on as if people have “normal” and “abnormal” brains.
If we really wanted to get right down to it, we could plot a wide spectrum of “disabilities,” from the obviously physical ones to the more ambivalent mental ones. No illness, injury, negative emotion, or annoying personality trait would be spared. Anything outside of “perfect” would be plotted.
The problem, of course, is that you can’t define a perfect human being. Ask a billion people, and you’ll get a billion different answers. We each have our own set of beliefs and behaviors that we wish everyone else abided by.
No one person could meet the criteria for “perfect” of a billion different people. Therefore, we all have characteristics that could be plotted as a “disability.”
In nature, diversity is crucial to the survival of ecosystems. It is not something that needs to be fixed. And it is always evolving. The human ecosystem is no different.
Still, despite our diversity, most humans share important desires. We want to be heard. We want to be loved. We want to be looked upon without pity. We want to matter.
We are born with extremely diverse brains. Yet our individual perceptions only become muddled when society tries to impose its norms on us. It is those moments when we become aware of our differences, leaving us feeling isolated and apart from each other.
When we struggle to fit in, we are told to seek counseling in order to adjust to a system that doesn’t value us as we are—instead of the system evolving to include us, to learn from us.
We can do better. We must.
The Human Symphony
Everything is connected. This is true whether you look to God or science for confirmation. We are all individuals that should be embraced for our differences while simultaneously recognizing that we are part of a larger whole.
Imagine an orchestra. It is composed of different musicians playing different instruments (every one of them essential)—violins, clarinets, cellos, drums—yet they each work together to produce a spectacular wall of sound and melody that transcends its individual parts.
Now imagine the human symphony—one without a conductor. Each one of us is a player. We can choose to fight and compete over which piece of music to perform and force upon everyone (banishing anyone we feel isn’t up to the task). Or we can playfully cooperate and improvise an unwritten piece of music, patiently teasing out each other’s talents out of genuine curiosity and respect. Which option do you find more inspiring?
What are we here to do if not learn, explore, and love? We are all students. Have we forgotten how to learn from each other? Have we forgotten how to cooperate?
I jumped off the cliff because I couldn’t put aside my nagging feelings in order to write another post that was disconnected from the bigger picture.
If I splattered upon the rocks, I am sorry for the gory mess I’ve left behind. On the other hand, I’m sure there is a lesson in that.
I can do better. I must.
How about you?
