Edu-Leadership

From the Inside-Out: Learning Disability Caused by Ed-Tech

'…certainly looks good to me’ Marvin Minsky MIT Media Lab and MIT AI Lab

Our society is in the grips of a technology-transmitted neurological disease that very few people know exists and far fewer understand. Over 90 million adults are afflicted. 60% of our children are struggling with it. It is estimated to cost our economy over $220 billion dollars a year.

For the most part it’s a misdiagnosed childhood disease. The mechanism of transmission is similar to the replication of a virus's DNA code. When people use the infected technology, its code insidiously informs the structure of their brains and affects the quality of their neurological functioning. It targets areas of the brain that process the interface between visual and auditory functions and that involve memory, language, thought and emotion. When active, it produces erratic 'stutters' in the flow of the child's attention.

Because the adults around them don’t understand it, children are forced to suffer its painful symptoms alone. Typically, if they don’t get through it within a few years of exposure, the result is a life-diminishing, life-sentence. Because they are alone and don’t understand it, children blame themselves for the intellectual and psychological disabilities it causes. Many of the afflicted become ashamed of their own minds. They become prone to forming debilitating intellectual and emotional self-assumptions.

What am I talking about? You just used it. You are using it right now. Since you began reading the paragraphs above your mind has used the technology I am talking about to perform tens of thousands of mental operations. The technology I am speaking about is the ‘code’ we use to ‘decode’ written words – the code we use to read with. This code is so pervasive and so taken for granted that its neurological affects have been almost completely overlooked. Our reading research community all but ignores it. Yet, this code is an archaic man-made technology. It requires the brain to conform to it. Learning it often requires years of unnatural mental frustration. A failure to learn it well will intellectually and emotionally warp a child's life.

I know its hard to believe. You are probably one of the fortunate who have escaped the disease, but nothing I have said is exaggerated. I am asking you to consider that the root cause of the intellectual, emotional and economic suffering of illiteracy is the code itself. Beyond, illiteracy, I am asking you to consider that our children’s educational performance and how they feel about themselves in relation to their performance, is seriously affected by the intellectual self-assumptions that form as they struggle with this code. Give me a little more of your attention and I will prove it. I am not trying to sell anything. This issue needs your attention.

please continue on at http://www.implicity.org/reading/Letters/dec2001.htm