Today's child's world

Words have a way to get into your heart. Not just words from a poem but words from prose too. Recently, I came across two instances where words and thoughts struck a chord with me.

Ad Busters

From time to time, he brought one of his books and shared something interesting in them with us. I have never understood his selection of books. I never knew that such books existed. Normally I would not have considered the topics that the books covered as topics for a book at all. But most books turned out to be interesting. Though life did not give me the time required to look through these books, the past two times I have taken out time to go through the books that he brought to me. One such book was a journal called Ad Busters. The March/April 2011 edition of the book has an interesting article about children called ‘Dopamine Squirts’. This article contains the following snippets based on an interview with Dr. Gabor Mate in Democracy Now!

• If your spouse or partner came home from work and didn’t give you time of day and immediately got on the phone and started talking and texting with other people, your friends would not say “Your partner has a behavioural problem. You should try tough love”. They would say you’ve got a relationship problem. But when children act in these ways, many parents think their children have behavioural problem and they try to control those behaviours. In fact, what our children are showing us – my children showed me this as well – is that we have a relationship problem with them. They weren’t connected enough with me and were too connected to their peer group.
• The child peer world is so dangerous. It is fraught with bullying, ostracization, “dissing,” exclusion and negative talk. How do children protect themselves from all that negativity in the peer world? They are not committed to each other’s unconditional loving acceptance. Even adults have a hard time giving that. Children can’t do it. So those children become very insecure. To protect themselves emotionally, they shutdown. They become hardened. They become cool. Nothing matters. Cool is the ethic. You see that in the rock videos. It’s all about cool. It’s all about aggression and cool and no real emotion.
• Brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing … the worry is that we are raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.
• The conditions in which children develop have been so corrupted and troubled over the last several decades that the template for normal brain development is no longer present for many kids. Dr. Bessel von der Kolk, a professor in psychiatry at Boston University, actually says that the neglect or abuse of children is the number one public health concern in the United States.
• There are about half a million kids in this country receiving heavy duty antipsychotic medications such as are usually given to adult schizophrenics to regulate their hallucinations. But in this case, children are put on these medications to control their behaviour. So, what we have is a massive social experiment of the chemical control of children’s behaviour, with no idea of the long-term consequences that these heavy-duty antipsychotics will have on kids.
• In other words, what we’re doing is correcting a massive social problem that has to do with disconnection in society and loss of nurturing and we’re replacing that chemically. These stimulant drugs seem to work and a lot of kids are helped by them. The problem is not so much whether they should be used or not. The problem is that 80% of the time a kid is prescribed a medication and that is all that happens. Nobody talks to the family about the family environment. The school makes no attempt to change the school environment. Nobody connects with these kids emotionally.
• Canadian statistics just last week showed that within the last five years there has been a 43% increase in the rate of dispensing stimulant prescription for ADD or ADHD, with most of these going to boys. In other words, what we are seeing is an unprecedented burgeoning of the diagnosis. More broadly speaking, what I am talking about is the destruction of American childhood because ADD is just a template. It is just an example of what’s going on. In fact, according to a recent study published in the States, nearly half of American adolescents now meet some criteria for a mental health disorder.
• There are parts of the brain in the prefrontal cortex, right in front of the brain, whose job it is to regulate our social behaviours. They give us empathy. They give us insight. They give us attuned communication with other people. They give us moral sense. They are the very conditions that, according to a Notre Dame study, are now lacking. So, a lot of kids today are growing up without empathy, without insight into others, without a sense of social responsibility. Bullying is just one example of that.

Poor Economics

Many years ago, I gave a talk to a set of students in a business school. At the end of the talk, I was given a book as a memento. I saw that the book had the word ‘Economics’ in its title. So, I put it at the bottom of my book shelf at home and forgot about it. Recently, when I was cleaning my bookshelf, I chanced upon the names of the authors of the book, Abhijith Banerjee and Esther Duflo. The name Abhijith Banerjee seemed familiar. Soon I realized that he had won the Nobel Prize for Economics recently. Suddenly, my respect for the book went up. I looked at the title of the book. It read ‘Poor Economics’. Under the title of the book was the phrase ‘A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty’. For reasons beyond my comprehension, I felt a deep interest for the book rising through me. I put back the Malayalam novel that I was reading and started reading this book. I found the contents of the book interesting. The authors presented interesting views of poverty. One of the chapters talks about the role education plays in alleviating poverty for families across the globe. This chapter has the following points on the issues in the education system with respect to the education for the poor.

• In a study designed to study whether this prejudice influenced teacher’s behaviour with students, teachers were asked to grade a set of exams. The teachers did not know the students, but half the teachers, randomly chosen, were told the child’s full name (which includes the caste name). The rest were fully anonymous. They found that, on average, teachers gave significantly lower grades to lower caste students when they could see their caste than when they could not. But interestingly, it is not the higher caste teachers who were doing this. The lower caste teachers were actually more likely to assign worse grades to lower caste students. They must have been convinced that these students could not do well.
• Because in many developing countries, both curriculum and the teaching are designed for the elite rather than the regular children who attend the school, attempts to improve the functioning of the schools by providing extra inputs have generally been disappointing.  … It should now be clear why private schools do not do better at educating the average child – their entire point is to prepare the best performing children for some difficult public exam that is the stepping stone towards greater things, which requires powering ahead and covering a broad syllabus. The fact that most children get left behind is unfortunate but inevitable.
• The public-school teacher seems to know how to teach the weaker children and is even willing to put some effort into it during the summer, but during the regular school year this is not his job – or so he has been led to believe. Recently in Bihar we evaluated a Pratham initiative to fully integrate remedial education programs into government schools, by training the teachers to work with their materials and also by training volunteers to work as teacher’s assistant in these classrooms.  The result was striking. In those (randomly chosen) schools that had both the teacher training and the volunteers, the gains are substantial. Where there was just teacher training, on the other hand, essentially nothing changed. The same teachers who did so well during the summer camps completely failed to make a dent. The constraints imposed by the official pedagogy and the particular focus on covering the syllabus seem to be too much of a barrier. We cannot just blame the teachers for this. Under India’s new Right to Education Act, finishing the curriculum is required by law.
• A combination of unrealistic goals, unnecessarily pessimistic expectations and the wrong incentives for teachers contribute to ensure that education systems in developing countries fail their two basic tasks: giving everyone a sound set of skills and identifying talent. Moreover, in some ways the job of delivering quality education is becoming harder. The world over, education system is under stress. Enrolment has gone up faster than resources, and with the growth in the high-tech sectors, there is a worldwide increase in demand for the kind of people who used to become teachers. Now, they are becoming programmers, computer systems manager and bankers instead. This is going to be a particularly serious issue for finding good teachers at the secondary level and beyond.