New Idcar in Psychd. Vol. IO, No. 1, pp. lOS104, 1992 Printed in Great Britain

0732-118x/92 $5.00 + 0.00 Pergamon Press plc

IDEOLOGY IN SPECIAL EDUCATION

Review of The Learning Mystique: A Critical Look at “Learning Disabilities” by Gerald Coles. New York: Pantheon, 1987.

JEFFREY A. ATLAS Bronx Children’s Psychiatric Center, 1000 Waters Place, Bronx, NY 10461-2799, U.S.A.

A ten year-old boy is referred for psychological evaluation by his teacher due to poor academic work, fighting with peers, leaving the classroom without permission. Educational testing shows achievement levels to be first to second grade, with significant lags in reading. A social history indicates much present turmoil in the household, with mother anguished over her only child’s school difficulties and father too busy with work to help. Psychological testing yields a picture of an impulsive, distractible boy of low average to average intelligence with poor self-esteem and emergent anti-social trends. The evaluation team refers the case to the Special Education Committee for consideration for a small- class placement designed to help children with learning disabilities.

A scenario such as that portrayed above is enacted hundreds of thousands of times a year across the United States, leading observers such as Gerald Coles, a professor of clinical psychiatry and a youth and education coordinator at a community mental health center, to question the validity of the designation “learning disabled.” For Coles “learning disability” may be seen as a kind of collective rationalization or compromise formation forged at the nexus of history and political economy. A postwar optimism in the 1950s United States leads to heightened social welfare expectations which, in part, are realized. Immigrants work hard to achieve financial security and get their children a good education. Families move to the suburbs, emblematic of improved social position. But things begin to unravel with continued pressures for upward mobility. It is increasingly apparent in the early to middle 1960s that many children from an expanding middle class cannot read, and this despite evidently normal intelligence. These cases do not fit the category of functional retardation, a hidden or not so hidden injury borne of discrimination, poverty, violence, and other environmental toxins of underclass existence. These latter cases, at least before the controversies concerning test bias, did not elicit the national concern prompted by “learning disabled” youngsters. In line with a capitalist mode of production, there would always be an unemployed, unemployable underclass unable to compete with others, dependent on the beneficence of the state. The designation “learning disabled” has become a term of choice in its implied biological legitimacy and exclusion of social, psychological, and historical factors that might undermine faith in the structure of our schools or society. This is the mythic or ideological aspects of “learning disabilities,” which Coles submits to in- depth examination.

Coles reviews dozens of studies purported to show, but unsuccessful in

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showing, determinative biological bases for learning disability (perceptual and attention deficits, language deficits, memory deficits). He sketches the begin- nings of an “Interactivity Theory” of learning difficulties, grounded in history but dialectically connected to biology. For Coles, the learning difficulties showing steady increase in the United States are not a flat lie. Students fail to read due to polyphonic influences of overcrowded classrooms, boring curricula stressing conformity, insufficient preparation at home, and family stresses including increased rates of divorce. Biological “markers” or correlates of certain type of learning difficulties, such as in reading, comprise neurological “differ- ences,” as suggested by the plethora (often significant, but nonuniform) findings in the scientific literature. The greater predisposition of boys, as compared to girls, to learning difficulties is not due to greater biological vulnerability but, according to Coles, to greater role stresses in patriarchal society, with pushes for conformity and independence clashing most in the classroom. Stress may lead to (reversible) neurological differences and learning difficulties. Kudimentary experimental work by Coles and others suggests decrements in left-hemisphere (verbal-analytical) functioning and reading skills in some persons subject to psychological stress. Acute emotional preoccupation may lead to I’elative limitation of psychical activity to the right hemisphere, with diminished lateralization of cognitive activity to the left hemisphere. III such circumstances, diminution of psychological conflict in concert with focussed remediation may

lead to a return to normal brain functioning and lifting of learning difficulty. Coles does intimate that there may be a small group of truly “learning

disabled” youngsters, with neurological dysfunction having developed f’rom some type of environniental toxin (e.g., lead poisoning). For this group of children special education approaches over and above remedial tutoring work is necessary.

Coles leaves us with a picture of the learning disabilities field as out of focus. I found the sections of his book addressing attentional problems and psychosti- mulant medications too dismissive, but on the whole his indictment is compelling. ‘I‘housands of children read several years below grade level and well-intentioned evaluators borrow the term “learning disabled” at least to get some children extra attention in class. Truly learning disabled youngsters may get lost in the shuffle, grouped with children who do not need special curriculum. Coles is accepting, if not laudatory of, these pragmatic arid

ameliorative efforts. Preventive and progressive ‘intervention ~wulc1 require social-structural changes in our society aimed towards more egalitarian families, communities, and schools.