Many years ago when I was a video producer, I had the extraordinary experience of spending three days at the American School for the Deaf in Connecticut. That experience is a long story in itself, but there was one experience that really struck me at the time, and has stayed with me lo these many years. I was interviewing the president of the school, and he was talking about how very young children acquire language. He was explaining how it was important to be “signing” around deaf infants as soon as possible, because, he said, “we learn 80% of our language skills by the time we are five years old.”
Assuming he was correct in this estimation, and he was in a position to know, this leads to all sorts of questions one must ask about language skills and how we teach them. If we already have 80% of our language skills by the time we are five years old, why is it that it takes us another 12 years to get the final 20%?
But those questions aside, I have a bigger issue. The evidence is fairly clear that once an average human being is born, in just five years they go from being in a state where they have no concept of language, can’t walk, and are incontinent, to having a very solid grasp of the English language, as well as knowing how to walk and otherwise coordinate a body that is changing in size and shape daily.
I always shake my head when I hear someone talking about “teaching problem-solving skills.” Any kid who can speak basic English by the time they are five years old has demonstrated, to me anyway, pretty amazing problem-solving skills.
But even though every average kid demonstrates this extraordinary ability, once they get to be five or six years old we universally get into this whole sorting of students into the bright ones and the dumb ones. Given just how extraordinarily brilliant every single kid who can speak basic English has demonstrated themselves to be, why is it that suddenly a fairly regular percentage of them always get labeled as “slow learners”?
I have to say, at this point, I just can’t accept it. There are too many red lights of conflicting data here. I have been studying Portuguese for the last 10 years, and I am probably demonstrating less than 2% of the language acquisition skill of the most pedestrian five-year-old.
My mind leaps to this conclusion: given the learning capacity that average language acquisition denotes, these D student kids are being judged, not on their ability to solve problems or learn, but on their ability to cope with the environment into which we place them, and their willingness to accept our authority and obey our commands and structures. Or perhaps they are being judged on the importance that they are placing on our priorities.
I know several people who speak English as a second language. These are brilliant people, yet they all talk about how horrifically difficult the English language is, due to its many irregularities and idiomatic expressions. Yet every run-of-the-mill American five-year-old masters this horrific task, starting from having no language skill of all, in just a few years. Tell me again how slow, passive, and dimwitted some of these kids are, and how they need to be taught problem-solving skills.
© Justin Locke
