There are administrators, and even some teachers, who believe that slow learners do not want to learn, they are non-learners. The facts argue otherwise.

Some kids just don’t want to learn.”

The Incurious Child

I was talking with an education bureaucrat a few years ago, discussing the problems in education and how we might approach them differently, when this stunner popped out of her mouth. She believes that our slow learners are actually non-learners.

A few days later I was talking to a young man, maybe 12, who was considered a slow learner in school. In the 5 minutes we spoke, he avalanched me with information, about TV shows, things he’d seen, kids at school, comments his parents had made. He was a very thirsty sponge, he was learning constantly.

He just wasn’t learning about Thomas Jefferson, mathematical exponents, or the parts of a flower.

Slow Learners vs Biology

I thought about that a lot. I still do. It occurred to me that, from a biological standpoint, there is a highly technical scientific phrase to describe slow learners, and any child who does not want to learn:

Wild animal food.

At first consideration, humans are ill-prepared for survival. We have almost no fur to keep us warm. Compared to other primates we are weaklings. Our skin is rather delicate, and we have long, fragile fingers, toes, hand and foot bones that are easily broken (I set them all the time in the ER). We lack sharp teeth, and we are not particularly fast runners.

Human Superiority

All of these weaknesses are unimportant, however, because we have developed tools and technologies which more than compensate. We build fires for warmth, and wear skins and woven cloth to keep us warm and to protect our skin. Our relative weaknesses and lack of speed are compensated for by knives, spears and arrows, which fly faster than the swift, and which make us deadlier than the great white, the grizzly, and even the lion’s pride.

This is because the signal strength that allows humanity to dominate the planet resides, not in our arms or legs or teeth or claws, but above our eyes. Humanity represents an entirely new category of animal that triumphs by learning, thinking, and innovating.

Embedded deeply in her DNA, every normal child has the same ability, the same survival instinct: learn, learn quickly, learn constantly.

Educational Abuse

Children learn all the time. It’s just that our schools are designed to discourage it. Our educational paradigms are not designed around the natural curiosity of children, but around the joyless authority of the textbook.

And so we frequently end up with education that is a form of intellectual abuse. There are no slow learners in kindergarten; they are all curious sponges.

By high school, their curiosity is all but gone. In fact, a ‘nerd’ is nothing but a kid whose curiosity has survived into the teenage years.

So what happened in 13 years of ‘education’, that we take normal, healthy, curious, thriving children, and turn them into slow learners?

Please share this on social media; icons for popular platforms can be accessed below.

Subscribe and receive a copy of my first book,

Happiness: A Physician-Biologist Looks at Life .

















If you enjoy Happiness, check out my recent award-winning book Leave this field empty if you're human:

Picture courtesy CollegeDegrees360 via Flickr.com.

Like this: Like Loading...