There is no doubt that learning disabilities can be extraordinarily challenging and frustrating for both students and parents, so it’s no surprise that there are lots of people investigating ways to overcome them. Earlier this week researchers out of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children published research suggesting there may be a pharmaceutical remedy – as easy as being prescribed a pill – to learning disabilities (journal article). The researchers’ idea is that they can improve communication between neurons, but of course not all parents are going to jump at medicating their children.
The problem, of course, with more traditional techniques centering around behaviour and alternative ways of learning have had mixed success. But it is in this spectrum that Toronto’s Arrowsmith School operates. While any school will have special programs or options for students with learning disabilities, the Arrowsmith program is making news for its unique approach, attempting to change the brain not through pills but through special activities.
Barbara Arrowsmith Young, who started the program over 30 years ago, overcame learning disabilities of her own to get to graduate school.
There, she combined the discoveries of two groundbreaking neuropsychologists – Aleksandr Luria, who mapped the human brain, and Mark Rosenzweig, who found outside stimulation could change the brains of rats – and developed exercises to retrain her own brain.
It is that same philosophy that provides the foundation of the Arrowsmith program, where students will do exercises the force stimulation in the part of the brain that needs it most. In some cases that may mean covering one eye with a patch while tracing Urdu and Persian symbols, thereby targeting the left brain.
The success of the Arrowsmith program is not particularly disputed – students tend to be successful – but on the matter of whether or not student’s brains are being changed the debate is strong. And some critics discount the exercises and suggest that the degree of individual attention is what matters most.
The program has enticed one public school board, though, so students in the Toronto Catholic District School Board have the opportunity to benefit from the Arrowsmith program at no additional cost. That represents a big savings over the roughly $20,000 sending a student to Arrowsmith costs.
All of this makes for fascinating discussion. While students with special learning needs can excel in all sorts of schools, having programs and researchers dedicated to learning disabilities helps drive progress from which we can all benefit. Maybe the pill will really help; it’s possible Arrowsmith has developed a great strategy. The important thing is to make sure children having difficulty learning get more attention to help them out.
