| From the Founder |
Our schools are caught in a conflict. To prove they are doing their job, schools, and therefore teachers, are being held “accountable.”
Accountable for what? For the fact that an increasing number of children are born with birth defects? That American infants in general are over-stimulated from birth and malnourished during the optimal years of brain development? That as a society we ignore the facts that our visual system develops late and that premature stress on vision (as on any part of the nervous system) reduces the efficiency of brain function?
Families and communities need to reclaim their rights and responsibilities in the education of our children. They need to remember that education and teaching are not one and the same.
Education means to draw out. Therefore, it is only logical that there is a basic foundation from which we can draw - a foundation basic to every race and culture: the human body and its connections with the brain.
Scientific studies show that input from the stimulation we receive and how we move in response molds the brain. Perhaps because psychology emphasized mental processing, and mind-body studies stressed the control the mind has on the body, our society has forgotten how movement and lack of movement affect mental processing and emotional states.
Among special needs populations (gifted and challenged alike), movement looms vital. Highly technological and competitive societies encourage young children to engage at ever-earlier ages with linguistic and cognitive material, while ignoring developmental sensory-motor activities. In an effort to stimulate children so they will achieve, we provide intense stimuli that stress and may shutdown the very systems we need to enhance.
Some of those in education realize the importance of tactile sensitivities to social behaviors and to processing that may preclude attending to “the lesson”, since the individual is employing high level functions to monitor irregular input of lower ones. The vestibular system (simplified as the inner ear) is particularly significant, since directly or indirectly it controls all functions other than smell, taste, and touch. When, for instance, one has difficulty sensing the body in space, or fears losing balance, tremendous energy is used to keep the body safe. Energy is then not free for learning.
Muscle tone, the tension in the resting muscle or the readiness to respond, is vital to our functions, intentional and autonomic both. It, too, is regulated by the vestibular system. The recent movement toward accountability ignores the fact that irregular functions may need strengthening so children can sustain their attention, read, write, and rapidly respond to directions.
To maximize human potential for creative, responsive beings, we must understand and enhance the interaction and interdependency of our neurodevelopmental systems. We cannot readily draw out of a system that has irregular flows and stoppages. We cannot educate without first nurturing the body-mind connection.
Therefore, the major HANDLE contribution to the concept of accountability is to help parents, educators, health care professionals, and others understand observed behavior, map systemic functioning, to discover the root causes of disordered behavior and learning and to improve functions, naturally. To educate, not to teach.Ann Potter knows that the great gains her eight and a half year old daughter made in six months of a HANDLE program allowed her to benefit from her school program. Ann implores: “If you are a teacher, therapist, or aide in special services, I beg you to listen to the HANDLE ideas with an open mind and to bring them back to your classrooms. The ideas are based on the fact that a child’s behavior gives us a clue as to the needs of the child and shouldn’t be overridden. They are based on strengthening specific neural pathways. The techniques are gentle and non-intrusive for the child. We all have nothing to lose and everything to gain from trying HANDLE.”