2.- 'BRAIN-BASED' EDUCATION: RUN FROM IT
'Brain-based' education: Run from it
By Valerie Strauss
02/28/2011
This was written by Larry Cuban, a former high
school social studies teacher (14 years, including seven at Cardozo and
Roosevelt high schools in the District), district superintendent (seven years
in Arlington, VA) and professor emeritus of education at Stanford University,
where he has taught for 20 years. His latest book is "As Good As It Gets:
What School Reform Brought to
By Larry Cuban
The history of searching for a cancer cure
began with “radical surgery” for breast cancer–hailed as a “cure” in the early
1920s.* The restless search then moved to radiation for different cancers
including Hodgkins disease in the 1950s, feeding the hope that the lethal
disease had found a “cure.” Then in the 1960s researchers bent their
microscopes to chemotherapy searching for toxins to “cure” a child-killing
leukemia. Medical researchers and physicians heralded each therapy–cutting,
burning, and poisoning–as, finally, the “cure” for cancer.
From seeing the disease as monolithic–all
cancers were the same–and searching for “magic bullet” cures, the war on cancer
has continually tripped over itself in the past four decades as accidental and
chance discoveries challenged the mainstream wisdom that all cancers were the
same. Serendipity in the lab and luck established that each cancer is different
and no one therapy can “cure” all cancers.
Since the 1990s, the search for cancer-killing
drugs has now concentrated on the complex genetic mechanisms that turn normal
cells into cancerous ones. Not one cure for cancer but many different ones that
deal with “oncogenes”–particular genes that encourage and inhibit normal and
abnormal proteins within cells.
In the 1990s, researchers found a particular
protein that could could prevent abnormal proteins from unleashing the lethal
disease called chronic myeloid leukemia or CML. The drug Gleevec, targeted just
for this disease, created miraculous remissions and now has become the standard
therapy for CML [from Siddartha Mukerjee's "The Emperor of All
Maladies: A Biography of Cancer"]. Oncogene research continues for
many other forms of cancer.
What does all of that have to do with brain
research findings being applied to classroom lessons? The analogy of cancer
researchers and medical specialists initially framing the problem of cancer for
a half-century as one disease, one cause, and one cure–surgery, radiation, and
toxins–before medical researchers began to understand the genetic and molecular
mechanisms that turned normal cells into abnormal ones is similar to brain
research findings that have spilled into classrooms helter-skelter.
While some raised questions and doubts about
the applicability of neurological research to classroom practice, for the most
part there was a Gee Whiz tone to the writing that left guilt in its wake for
those practitioners who ignored the latest research findings.
My point is that brain research is
insufficiently advanced to give teachers practical advice since neurological
mechanism have yet to be discovered that connect the dots–as a targeted drug
such as Gleevec did for a particular cancer–for the kinds of learning issues
that arise in classrooms. While neurological findings can reinforce existing
practices that experienced teachers have found workable for their students year
after year, brain-based research remains in John Breuer’s words, ”A Bridge Too
Far.”
Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham at
the
*The brain is always changing
*The connection between the brain and behavior
is not obvious.
*Deriving useful information for teachers from
neuroscience is slow, painstaking work.
Willingham ends his post by asking a key
question and the advice he got from a colleague:
“How can you tell the difference between
bonafide research and schlock? That’s an ongoing problem and for the moment,
the best advice may be that suggested by David Daniel, a researcher at
Running is not bad advice given the
rock-strewn history of another medical research saga in discovering what cancer
was and the different “cures” that were tried out from one decade to another.
Where life and death are at issue the zigzag
history of therapies occurred simply because the biological mechanisms that
trigger normal cells into cancerous ones were (and now are) still being figured
out. For all of those reasons if running from brain-based lessons for teachers
is one alternative, another is the ancient lesson of caveat emptor.
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