A few years ago, I met a woman who said that she had been a special
education teacher in a poor urban area. She told me that she had observed a large
number of children who had a bizarre learning disability. According to her, the
children couldn't associate what they saw on a vertical surface, such as the
chalkboard, with what they saw on a horizontal surface, such as the top of
their desk. As a result, they couldn't copy what was on the chalkboard into
their notebooks. She said that this must have been due to some previously
unknown brain disease.
She was excited about this discovery, but it sounded dubious
to me. I asked what I thought was an obvious question, "Did anyone check their
vision?"
"What?" she replied.
"Their vision. You know, give them an eye test. Take those
kids down to the nurse's office and have the nurse figure out if they can
actually see. Maybe some of the kids couldn't see what was on the board because
they were nearsighted, and maybe others couldn't read what was on their desk
because they were farsighted."
Her eyes went wide with surprise. Evidently, nobody thought
to check the kids' vision. To fill the uncomfortable silence, I said, "We're much
more likely to find a bunch of kids with a common problem, like
near-sightedness, than to find a bunch of kids with a weird brain disease that
no one has ever noticed before."
She just kept staring at me in silence, so I changed the subject.
Later, I described this conversation to a friend of mine who was teaching
English in a public school in a working class neighborhood. She said that she
had more students who had to sit in the front row (because they had trouble
reading the board) than she had seats in the front row. Some of these kids did
have glasses, but their families couldn't afford to keep the kid's prescription
up to date. She felt that it was insane that the government was spending so
much money on standardized tests to confirm that children who can't see aren't
learning in school. She thought it would make more sense to use that money to test
the kids' vision and give them new glasses and thus enable them to learn.
It would be easy and cheap for schools to do vision
screening for all students at the beginning of every school year. Ideally, of
course, everyone should be getting regular eye examinations from an optometrist
or ophthalmologist. In many countries, this kind of healthcare is available
free to everyone. We could get that kind of care free for everyone in the
United States if we
expanded Medicare
to cover everything (including vision checks and eyeglasses) for everyone. (We'd
also
save money
if we did that.) In the meantime, school administrators should think about how
to make sure that the children in their schools can see.
Laurie taught herself to read at age 4 by analyzing the spelling of the rhyming words in Green Eggs and Ham, by Dr. Seuss. She has worked as an editor in medical and academic publishing for more than 25 years. She is the author of five books: (more...)