The oth­er day, I was dri­ving by St Mary’s Church in St James when I saw a young man drugged out of his sens­es but con­scious enough to know to seek sanc­tu­ary in the door­way of a church.

The sto­ry, from ba­by to boy to man, of how he got there should make for ab­sorb­ing read­ing.

Learn­ing should be life­long. It sel­dom is. Few adults con­tin­ue to learn through­out their lives. The sit­u­a­tion is wors­ened in a small is­land where adults are typ­i­cal­ly afraid to learn. That might mean they have to change. Change is scary.

For­mal ed­u­ca­tion is sup­posed to help us learn. In our present ed­u­ca­tion­al sys­tem it has the op­po­site ef­fect. Far too of­ten, it stul­ti­fies. Think of the bub­bly, bright-eyed ba­by girl you saw tak­ing her first steps at one year. Think of the hap­py, ea­ger four-year-old who used to im­press you with how much he knew. Think of the stub­born, con­fused teenag­er who ap­pears dis­in­ter­est­ed in learn­ing and may be a dan­ger to her­self and oth­ers.

What hap­pened? How did they go from ea­ger learn­er to sullen anger in ten short years?

Tod­dlers are chil­dren be­tween the ages of one and three years. Tod­dlers are con­stant mo­tion, a whirl­wind de­mand­ing to learn. They not on­ly want to learn, they need to learn. Their brains de­sire ex­pe­ri­ences every sec­ond, every minute, every hour of their wak­ing day. In her 1949 book, The Ab­sorbent Mind, Dr Maria Montes­sori states, “He in­car­nates in him­self all in the world about him that his eyes and his ears hear.”

This tod­dler, this de­vel­op­ing en­ti­ty, thrives on feed­back from its en­vi­ron­ment. Every­thing a tod­dler does is ori­ent­ed to­wards one ob­jec­tive: learn! It is fa­nat­i­cal. Like an ad­dict, the ab­sence of learn­ing, of stim­u­la­tion, caus­es an­guish, anger and then re­morse. De­pres­sion sets in. “Bad” be­hav­iour re­sults. If pro­longed, the tod­dler be­comes cata­ton­ic, as hap­pens in some or­phan­ages.

This in­stinc­tive, un­yield­ing, un­wa­ver­ing de­sire to learn is of­ten mis­tak­en by adults as ab­nor­mal. The child bad! “She want she own way.” In the worst of ex­pres­sions, “it wicked!” The med­ical ex­pla­na­tion is the “ter­ri­ble twos,” a wor­ry­ing de­scrip­tion that places blame for nor­mal be­hav­iour on the child.

Most chil­dren who go through the “ter­ri­ble twos” do so be­cause their learn­ing needs are not be­ing met and they are frus­trat­ed and be­have ap­pro­pri­ate­ly. Thus is set up, the first great block­age to learn­ing in the life of a child, a ter­ri­ble in­jus­tice.

By the time the child is eight or nine, a tween, oth­er fac­tors have come in­to play. The frus­tra­tions of be­ing two and mis­un­der­stood may have con­tin­ued and wors­ened and that is se­ri­ous. But most chil­dren de­vel­op out of that cri­sis and do rel­a­tive­ly well un­til the tween years.

Tween is a unique­ly Amer­i­can ex­pres­sion and like so many things Amer­i­can, re­lat­ed to mar­ket­ing. It was in­vent­ed by mar­keters who need­ed a tar­get au­di­ence for their goods, to de­scribe a young per­son in tran­si­tion be­tween child­hood and ado­les­cence, eight to 12. The word was ini­tial­ly ap­plied to girls, as in the vul­gar but catchy ex­pres­sion, “too old for toys, too young for boys.” It has now mirac­u­lous­ly leapt the gen­der gap and been ap­plied to boys. It has been fair­ly crit­i­cised as an at­tempt to end child­hood pre­ma­ture­ly and make chil­dren small teenagers, “force ripe”, with ma­te­r­i­al wants they do not need.

At this age, how­ev­er, their brains are still de­vel­op­ing, as is their self-im­age. The de­sire to fit in with their peers is para­mount. Peer pres­sure to adapt is tremen­dous. Mov­ing from a safe en­vi­ron­ment where they are the most re­spect­ed kids in their pri­ma­ry school to a sec­ondary one, where they may be the youngest or least ex­pe­ri­enced, is a cause of tox­ic stress.

Now, be­cause of the state of their brain and ed­u­ca­tion­al de­vel­op­ment, learn­ing dis­or­ders come to the fore. AD­HD; the var­i­ous forms of read­ing and writ­ing dis­abil­i­ties; the non-ver­bal learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties (mo­tor clum­si­ness, prob­lem­at­ic so­cial re­la­tion­ships and poor or­gan­i­sa­tion­al skills etc), all be­come ap­par­ent in the years eight, nine and ten.

For many of them, the fam­i­ly sup­port need­ed is un­avail­able and our med­ical and ed­u­ca­tion­al sys­tem does not cater for them. This is the sec­ond pe­ri­od of tox­ic stress that dam­ages a child for life.

This is why Stu­dent Sup­port Ser­vices was set up but as we know too well, they are gross­ly un­der­staffed. They are called up­on when the schools be­come places of vi­o­lence and ig­no­rant adults get hot up and call for po­lice ac­tion. Too late.

Back to the open­ing para­graph.