The problem is very complicated, and that’s why we’re frustrated. Because as I assess the problem, it’s like a house that was constructed wrong in the first place. The foundation is not strong. The foundation of education is primarily a mechanical pouring-in information notion. And it’s largely a cognitive, linguistic approach.

And the rest of it, the social interactive, psycho-emotional, moral-ethical, that part of it has been ignored. And so you have an educational system that has a foundation that’s weak in the first place. It’s when children get into trouble in school that we think about child and adolescent development. We should think about creating systems that prevent them from getting into trouble, allow them to be successful in the first place. But you have an education system that does not work that way.

So getting back to the house-that’s-falling-down analogy, anything you touch in that house would be helpful. If you go in and the blinds are all out of shape and missing slats and so on, you fix one of those, that’d be great. But it’s not going to help the foundation. That’s the problem in education, is that we keep focusing on things all over the place. And there’s so many things.

Family functioning is a problem. The absence of community activities that support development is a problem. The absence of funding. The absence of people who understand children. The absence of so many things. The presence of so much information that goes directly to children that never went to children before.

When I was growing up I didn’t see a television until I was sixteen. Children now are bombarded by enormous amounts of information with nobody to help them learn to deal with that. All of those issues and problems are in the school. That’s what you face. And so everybody takes a piece of that and attempts to work on it rather than starting . . . if I had to repair that old house, the first thing I would start with would be the foundation.

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