Using the Medical Model in Education: Can Pills Make You Clever?

190 Pages·2010·1.01 MB·English

by  David A. Turner

Using the Medical Model in Education
Also available from Continuum
Theory of Education, David A. Turner
Theory and Practice of Education, David A. Turner
Using the Medical Model in
Education
Can Pills Make You Clever?
David A. Turner
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© David A. Turner 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or
retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
David A. Turner has asserted his right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-84706-117-1 (hardcover)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Turner, David A.
Using the medical model in education : can pills make you clever? /
David A. Turner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-84706-117-1 (hardback)
1. Nootropic agents. 2. Education. 3. Intelligence.
4. Neuropsychology. I. Title.
RM334.T87 2009
6159.78—dc22 2009010965
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Contents
Chapter 1: Medical Models in Education 1
Chapter 2: The Physical Basis of Intelligence 25
Chapter 3: The Thinking Machine: What is ‘Hard-wired’ in
the Brain? 46
Chapter 4: What is Intelligence? 58
Chapter 5: Thinking Harder or Thinking Smarter? 74
Chapter 6: Attention Defi cit 86
Chapter 7: Hyperactivity Disorder – Or Just Having
Something Better to Do? 101
Chapter 8: Two Different Approaches to Learning 116
Chapter 9: Discipline and Respect 126
Chapter 10: Whither Education? 139
Chapter 11: Conclusions 169
References 178
Index 181
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Chapter 1
Medical Models in Education
Medical models are widely used in education, and their use is on the
increase. Every year growing numbers of young people are diagnosed
as having learning disorders, and the treatment is frequently the pre-
scription of drugs. The language of ‘diagnosis’, ‘disorders’ and ‘treat-
ment’ is medical, and we have come to think that the use of these
terms is appropriate for the discussion of educational questions. The
idea that education is susceptible to medical treatment reaches its
height in the concept of cognition enhancing drugs, or ‘smart pills’.
There is a great deal of attraction in the idea that one can take a
pill and immediately become smarter. In many other walks of life,
taking a pill is seen as preferable to engaging seriously with the issues
involved – a diet pill is easier than controlling one’s food intake or
taking exercise, taking a vitamin supplement is easier than eating a
balanced diet in the fi rst place, and taking a pill to control an addic-
tion is preferable to exercising willpower. We have pills to wake up,
pills to go to sleep and pills to make us happy in the meantime. We
should hardly be surprised that young people think that taking pills
is a necessary adjunct to enjoying an evening out, or a valuable way of
enhancing their academic performance. This is all part of our gen-
eral and increasing tendency to see all human behaviour in medical
terms; learning and thinking are seen as bodily functions. In that
sense education is simply the mirror of society.
In this book I will argue that the use of medical paradigms in
education is mistaken. I will argue that we accept too readily the
idea that learning can be enhanced by medical ‘treatments’. But I
will also argue that the readiness with which medical models are
accepted points to some underlying diffi culties in the way that we
think about education.
2 Using the Medical Model in Education
At bottom, the application of medical models in education rests
on the belief that the brain and the mind are so intimately linked
that an understanding of the brain will completely account for the
working of the mind. It is diffi cult to fi nd the exact language to
describe this belief, because it covers a range of positions. Some
people believe in a strict sense that the brain and the mind are the
same, and that once the brain is fully understood, the mind will hold
no mysteries. Others hold to a less rigid, more metaphorical, view,
that the brain is analogous to a physical organ, like a muscle, that
can be strengthened through exercise. For the time being I have
grouped these different views together, because we rarely examine
this link between the brain and the mind, so we do not always make
it clear exactly which part of the spectrum we are looking at. It has
become more or less axiomatic that learning and developing the
brain are synonymous.
If anything, this unthinking acceptance of the link between educa-
tion and the physical development of the brain has become stronger
in recent years. Technology has supported this view. Sequencing the
genome has made it easier to think in terms of fi nding specifi c genes
for specifi c capabilities. Brain scans and images of living brains have
made it easier to think that we understand what is happening in the
brain when we think. And the development of new pharmacological
agents has made it easier to believe that wonderful enhancements of
cognition are just around the corner.
In this book I will be arguing that the application of medical models
in education depends upon this ready acceptance of the link between
the physical and the intellectual. I will further argue that the popular
view of a direct link is mistaken, or at the very least requires a much
more critical examination. For one thing, the idea that all thinking
can be understood in physical terms grossly undervalues the role of
the social and the cultural in the development of rounded human
beings.
Cognition enhancing drugs exemplify this very well, and will be
an important example in my examination of medical models in edu-
cation. Steroids can help an athlete build up muscle, and by analogy
a cognition enhancing drug can make the brain more effective. But
the analogy is a poor one, because, even if we admit that a drug
Medical Models in Education 3
can make it possible to think more quickly, or think more (whatever
that might mean), there remain serious questions as to whether that
would be the same as thinking better, or being smarter, or having
ideas that would otherwise have been impossible.
The use of cognition enhancing drugs is the educational topic of
the moment. Stories in the academic and popular press are common.
On the 16 April 2007 the BBC broadcast a radio programme called
The Defeat of Sleep (BBC, 2007). This programme presented a range of
expert opinion on the use of cognition enhancing drugs – drugs that
could be used to control weariness, to focus attention or to improve
memory – in a word, drugs that could be taken to make you smarter.
The BBC programme was followed, at the space of a few weeks, by
a feature the Times newspaper (Bee, 2007) presenting very similar
materials. And other newspaper articles followed, including one in
the Times Higher Educational Supplement (Tysome, 2007) describing
the use of such drugs by academics. There is a large, and growing,
interest in drugs that improve memory, recall and certain mental
operations which can be summarized as ‘being smarter’.
The newspaper stories covered very similar ground to that covered
in the BBC programme. The story in the Times, like the radio pro-
gramme, reported the work of Danielle Turner and her colleagues at
the University of Cambridge. She was quoted in the Times as saying
(of modafi nil): ‘It seems to improve short term memory, the ability
to plan and process information, and helps a person to be less impul-
sive and more refl ective about their decision-making, which lends
itself to greater accuracy’.
The high level of interest in the popular media is accompanied by a
willingness to take advantage of such drugs. The market for them was
estimated to be worth as much as $500 million a year in the USA alone,
with as much as half of that being off prescription use (which is to say,
the use of those drugs by students and others hoping to improve their
performance) (BBC, 2007). The market looks likely to increase. The
drugs that are currently being used include ritalin, which has been
used in the treatment of Attention Defi cit Hyperactivity Disorder
(ADHD) for some time, and modafi nil, but these seem destined to be
joined by a family of drugs developed more specifi cally for the pur-
pose, the amperkines.