An American (School) Girl: The Autism Edition

One of the worst things about eighth grade for our girl is the ringing of the bells between periods. Every time the alarm sounds, it jangles her keenly sensitive auditory neural pathways, and sets off a cascade of neurotransmitters to generate a flood of adrenaline. Instead of shrugging and heading from class to class, she races through the hallways as though pursued by a saber tooth tiger or a pack of wolves (not to mention the threat of detention for tardiness). When she hears a bell she'll plough right through any obstacle — inanimate or animate — to ensure that she's on time to her next class.

The excruciating (for our girl) sound of the school bell is, according to educator Cathy N. Davidson, one of the many remnants of an educational infrastructure designed to create the compliant and synchronized industrial workforce needed to populate the factories and offices of 20th century America. The bells, the desks in rows, the proscenium stage set of chalkboard with teachers at lecterns, the out-of-date textbooks, the separate vocational and college tracks, and the standardized multiple choice tests (the results of which can shape the course of a life) are the educational dead weight of the industrial age that could keep our country from realizing the genius needed to succeed in the current century and the future it holds.

Twice in the past month I've had the pleasure of hearing Davidson talk about her new book, Now You See It: How the Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn, which takes up these and other problems (and possibilities) created by the disjunction between our neurobiology and the structures of our schools and workplaces. Along the way, Davidson's research on neuroscience has led her to consider the anomalies found among kids like ours.

In a particularly evocative section of Now You See It, Davidson writes about the fate of children with Williams Syndrome across cultural contexts. In the United States, where happiness and effusiveness are considered virtues, the ebullient and embracing nature of Williams Syndrome kids make them more lovable and socially acceptable.  However in the context of Japan, where a reserved demeanor is valued, Williams Syndrome children are more likely to be institutionalized — possibly because of their (perceived) rude and intrusive behavior.

Reading this passage had me thinking about the social deficits that our girl has. She's on the other end of the emotional continuum from the Williams Syndrome kids. Our sweet girl is by no means warm and cuddly. She rarely engages in the back and forth of tween girlhood. She's not what anyone who'd just met her would call friendly or welcoming. Smiling is just not a default facial expression for her. In short, she lacks those social skills that are so highly rewarded in the "how to win friends and influence people" American context. Her reserved nature would be a problem for any kid, but it's especially a problem for a girl. While good cheer and an affable nature are valued in middle class American boys and men, they are all but required among the girls and women of this group.

Our girl's social reticence is a very real phenomenon, but it is the social requirement of female friendliness that transforms her particular affect from a simple fact to a significant handicap. 

As our girl shoves her way through the hallway to get to class on time she is not just frantic and rude, she's also unladylike, ungracious, and simply less lovable. She's violating the social norms of her nation, as well as for her gender and her class. I am painfully aware of how she seems to others -- remote, rude, awkward, pushy.

Sometimes I wonder if things would be better for our girl in Tokyo, home of the Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh she loves. There she would be strange, but her strangeness would be chalked up to being a foreigner, to being gaijin as I once was. Sometimes she even asks when we can go to Tokyo, or what it was like when I lived there. I'd like to tell her that it was strange and wonderful — a lot like she is. But instead I tell her about coffee shops that serve pasta topped with mashed potatoes and gravy or sushi bars that make sashimi so fresh it's still quivering on your plate. Our girl recoils in horror at the thought of either, and in that moment I know that however much of a neurological foreigner she may be, in so many other ways she's still an American girl.

Now there is only the small task of making over an America in which she can thrive, and, in the meantime, an eighth grade class where she can more than survive.