Temple Grandin says education systems aren't making space for visual thinkers like her
Focus on academics over trades and 'hands-on' fields risks leaving neurodiverse students behind: author
Temple Grandin is sounding the alarm on education systems that fail to recognize neurodiversity and may let visual thinkers like her fall through the cracks.
The author, scientists and animal behaviourist helped revolutionize farms and equipment to ensure livestock are treated humanely. She's also changed how many people view autism, leading by example to show that they can lead rich and productive lives.
But she worries that as education systems put an emphasis on university-level education instead of practical subjects — from shop class to arts and drama — students who learn through visual methods like she does may never have the chance to excel — or even discover what they excel at.
Grandin's latest book is Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions. She spoke to The Sunday Magazine's Piya Chattopadhyay about why it's important to society that the next generation of inventors and visual thinkers is not left behind. Here's part of their conversation.
Visual thinking is something that is at the heart of how you see and interpret the world. So what is it, and how is it different from the way other people listening right now might think?
Every thought I have is like a photorealistic picture. And when I first started my career back in the '70s … I didn't know that other people thought much more verbally.
A lot of people on radio are verbal thinkers. I remember doing an interview years ago for my autobiography, Thinking in Pictures, and one radio person said to me, "I hated TV because I didn't know what to do with the pictures. So I went into radio."
Well, I'm the person who's going to know what to do with the pictures. And when I wrote articles, I always did the pictures first. And there's certain things that visual thinkers like me can do super well, and there's all the things we have problems with.
And so growing up, Temple, did you understand that you thought differently than the other kids?
No, I did not understand. And it took me a long time to fully understand other kinds of thinking….
I'll tell you the things I'm good at: working with animals, because they don't live in a verbal world. Photography: I have talked to many news photographers that were dyslexic, ADHD, autistic. Mechanical things: I work with brilliant mechanical people that were visual thinkers. And then art, of course.
Now the one thing we can't do is algebra. You cannot do abstract math — absolutely cannot do it. And I'm worried about that holding a lot of visual thinkers back.
If you don't expose kids to enough different stuff, you don't know what they're going to be good at.- Temple Grandin
You have written that if you were in high school today, you would have serious difficulty with the materials that are being taught and serious difficulty even graduating. Why do you say that?
Well, I can't do algebra. I failed the S.A.T. in math. I went to a small college and back in the '60s and the required class, thank goodness, wasn't algebra. It was statistics, probability and matrices. [I had] a book with a bunch of tutoring I was able to do, because there was more to visualize.
But I'm seeing students right now that are on their second and third algebra class because they want to be a veterinary nurse, which you don't need algebra for, and it's blocking their career. Now, if you want to do chemistry, you want to do orbital mechanics? Yes, you need to have higher math. I don't know why veterinarians need calculus. I don't know what they do with calculus.
And there are some deans that say you need algebra for logical thinking. That's not how I think. And when I was doing my book signing for visual thinking just back last October, we did it in a school and I spent an hour with the principal. This was just a few months ago, and he didn't know what my kind of thinking was.
Well you need my kind of mind to keep the water system running.
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And so you see neurodiverse people today falling through the cracks because we still teach things like algebra in the school system. Is that what inspired you to write this book, in part?
What inspired me to write Visual Thinking was when I realized the skills we were losing. We are paying a gigantic price for taking out all hands-on classes.
I just talked to a gifted group last night and parents of gifted kids don't want their kids taking the hands-on classes. They want [them] to be doctors and lawyers and stuff like that.
I went to four places in 2019 just before COVID shut the world down. They convinced me we had a serious skill loss issue. I went to two port processing plants, brand new ones, and the equipment all came from Holland. I went to a brand-new poultry processing plant; 100 shipping containers of equipment from Holland.
The last thing I saw really blew my mind: the Steve Jobs Theater. And I stood in the middle of the Steve Jobs Theater screaming, "We don't make it anymore." Structural glass walls from Italy and Germany. A carbon fibre roof from Dubai. This is high-end stuff coming out from high-wage countries.
And then just recently in Canada, another chicken plant was built and the equipment's all from Holland. It goes back to the educational system. You see in Europe, you can choose to go to university or go [into] tech, and they don't stick their nose up at tech and think of it as some lesser form of thinking. I can tell you it's not. It is a different kind of thinking.
What is your message to parents? What do you want them to know about raising children who have been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum?
Well, if you have a three year old that's not talking, you need — I don't care what the reason is — you need to get them into an early intervention program. Like right now. Don't wait. That's a universal requirement.
As they get older, if the kid's got an area of strength, it could be art, it could be mechanical things. But how can you tell if a child has ability in mechanical things, if they're not exposed to tools and mechanical things? Or it might be math, and then that kid, you need to move them ahead in math. You've got others that are super good at foreign languages. Take the thing that kids are good at and build on it.
But if you don't expose kids to enough different stuff, you don't know what they're going to be good at. There's no way you can find out you're good at math if no one exposed you to higher math.
And what about our educators in our education system, which in a lot of ways, you know, people say is sort of one size fits all?
It doesn't. This is especially the problem with autism.
Interview produced by Peter Mitton.