Our Autistic children can learn

Over the last eight years, I have been actively involved in the education of autistic children – starting with my own child and then working with other children at our centre and school. One of the things that is clear about educating children on the autism spectrum is that it is POSSIBLE. Sometimes you hear some parents say things like: I want my child to get some vocational skills – meaning they believe their child cannot cope in school, and needs to go and learn some “trade” or “craft” that in their assessment may be easier to achieve. From what I have come to learn and understand myself, learning is the same – whether you are learning physics, or calculus on one hand or whether you are learning carpentry or tailoring on the other. While some more academic subjects may involve more abstract components, my belief is that what it takes to learn pure academics is not much different from what it takes to learn a craft, and besides for all the academics that most of us have learnt, it is not those bodies of knowledge that are tested at work each day, but some specific skills for productivity that we need to use.

So, rather than give up too quickly and think your autistic child cannot learn in school, I encourage parents to dig deeper into understanding how learning happens and work harder to get their children to learn based on this elevated understanding. There are a few things that are critical to learning, and I strongly recommend that you pay attention to developing these skills first and throughout the learning journey with your child. So even if you think your child will do better at a craft than at academics, you still have to pay attention to these “prerequisites” for learning to help him/her succeed.

Learning can ONLY take place when the learner is able to pay attention. Children on the autism spectrum typically have challenges with maintaining eye/facial contact and are often also diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorders. So, one of the first things that parents and teachers need to pay attention to is getting their child to be attentive. Attentiveness can be enhanced through a variety of interventions including but not limited to: limiting or removing any items that may cause hyper-sensitivity: light, sound, colours; improving the child’s diet by eliminating foods that are high in sugar, and introducing more water and other foods that help to detoxify the child; as well as fine motor activities like stringing beads and separating rice from beans which require a lot of focus. A combination of these and many other interventions over a sustainable period will help your child focus and be attentive. These therapies may need to continue all through the child’s learning to create the ATTENTION required to learn, but surely once you have their attention, autistic children WILL LEARN.

In addition to attention, learning happens as a result of COPYING. So, building on the attention that you may have achieved with your child, the next “prerequisite” is to get your child to COPY. Copying can be achieved using a number of interventions – starting off with as simple as clapping and other very physical activities to more specific activities like writing or sounding. Copying is at the heart of all learning, so take time to teach your child how to copy – how to imitate you and learn from you and everyone else around. Copying can also be enhanced through repetition – repeating activities over and over again is what helps all of us to learn – same applies to autistic children. Even Malcom Gladwell posits the same in his book – “Outliers” with what he describes as the 10,000 hour rule. So, if you want your autistic child to grab something, then take time to repeat it as much as possible. Typically, they may require much more repetition than other children would, but it just means that they may learn at a different pace – but surely they WILL LEARN.

Also there is generalizing – applying what has been learned in one dimension to other facets of life. This is typically where the challenge is, but it is a challenge that can be overcome. The best way to get your children to generalize is to build strength and capability in one specific dimension so much that the child can confidently express themselves in another dimension. This is exactly true for “neuro-typical” children – the difference with the autistic child is just the time it will take to become an expert in a specific dimension and gain the confidence to generalize in other dimensions. Once the confidence is achieved, the generalization can occur and then your autistic child WILL LEARN.

Parents, care-givers, teachers and therapists really need to dig deeper, and push harder, but what we must be cognizant of and never lose sight of is that our children CAN LEARN, just the same way that “neuro-typical children” learn: by paying attention, copying and then generalizing. Whether you want them to go to conventional school or learn a craft or vocational skill you need these three prerequisites in play. Learning academics instead of a craft is not necessarily harder or vice versa – in both cases, it’s the underlying prerequisites that will make the difference.

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