Let's stop using the developing prefrontal cortex to explain why students are immature. It's misleading and could end up making our jobs more difficult.

There’s a factoid that I've heard ad nauseam in faculty meetings and workshops since I started teaching high school three years ago:

“The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for judgement, isn't fully developed until age 25.”

Maybe you've also encountered this soundbite. Educators and educator-adjacent consultants use variants of this idea as an explanation for why our students make immature or poor decisions. It seems harmless enough at face value, but I’d like to encourage everyone to stop repeating it, or at least have a conversation about why it's so prevalent. At best, it’s misleading, and at worst, it’s counterproductive to our work as educators.

As a younger teacher, I’m suspicious of this statement on a personal level. It certainly hasn’t played out as a profound truth in my own life. I recently turned 25, and so far I haven’t felt my prefrontal cortex kick into high gear and guide me towards more rational decisions. Even when I was 17, I feel that I was working with roughly the same cognitive equipment that I have now. My bad decisions were probably more due to a lack of people skills and life experience than an age-related cognitive deficit. And I happen to know fifteen year olds who are more mature than certain adults in my life.

Like me, your personal experience likely indicates that it’s silly to cite a specific age at which we become cognitively mature. But we can also reject this soundbite on technical grounds. Any second-year psychology major will tell you that neuroimaging (the methods of studying brain structure & activity) should be approached with skepticism when it is used to suggest causal relationships between brain structure and human consciousness. In other words, while neuroimaging studies reveal that the adolescent brain is developing, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about how this phenomenon affects real-world adolescent beliefs and behaviors. Human consciousness is a deep enigma, and neuroimaging is certainly not a mind-reading technique, as the discipline’s own researchers are apt to point out.

But going further, this shred of wisdom should also be discarded because it’s not instructive. For the sake of argument, let’s accept that those under age 25 are indeed cognitively deficient relative to adults, and this explains why they have worse judgement than those older than 25.

Or, to reduce the idea to its essence: adolescents have worse judgement than adults. Well, is this news to anyone? We’ve been structuring our society around this reality for much longer than we’ve known about the function of the prefrontal cortex. It’s why we don’t let people under 18 vote. So, to the extent that this statement is instructive, it’s also obvious and uninteresting.

Still, my criticism doesn’t stop at how this assertion isn’t helpful or thought-provoking. I myself often make similarly banal observations for the sake of small talk, like when I comment on the nice weather we’ve been having.

My ultimate criticism of this soundbite is that it alienates and infantilizes our students by suggesting that their shortcomings are an inherent feature of their demographic. Why do we have to adopt such a deterministic view, one that robs students of their agency? Can’t we be more charitable and recognize that adolescents have less life experience than adults, so their behavior is often characterized by identity development, pushing boundaries, and experimentation?

Our students are sensitive to condescension and may be aware that we use this framework to understand their behavior, moreso the longer we repeat it to ourselves. This could create distrust. If our students know that the authority figures in their lives view them as cognitively stunted by default, the natural reaction is to be suspicious of our decisions.

And if we are to fully invest ourselves in our role as educators, do we want to believe that we’re working against intractable biological factors that prevent our students from behaving appropriately, like we’re attempting to teach chickens how to play chess? I’d rather believe that my students can show maturity well beyond their years with proper guidance. The brain-development hypothesis is a lazy approach to understanding student behavior, allowing us fault biology for undesirable outcomes rather than interrogate what we could be doing better ourselves.

I might be making a mountain of a molehill, but I think that language matters, especially when this refrain will be repeated at many more faculty meetings in the coming years. If we want to understand why our students make dumb, awkward, or even harmful decisions, let’s not resort to bad science and boring platitudes: let’s just acknowledge that our students still have a lot to learn and we’re here to help.

Submitted March 02, 2021 at 10:59AM by schizophrenicrooster https://ift.tt/2ME7fjw