KQED News Mind/Shift – Katrina Schwartz
“Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman’s personal education story may sound familiar to many families struggling against a system that doesn’t tend to value qualities in students that make them different from a predetermined “average” learner. When he was young, Kaufman had central auditory processing disorder, which made it hard for him to process verbal information in real time. He was asked to repeat third grade because he was considered a “slow” learner. That started him down a path of special education classes until high school. “I felt on the one hand that I was capable of more intellectual challenges,” Kaufman told an audience at the Creativity Forum hosted by the Bay Area Discovery Museum, “but on the other hand I thought, ‘Who am I to question authority?’ ” So he didn’t, and since school wasn’t challenging him, Kaufman spent a lot of time in his own internal world, daydreaming.”(more)