Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

by Temple Grandin

If you went to public school in the 1990s or after, you may not remember such programs. They were largely scrubbed from the public school curricula around that point, along with art, theater, welding, and auto mechanics, with some regional variation. The culmination of these policies arrived in 2001, when the education reform bill known as No Child Left Behind “hit American education like a tsunami,” according to Nikhil Goyal’s critique of the legislation in his book Schools on Trial. Now, not only was the stripping away of hands-on learning a reality, but a new philosophy had supplanted it: teach to the test. The policy, otherwise known as “drill, kill, bubble fill,” became the norm. The legacy of the previous twenty years of federal education policy, from No Child Left Behind to the Every Student Succeeds Act, has created a culture that has simultaneously overemphasized testing and stripped our schools of multifaceted curricula. The goal of raising national academic standards through comprehensive testing decimated the classes that didn’t lend themselves to standardized testing. “Beginning in third grade, the amount of instructional time in the arts, music, science, and history was reduced, because basically what was tested got taught, and these subjects were not equally tested,” writes Goyal. In 2015, the president of the National Education Association, Lily Eskelsen García, and the president of the National Parent Teacher Association, Otha Thornton, wrote in The Washin...