ADHD Visual Learners in Auditory Schools: A Double Whammy
Both our society and the world in general are becoming more visual. But many of our institutions, particularly our schools, have not kept up.

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
—William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
Leif Roland is one of the most effective psychologists I know. He runs Gestalt and NLP therapy groups, does individual therapy in Atlanta, and is solidly grounded in the notion that people are individuals and not labels.
Over lunch some years ago, Leif presented to me a startling and fascinating view of one possible reason for why we have ADHD.
“I grew up in Denmark in the 1950s,” Leif said. “My parents told me stories and read to me. In school we read constantly, and for recreation at night at home we’d either read or listen to the radio.
“As a consequence, I’m a very competent auditory learner. When I hear things, I’m quite good at understanding them and processing the information within them. When I’m doing therapy, I find it easy to listen to a person and discover what they’re really saying, what their deeper levels of meaning are. I can hear subtleties in their tone of voice that others may miss, for example, and this is useful in my work.
“But what I’m seeing increasingly among my clients is that more and more people, particularly here in America, are visual learners. They don’t listen well, or at least don’t understand or process what they’re hearing, but instead they use their eyes to experience and learn from the world.”
After that lunch with Leif, I went home and dug out a picture book of The New York Times which dated back to the last century. Reading articles written a hundred years ago, I was struck by how detailed they were, how linear and methodical, and how dense and turgid was the writing style.
My father had given me some textbooks he’d kept from high school in the 1940s, and I dug them out. His 7th grade history text would intimidate a modern college freshman. The tests in his 8th grade English textbook would overwhelm most college graduates I’ve interviewed for employment in the past ten years (and there have been dozens, if not over a hundred).
The Conservative Curmudgeon view of this transition in education is that our schools have become more permissive, weaker in their emphasis on learning, and less willing or able to discipline, threaten, or force children to learn. This has spawned a back-to-the-basics movement that’s most visible in the Christian schools and military academies, but even there the levels of academic achievement which were the norms in 1920 are rarely achieved.
Certainly modern children have more distractions and more alternatives to paying attention in school. There are TV, movies, phones, the mall, the mobility of automobiles, social media, and all the many lures of modern society (many provided by companies with a specific profit/sales agenda). There’s also an increased lack of parental involvement in the educational process as more parents are divorcing or, in this post-Reagan “gut the middle class” era, both parents must work to maintain a middle-class lifestyle.
But many educators say these simple answers couldn’t possibly be at the real core of modern children’s relative inability to learn in the classroom.
“It’s gotta be something deeper, something more structural within the brain,” one 60ish Southern California teacher told me when we were discussing this after a speech I’d given in suburban Los Angeles. “These kids are somehow fundamentally different from the way I was and from the way my parents were.”
Could it be that this difference is real, and that what it’s really about is the transition people are making from an auditory to a visual learning style?
While some educators point to the 1960s as the time when our schools “collapsed” or became too permissive, that period of time also coincides with the first generation of children raised with TV.
So much of our information now comes to us visually. More than two decades ago, television replaced newspapers as the primary way most people obtain their news. And newspapers, even though they’re silent, are essentially auditory: we hear the words in our head as we read them.
About the time that TV really set in, studies began to show that children spent more time watching TV than they did interacting with their family or their peers.
Print media has become more visual: USA Today is sometimes referred to by old-school newspaper reporters as “TV journalism in print,” and probably the publishers wouldn’t altogether disavow that description. The news is presented in highly visual, easily digested bites, perfect for both the busy executive and the attention-span-deficient person.
Advertising, compared with 40 years ago, is wildly more visual and less verbal. Rare are the ads with more than a few paragraphs of copy, whereas ads from the last century were often nothing but words. Best-selling books are translated into movies to reach wider audiences: that simple transition can increase dramatically the audience for a writer’s work.
Even the nature of best-selling books has changed. Modern novels are highly visual and easy to read and sell in the millions. On the other hand, do you know anybody who has chosen to take Melville or Joyce or Dostyevsky with him or her for vacation reading? If even one name comes to mind, that’s no doubt the proverbial exception that proves the rule: writing that has depth is no longer popular with the masses.
Both our society and the world in general are becoming more visual. But many of our institutions, particularly our schools, have not kept up. Our educational institutions were developed over hundreds (in some cases, thousands) of years during which the oral, and then the written, tradition reigned. We moved from telling stories around the fire to lecturing in class. Speech-making is still the primary educational model, augmented by reading assignments—all auditory teaching methods.
Yet the children who are in these school and college classrooms are now conditioned virtually from birth to learn by visual means. The result is that while the teacher is speaking English (at least in American schools), it may as well be Greek, because after ten or fifteen minutes the auditory-learning attention-span has been exceeded and the child is no longer paying attention.
Until our children are again taught to be good auditory processors (not likely to happen in any home that has a TV or gives their kids smartphones), or our educational institutions begin to offer far more visual and stimulating forms of education (not likely to happen in these days of budget crises), there will continue to be an epidemic of children who seemingly just can’t learn. And they are often diagnosed as having ADHD.
The first solution to this is to read to your children, from birth to their teenage years. Reduce the amount of TV that your kids are allowed to watch and keep them away from screens. And engage them in conversation whenever possible, challenging them to think and reason.