But this unconventional approach, and the bold claims that underlie it, have yet to be accepted by the education establishment – something that has nagged at Eaton since he founded the school in 2009. private schools have adopted the program for some of their students, and a second Eaton Arrowsmith school opened in September in Redmond, Washington. Scores of parents, who pay $29,000 a year for a full-time slot at Eaton Arrowsmith, believe in it. They assert that such a regimen re-wires children’s brains so that, after a couple of years, students can hold their own, even thrive, in conventional schools.
Both Eaton and Arrowsmith-Young believe that children can overcome learning disabilities through specific cognitive exercises – if done repeatedly, at increasing levels of difficulty, with ever-increasing speed and accuracy. The founder, Howard Eaton, adopted the approach from the Arrowsmith Schools in Ontario, founded by Barbara Arrowsmith-Young. Its curriculum amounts to physical therapy for the brain. The school, based in rented space on UBC’s campus, caters to students with learning disabilities. Most of the time, students work quietly by themselves, on what appear to be tedious tasks: tracing ornate, unfamiliar letters from Chinese, Urdu or Burmese, often while wearing eye patches listening to recorded phrases, and repeating them from memory, word-for-word looking at images of clocks that flash on their screens, and typing in the displayed time – except the clocks can have as many as 10 hands, and the answers sometimes include identifying the correct millennium.
It doesn’t take long to discern that the Eaton Arrowsmith School takes a distinctive approach to education.
Photo courtesy of Eaton Arrowsmith School Lara Boyd explores whether an unorthodox curriculum has a neurological impact on children Students at the Eaton Arrowsmith School doing the clocks task.
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