The Ta Kung Pao newspaper reported on Nov 14, 2022, that special education had been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and 23.5 percent of special educational needs (SEN) children have been abused. Such discomforting headlines suggest education for SEN children is worrisome, particularly during the pandemic.
For this reason, our team of neuroscientists and social scientists is integrating advanced technology and social research, hoping to deconstruct the myriad causes and effects of this problem of increased child abuse. SEN children’s education in Hong Kong has been plagued by a multitude of systemic structural problems. The incidents of child abuse and school bullying reported so far are just the tip of the iceberg.
If we can use our curriculum resources and government funds to establish the world’s first support center for SEN students and teachers, Hong Kong will become a leader in SEN education
Difficulties faced by SEN students are typically classified under the following categories: special learning difficulties (including dyslexia), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, speech impairment, hearing impairment, visual impairment, physical disability, and intellectual disability.
However, each category is a mere generalized broad syndrome area that is difficult to be dealt with uniformly. From the perspective of neuroscience, a better strategy would be a personalized exploration, just like a Sherlock Holmes investigation.
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The current method of using inclusive school-based education ignores the “special educational needs” of SEN children as individuals, delays treatment, continuously creates craters, and worsens the conflicts between parents, or caregivers, and SEN children.
Dialectically speaking, the pandemic, while bringing new challenges to SEN children, also brings new opportunities. For most cases we have dealt with, what the virus brings to children may be an unprecedented opportunity to improve their overall learning performance and social skills.
When students suffer from brain fog caused by the COVID-19 virus invasion, SEN children will experience brain shutdown and brain circuit breakage. The intelligence of most children will go down and they will tend to be more equal as a group. SEN children have very few normal brain circuits, so the loss after the virus invasion should be minimal.
However, the virus will stimulate the brain to start the self-help program, which is called “brain plasticity”. In 2021, we used the characteristics of the brain to invent a set of brain exercises to help SEN children to start the rewiring of the brain so that they can reverse the situation and help solve many inherent learning difficulties, thus successfully improving their overall learning ability.
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For example, one of the students of Professor Yung Kok-hing, the second author of this article, Joshua, who is currently 17 years old, has suffered from autism for 17 years and was basically unable to speak normally. From September 2022, Professor Yung taught him English and physics.
This was intended to activate his left brain to repair the damage inflicted by the COVID-19 virus. He taught him brain rewiring exercises before the academic classes every day. The professor then taught him how to activate the Broca area (the language computing area of the brain).
After about one month of tutoring in English and physics, Joshua was able to communicate with his family and classmates in English and physics jargon respectively. This phenomenon can be explained by our discovery that brain plasticity applies to all learners of all ages.
Through this training, most SEN children can revive their brains, and surpass other normal learners while curing themselves of the long-COVID brain fog. The significance of this finding is that it confirms that the long-COVID brain fog is an attack on human intelligence, or in technical terminology, the brain wirings or architecture.
In our previous research on the dementia of the elderly before the pandemic, the normal recovery averaged around two years, if successful. The encouraging result in helping SEN students to recover from damage caused by the COVID-19 virus attack on their brains is that the recovery can happen as soon as one month from intervention.
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The biggest problem for SEN children is not that there are too few brain circuits, but too many inefficient circuits. The brain lacks the ability to screen and clear these inefficiencies, so learning is slow. The current technology cannot noninvasively scavenge these brain circuits so much so that SEN children’s brains do not develop properly.
Under the COVID-19 situation, this kind of microscopic brain line deletion work can be handed over to the virus. As long as we activate all the important brain regions related to language and logical thinking and, coupled with advanced and effective learning courses, we can naturally improve students’ learning ability promptly. This method is also very effective for normal learners; as such, it provides a quick solution to long-COVID brain fog.
A scientific model can now be developed to nonmedically alleviate child abuse in Hong Kong during the COVID-19 pandemic:
Children, caregivers and parents, SEN or normal, will have their intelligence lowered, decisions distorted, health deteriorated, and anxiety increased during the pandemic. With the various interactors becoming SEN learners or SEN providers in school or family education contexts after contacting the brain fog that accompanies long COVID, the increased child abuse can be explained.
Without the intervention (brain rewiring to add new and efficient brain circuitry) for both SEN learners and SEN providers, the anxiety and conflict of the interactors cannot be removed, and increased child abuse will result.
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The alleviation of long-COVID symptoms, in particular brain fog, along with the new intervention strategy, is able to remove the new child abuse that we observe now.
Our current intervention courses are based on a lot of data on current events, historical narratives, courses, movies, and songs accumulated since the 1980s. Every day, our team classifies and archives videos of TV stations, universities, and news agencies to form big-data files for curriculum design. If we can use our curriculum resources and government funds to establish the world’s first support center for SEN students and teachers, Hong Kong will become a leader in SEN education.
Chan Kwok-bun is founder and chairman of the Chan Institute of Social Studies, and former head of Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore.
Yung Kok-hing is CEO of HIMARS Brain Tech; senior researcher, Chinese Academy of Management Science ,and a senior researcher, Ji Xian Ling Education Foundation, Peking University.