Matthew Weinberg on Neurodivergent Learners and Why the System Needs to Change

I have dyslexia.

I did not have a name for it when I was young. I just knew that reading required something different from me than it seemed to require from the people around me. The words were there. Getting to what they meant took more work.

My brother had the same experience. We figured it out together, mostly by finding approaches that worked for us and quietly abandoning the ones that did not.

What I did not fully understand at the time was that the difficulty was not mine. It was the system's.

The System Is Not Neutral

Most educational systems present themselves as objective. They test what students know. They measure performance against a standard. They rank outcomes and distribute opportunities accordingly.

What they do not advertise is that the standard was designed for a specific kind of learner.

A learner who processes written text quickly and accurately. Who performs well under time pressure. Who can sustain attention through long periods of passive instruction. Who retrieves stored information reliably on demand.

These are real cognitive skills. But they are not universal. They are not evenly distributed across the population. And they are not the only cognitive skills that matter.

Students with dyslexia, ADHD, apraxia, autism spectrum conditions, and the full range of what we now call neurodivergent cognition often struggle with one or more of these specific skills while excelling at others. Pattern recognition. Spatial reasoning. Creative problem-solving. The ability to see connections across seemingly unrelated domains.

The system measures the first set. It largely ignores the second.

The result is that a significant number of highly capable people spend their school years being told, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that they are not good at learning. What they are actually being told is that they are not good at performing within a specific measurement framework. That is a completely different thing.

What My Children Taught Me

My daughter has apraxia. My son has ADHD and other learning differences.

Watching them navigate educational environments not designed for them has reinforced everything I already understood from my own experience, and added dimensions I had not fully considered.

The moments that look like failure from the outside are almost never about capability. They are about fit. A child who cannot sit still through a forty-minute lecture is not demonstrating an inability to learn. They are demonstrating that they learn differently. A child who struggles to decode written text quickly is not demonstrating low intelligence. They are demonstrating that written text is not their primary channel.

When the environment changes to match how they actually think, the picture changes completely. I have watched this happen with my own eyes, repeatedly. It is not subtle. It is dramatic.

That experience shapes every educational environment I design and every program I support through my philanthropy.

What the Research Shows

My doctoral research on game theory in education is relevant here in a specific way.

The core finding is that students behave rationally within whatever incentive structure the educational environment creates. If the environment rewards accurate recall under pressure, students optimize for accurate recall under pressure. If the environment rewards genuine inquiry and collaborative problem-solving, students optimize for those instead.

For neurotypical learners, the traditional environment is suboptimal but manageable. They can learn to perform within its constraints while also developing genuine understanding, though the system makes this harder than it needs to be.

For many neurodivergent learners, the traditional environment is not suboptimal. It is actively hostile. The specific skills the system rewards are the precise skills that are most difficult for them. The system is not a bad fit. It is a systematically wrong fit.

This is not a motivational problem. It is a design problem.

More on the game theory framework behind this is in Why Dr. Matthew Weinberg Applies Game Theory to Education.

What Needs to Change

The changes that would most benefit neurodivergent learners are not accommodations. Accommodations assume the system is fundamentally correct and needs minor adjustments for specific students. Extra time on tests. Larger font sizes. Separate testing rooms.

These things help. But they do not address the underlying design problem.

What needs to change is the incentive structure itself. Assessment that rewards genuine understanding over rapid recall. Instructional formats that engage multiple cognitive pathways rather than defaulting to text-heavy passive instruction. Learning environments designed around how different minds actually work rather than around a single cognitive norm.

This is harder to build than an accommodation. It requires rethinking what a learning environment is for and what it should produce.

I have spent my career trying to build exactly that. Through my research, through the programs I have designed at The Barrett School, and through my philanthropy supporting specialized schools and the Neurodiversity Fund.

Not because neurodivergent learners need to be fixed. They do not.

Because the system does.

A full account of my background and work in education is available here. More about my philanthropic work supporting neurodivergent learners is available on the Philanthropy page.

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Dr. Matthew Weinberg, PhD, MEd is an educator, author, Vice President of the Gloria C. MacKenzie Foundation, and founder of Grammar & Stone Publishing. His books are available at Barnes & Noble. Follow him on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X.