In the past decades, special education was moving at a steady pace towards diagnosis, improvement, and early intervention in the first years of a child’s life, as most of its reliance was on observation, behavioral assessment, and psychological and educational tests as tools to know the needs of children with disabilities, but with the rapid and increasing scientific progress in genetics, this led to the question: Can DNA be part of the individual educational plan?

From behavioral diagnosis to biological understanding of learning:

Special education in its field has always focused on understanding and knowing what appears and is observed in the child’s behavior, such as the level of attention and linguistic abilities that the child possesses, as well as the motor and social skills, in addition to the responses to the therapeutic programs that are presented to him, but what appears is only the tip of the iceberg. Behind every behavior that appears from the child there is a complex network of neurological, chemical, and genetic interactions that constitute the way the child learns and responds to the environment surrounding him.

Behavioral genomics today reveals that genes do not only determine the presence, type, or severity of disability, but go beyond that to determine the speed of information processing and the flexibility of the brain in learning, in addition to the sensitivity of the nervous system to stimuli and stimuli, the ability to acquire language, and the ability to respond to behavioral treatment provided to the child.

Towards the concept of the “genetic educational plan”:

The Individual Educational Plan (IEP) is considered the cornerstone of special education, but it currently relies on what can be observed and measured behaviorally. However, when simple genetic analysis is added to the design of the educational plan, it gives a more accurate account of the situation along with knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses. It supports the plan and provides deep biological information to the child, such as the extent of the child’s ability to concentrate and comprehend for a long time with the most effective learning method, as well as the speed of consolidating information in long-term memory, the level of sensitivity to sounds, and knowing the extent of the expected response to behavioral, cognitive, and linguistic treatment.

Not only does every child with a disability need a different plan, but he also needs a plan that suits his genetic code. This raises a deeper question:
How do we design education that understands them before they start learning?