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Dr. Mel Levine is a pediatrician, researcher, and philosopher who lives on a large goose farm in Rougemont, North Carolina. He is a professor of pediatrics and the director of the Clinical Center for the Study of Development and Learning at the University of North Carolina Medical School in Chapel Hill. He is also president of All Kinds of Minds, a non-profit institute for the understanding of differences in learning. Dr. Levine specializes in children with learning problems and the developmental issues they present. As part of these efforts, Dr. Levine has worked extensively with school personnel, especially classroom teachers, to create school environments that capitalize on students' strengths. In our interview, Dr. Levine details how his interest in his patients' learning problems developed and how he came to view students' problems from a unique perspective.
Q: How did your interest in learning disabilities develop?
My work represents the confluence of many interests and themes in my life. As a young child, I was intent upon understanding people through their biographies. I was fascinated by people's stories. By the time I was 8 years old, I had decided to become a physician. Later, as an undergraduate student in premedicine at Brown University, I spent my summers working in a children's camp where I taught mountain climbing. I was fascinated by the different reactions kids had to the challenges they faced in the mountains. From watching youngsters respond differently to the challenge of mountain climbing, I decided to become a pediatrician.
After receiving a degree at Brown University, I studied in two different areas. I studied philosophy on a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University and medicine-specifically pediatrics-at Harvard Medical School. As a philosophy student, I became keenly interested in issues that would later influence my ideas about labeling children, particularly the ethics of doing so. While attending Harvard, I became more interested in children who were served as outpatients and the difficulties they encounter.
Upon completing medical school, I was entered into the Air Force during the Vietnam War and worked as the pediatrician on a military base in the Philippines, where I served as the school doctor. My work as a schoolbased doctor gave me the opportunity to see patients as real kids in their...