Stumbled on this video at James Joyner’s digs, and both the lecture and the animation are quite extraordinary. I was nodding along throughout. We do need to go in the exact opposite direction than we’re headed – away from the industrialized model of public education, away from standardized tests, away from unthinking conformity and mind-numbing medication. ADHD is a fictitious epidemic (Peter Gray has a lot of good stuff on this topic, as well here, here, and here). And so on and so forth.
Now on to the main attraction:
That being said, I still find myself in a tricky place when it comes to the school choice movement, because on the one hand, some charter schools really do offer a brilliant alternative to stagnated traditional public schools. On the other hand charters/vouchers/etc. could also very easily lead to more class divisions, more inequity, less of a commitment to the very concept of public education. For instance, my wife went to a charter school here and it was a great school but there was much less access to transportation than at a traditional public school. Many charters don’t have any access to public transportation outside of city transportation (as opposed to yellow school buses). My wife spent nearly two hours getting to and from school because she wasn’t able to get a ride from her parents. Many lower-income families or families with working parents are going to run into these problems with charters, making it even more likely that charters are populated by upper-middle class students. Similar problems with special-needs students are also quite common.
Then again, when I look at schools for my children, I find the charters very appealing. I like having the choice at least. So it’s tricky. Either way, I think a radical rethinking of what we want to gain from public education is necessary. DougJ has described my prescription for public education as ‘hippie-solutions’ and I think that’s about right. I wonder if we could bring the wisdom of the unschooling movement to public schools? Or the sensibility of the one-room-schoolhouse, where children of all ages mingled in the classroom, to schools of 1400 students? I’m really not sure.
On a somewhat related note we watched Frontline’s College Inc. last night (also available on Netflix to watch instantly) and it was pretty disturbing stuff. The numbers on loan default (which are often rated at 7% but that leaves out any loans older than 2 years old, so you’re looking at more like 40% for many of these schools), on how much these for-profit colleges depend on federal loans, on the uselessness of their degrees – it’s pretty horrifying. You basically have a bunch of working class people going into a hundred thousand dollars in debt who graduate with degrees employers won’t touch.
It’s a massive, coordinated transfer of wealth from the working poor to the investor class, and that’s just the simple truth. It’s a travesty and a fraud, and it’s time to put an end to it, though I can’t honestly say how. Then again, the existence and popularity of these expensive sham colleges points to an underlying demand for educational opportunity for working people, people who need convenience, who are poorer or have less education to begin with – and traditional public or non-profit institutions aren’t meeting that demand. If they were, why would people pay an arm and a leg to go to The University of Phoenix?
*cross-posted this one over at The League
Zifnab
Honestly, I think standardized tests get a bad rap.
I mean, there’s a line. You can’t have the entire school year revolve around teaching to the test. But there is a baseline that students need to aim for. With the exemplary schools that have the exciting teachers and the most advanced curriculum, standardized tests are a waste. But with the bad schools that have the sloppy teachers and the chronic problems, you can’t afford to give classes the freedom that a good school gets. You need more structure and teaching to a test is better than not teaching at all.
So, :-p
Davis X. Machina
Brad DeLong is fond of saying — in 600-student lecture sections no less — that the only school model that really works is Socrates on one end of a log, and a student at the other, and that anything else is a compromise, for the sake of of cost-control, administrative convenience, or someone’s pet Ed.D. thesis.
beltane
For what it’s worth, in my rural neck of the woods a neighboring town is struggling with ways to eliminate multi-grade classrooms because they have proved to be a disaster, though one which has the advantage of being cheap. It may work wonderfully in a carefully blended classroom consisting of the best, the brightest, and the most well-behaved, but in the more common scenario it results in intimidated younger children, bored older children, and some very, very unhappy teachers.
Mnemosyne
Ah, I love it when people tell me I’m a lying hypochondriac because my mental illness doesn’t really exist.
Tell you what, I’ll send my unmedicated 17-year-old nephew over to your house and you can tell me if ADHD is “fictitious.”
MBL
I stopped reading after the words “fictitious epidemic”. You’ve clearly never been in a classroom, especially an urban one.
beltane
@Zifnab: I totally agree with you. My personal experience as a student at un-schoolish private school was an unmitigated disaster. The classrooms at my elementary school (they didn’t call it that) did not have doors or rows of desks. The emphasis on independent study resulted in my best friend and I spending the entire 3rd grade peering out the window at the East River and chatting endlessly. Despite the lack of structure, I still hated going to school though.
sherifffruitfly
It’s not even notionally possible for education to improve until there are teachers who aren’t idiots. And that rules out practically anyone with a degree in education.
Teachers can only teach what they know. And education majors simply don’t know anything. Love their dedication, how hard they work, and all of that. But the fact remains that they’re just plain dumb.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Ash Can
@Mnemosyne: I read that as meaning the “epidemic” aspect of the disease was fictitious, not the disease itself.
zattarra
@sherifffruitfly:
How many teachers do you know who have degrees in education as their primary degree? Most teacher’s I know have a primary degree in something else and then either an education degree of certification classes so they can teach. Science teachers have biology degrees or chemistry degrees. Math teacher’s with math or computer engineering degrees. History teachers with degrees in history. Maybe I just know different teachers? But your statement doesn’t match my experience (and I come from a family of teachers).
Fax Paladin
Ah, contextual advertising — on a page that blasts for-profit colleges as travesties and frauds, ads for the University of Phoenix, Full Sail University and the Art Institute of Pittsburgh…
ADD: And when the page reloads after my comment posts, Capella University and ICDC…
Alwhite
“ADHD is a fictional epidemic” excuse me but BULLSHIT.
I have 3 children, 2 were excellent students & one was unable to focus even as an infant (he would get distracted nursing) He ended first grade not being able to read or write with a teacher that also believed there was no such thing as ADHD. His second grade teacher worked with us to get him help & by by the end of second grade he was reading at a fourth grade level. Today he is on the deans list and inducted into a national honor society.
It was not discipline, it was not environment, it was not helicopter parenting it was ADHD.
Davis X. Machina
The first paid teachers — the Sophists — were strictly for-profit guys. And roundly excoriated for it.
The problem with the world is that the mutatis never mutandis.
300baud
@Mnemosyne (and MBL, too):
You’re not getting it.
When people say “ADHD doesn’t exist” this is not denying your experience or your pain. Those are real. Nobody is trying to take them from you.
What they are denying is the common analysis of the situation that includes those experiences, and the conclusions reached from it.
There is no reason for somebody diagnosed with ADHD or anybody who cares about them to get upset that people are questioning the science or the medical practice. The goal is to improve medicine and improve patient outcomes.
Comrade Mary
I can believe that a bunch of exuberant and/or non-conformist kids could be mislabelled as ADHD, so it’s plausible that the epidemic among school kids is, at the very least, exaggerated, but ADHD is real and it can fuck your life something royal.
Sly
Every time I hear someone who has never worked in a classroom as a teacher make sweeping generalizations and recommendations about education, either in total or some aspect of it, I have this odd impulse to chug a bottle of aspirin.
My profession is so fantastic that everyone and their mother thinks they’re a goddamned expert at it.
300baud
@Comrade Mary:
There’s a difference between saying “some kids have problems with attention in school” and “ADHD is real”. The first is an observation; the second is an analytical model that we try to use to explain the observation.
As a hit-or-miss student diagnosed with ADHD, it’s a topic I’ve been following for years. As best I can tell, Grey’s right. As a diagnosis, ADHD (and its earlier names, including “hyperactivity” and “minimal brain disfunction”) is a convenient diagnostic bucket, not a real disease. It’s as if people were being diagnosed with “sneezing syndrome” because they all sneezed. It’s akin to the modern psuedo-diagnosis of “internet addiction”, wherein normal behaviors plus a variety of actual problems are all given the same label.
So Grey isn’t denying the observations; he’s denying the analytical model, and some of the conclusions drawn from it.
Mnemosyne
@300baud:
Really, there’s no reason for people to get upset because people are telling us that ADHD doesn’t really exist and the problem must be something else? Gosh, I certainly haven’t spent my whole life hearing people tell me that if I just applied myself everything would be fine.
YellowJournalism
@Zifnab: There is nothing wrong with a single standardized test at the end of the year that would help teachers and administrators measure progress. It, just like any other test or measure of performance and mastery, should be looked at as a thing of value. There is a huge problem with standardized tests being the only recognized marker of a child’s progress or the results being the basis for a teacher’s salary.
Silver
@zattarra:
My experience has been exactly the opposite.
Ideally, I guess, an Education degree would be like a law degree, or an MBA. Except you’d get paid way less and have to deal with the maniac kids of assholes. Might as well just be a lawyer or MBA and deal directly with the assholes and cut out the middleman.
Although I did have a PhD botanist teach me high school biology. She was a hardcore creationist. Christian school fucking fail, right there…
wengler
Actually the prescription for better public school education is pretty easy. Lower class sizes and better paid teachers.
But that costs money. A lot of money.
So instead of that the Washington establishment is demonizing teachers’ unions and pumping up charter school madness.
The whole point of public schooling in the first place is that they have to educate everyone. Charter schooling is a marketing makeover for selecting the kids with the most engaged parents and putting them all together. It’s not exactly a surprise when they do well. The fact that many of them don’t have to go through the rigors of NCLB and other mandatory standardized testing also makes them look more appealing for they have no accountability whatsoever.
Nothing in this September rollout of “education reform” makes me optimistic for the future of public schooling this country. In the end it is just one more untapped market for the millionaires and billionaires to slash and burn.
Silver
@Mnemosyne:
If you took your Ritalin, perhaps you’d read the whole sentence and see that it wasn’t written as “fictitious disability” but “fictitious epidemic.”
Mnemosyne
@Silver:
No, now 300baud is saying it’s a fictitious disability:
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@Mnemosyne: Nobody’s better than you at twisting any statement into an attack on you, personally. It must be rough going through life when every other random statement you hear is, in fact, a direct attack on yourself.
@Mnemosyne: Reading comprehension fail. Nobody is surprised.
Mnemosyne
@Jrod the Cookie Thief:
You like pie? So glad to hear it.
daveNYC
@Mnemosyne: What we have here is a failure to communicate.
Mnemosyne
@daveNYC:
I’m not sure how else I’m supposed to interpret “not a real disease.”
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@Mnemosyne: But don’t you see? When I said, “I like pie,” what I was really saying is that you might actually bear some responsibility for your life, which is of course the most terrible thing anyone ever said about anyone!
Earl Butz
ADHD: total fiction.
I can prove it to anyone here.
Just take that kid and plunk ’em down in front of something they like. It’s usually TV or video games.
They’ll sit for hours.
ADHD is a fucking lie.
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@Mnemosyne: You might consider thinking about how the word “disease” is being used, rather than jumping to whichever conclusion seems most like a vicious attack on yourself and all that is good and noble.
Ash Can
So much for this thread.
daveNYC
@Mnemosyne: My take on what he said was that ADHD is more of a ‘fake diagnosis’. Yes there’s something squirilly with the kids, and yes the symptoms are similar, but the root cause is not the same, and to tie it in with the ‘fake epidimic’ line, some of those diagnosed are just regular rowdy kids that are given the ‘one size fits all’ label of ADHD and doped because their parents/teachers/doctors don’t care enough to deal with them.
This does not mean that those diagnosed with ADHD have nothing wrong with them and just need to nut up and focus. It means that ADHD is an imprecise (in 300baud’s opinion) diagnosis, that is being used to cover a variety of real conditions.
Am I talking out of my ass here?
Edit: Earl Butz, OTOH, can suck a bag of dicks.
Omnes Omnibus
@sherifffruitfly: Education degrees are primarily for elementary school teachers. At that level, one of the things that is being taught is how to learn. And fuck you on behalf of a lot of very bright teachers. **
**I am not a teacher and was not an education major. My mother, on the other hand….
Cacti
@Earl Butz:
The logic of young earth creationists applied to neurobehavioral developmental disorders.
Brilliant!
Jon H
Peter Gray can bite my taint. Kain can too.
“Psychology Today” is cheap-ass tabloid self-help garbage.
Davis X. Machina
If there were a real, actual, existing constituency for improving public schools powerful enough to improve public schools, that actually wanted to improve public schools, they wouldn’t be the way they are now.
We have, after all, public schools, as good or as bad as the public is willing to stand for. They were not, pace “A Nation at Risk”, imposed by some foreign occupying power.
What there are, are pressure groups who have various uses for a school ‘crisis’ — it is, for them, a useful tool to employ in their advocacy of other issues, unrelated to actual schools.
If — conceding arguendo –our schools suck, it’s because sucky schools have a constituency, albeit it is more likely there is a constituency that on balance prefers sucky schools to other policy outcomes, and not a constituency actually in favor of sucky schools per se.
I’m waiting for a politician with the balls to run on a platitude-free, low bullshit, education platform of “Schools? They’re bad, but hey, they’re not that bad, mostly. And they’re not your kids, mostly. This way you get to keep your money, or more accurately, you don’t get to keep your money, but we take it and do other non-school-y things with it, that you like more anyways. Vote for me.”
The decrease in hypocrisy would be a social good, all by itself.
Jon H
@daveNYC: “ADHD and doped because their parents/teachers/doctors don’t care enough to deal with them.”
Because giving rowdy kids stimulants is a great way to settle them down.
kamper
At the risk of proselytizing, a Waldorf education addresses some of the issues with industrialized education presented in this video. Not all, but some of the important ones. Problem is that it’s not for all kids and its implementation can vary by school.
artem1s
gotta say that no amount of money or good teachers is going to fix an education system that thinks its job is to be athletic training leagues for the NCAA and the NCAA thinking its job is to be farm clubs for professional sports.
if parents and communities took basic reading and math skills as seriously as they do teaching their kids how to properly throw a spiral, square up when they tackle, make a layup, or field a ground ball then testing minimums would be a moot point.
can’t tell you how many people I know who chose their kids school based on what the athletic department’s record was. The math teacher could have been a Gibbon and the science labs could have been in a card board box but as long as the school had a state of the art weight room, an athletic director and practice field (just a stadium isn’t good enough) that was good enough for their kid.
when every kid knows as much about Stephen Hawkin as they do Derrick Jeter or King James then we might have a decent education system. instead we have business leaders, politicians, and celebrities telling kids that science and scientists are evil?
It amazes me that anyone is even notices when things go wrong in education when they spend so much time vilifying anyone who has anything to do with it. why do they care if they believe that educated people and academia is ruining ‘murica!
when they want their kids to be smart, be around smart people and think, as much as they want them to win in little league, then they will want to fund education. now the only time a levy gets passed is when the board threatens to take away sports.
I don’t hate sports but it does fascinate me the amount of time and money our culture is willing to spend on sports but a similar output for say, math, is considered a waste. think about it, its perfectly OK for legislators to suggest that maybe not every kid needs to go to college but can you imagine anyone suggesting that not every college or high school needs to have a football team?
rant over…
Jrod the Cookie Thief
To get on topic, I don’t think pushing charter schools is a good idea at all. If anything, public school funding needs to be equalized. Instead of the districts with the highest property tax base getting the most school funds, all that money should be pooled statewide and evenly distributed to every district. The dirty non-secret of our current funding scheme is that the well-off get the good public schools, while the poor get crap and hand-me-downs.
Vouchers will only exacerbate this problem, except it will become “the wealthy get money to go towards their charter schools while everyone in a regular public school gets the shaft.” As was said in the top post, lower-class students have more barriers to get into charter school than simply money.
On top of that, charter schools simply have limited space, so even if all else was equal, not everyone who wants in can get in. Public schools, by definition, can take all comers. It makes sense to focus our money there, where it can do the most good.
As for public schools taking on some of the techniques of charters, that’d be great. Thing is, simply reducing class sizes and increasing budgets would cover most of what makes the charters so good. For that to happen consistently, there can’t be any large differences in the funding schools get. If given the chance, the well-off will work to keep the lion’s share of funding with their own children. That’s just human nature.
In our current situation, though, I don’t see any shame in trying to get your children into the best school you can. I just see the long-term goal to be making such a choice moot. (On the public level, anyway, private schools can always be an option as well, as long as they are paid for with private dollars.)
R-Jud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah, I can see an argument for high school teachers having a degree (or two) in the field they teach, but for elementary school teachers, you aren’t just telling the kids what you learned when you were their age. You need to understand how to teach people to read and write. An education degree is important for teaching the under-12s.
Davis X. Machina
Now if the history teacher were a Gibbon — that would have been something special.
Karmakin
First things first.
We have to admit that as an economy, we’re overeducated. Not so much in the K-12 range. But above that, we have too many educated folks for the jobs that we have that require that level of education. So even among those groups, the number of people that we have that are underemployed for their education is simply staggering. And what this does is it lowers the value of the degrees, so it’s even harder to pay back all that money for the people who DO have the jobs.
The reality is that education is a class marker. It’s a sign that you have a certain background and a certain frame of mind. The education itself, often is inconsequential to the job you’ll actually be doing.
As well, we’re constantly becoming more and more productive as a society, so we’ll need less and less educated jobs in the future. (People scoffed at the people hired off the street to pump through mortgage information. That’s the real world folks. Most jobs can be trained in a few weeks. The stories about what happened at those places is indicative of the “Get ‘er done” attitude that’s common…no, necessary for survival among the lower classes in our modern economy. Been there, done that, have the mental and emotional scars. Maybe I’ll rant about all this in another thread)
The point is, we CAN’T put an end to it. It’ll end itself, as pre-training jobs and non-pre-training jobs balance each other out in terms of wages, because after all, most people would rather work in IT than be a fry cook or a janitor. And eventually we’ll get to a medium where in most fields, people go to college because they want to work in that field, and not because it pays well, because it doesn’t, but in a few fields there will be drastic labor shortages, and in that case we’ll either work around it, or there will be a boom with people training for those jobs, and eventually they’ll be oversupplied as well.
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@artem1s: Some schools are shutting down the football program. At least one college that ended their football program is doing just fine without it.
Yes, there’s life after football.
ornery curmudgeon
@Earl Butz: Lol … insensitive but you have a blunt point. You made me think about my ADHD nephew, now medicated into submission … he spent countless hours watching teevee and playing video games as a youngster, but books and classrooms somehow aggravated his symptoms. It was either take the mind-pills or stop teevee and video games, so the American choice had to be made. Poor kid.
Medicating children so they sit still and cope with rote testing implemented by theocratic Conservatives who were specifically trying to kill our public school system … unf’ing real. As a kid who no doubt would have been dosed with ritalin to keep my attention on the BORING ASS bullshit that comprises teaching today … I say ADHD is too often just a convenient excuse for the adults. Find another way.
Not to say some kids don’t have learning issues … but it’s too much to be feeding mind-pills to antsy kids after letting them zone out to teevee their young lives. Was ADHD a widespread problem before teevee became a way of life for our children? No, it surely existed, but nothing like now.
Something else is going on, and it sure ain’t too much reading.
Mnemosyne
I had another comment vanish into the ether, so I’ll try not to make this one too repetitive.
@daveNYC:
Pretty much, yeah. ;-) The diagnosis for most mental/neurological diseases is imprecise. That’s why they talk about the “autism spectrum” — it’s not a single disease with a single manifestation, but a whole lot of things that manifest differently in different people. You could have two depressed people, but one will respond better to Prozac and the other will respond better to Wellbutrin. It’s all a crapshoot, frankly, but that’s not the same thing as saying that it’s a wrong diagnosis.
ADHD does get misdiagnosed pretty often, but I would argue that’s because teachers have an idea of what it “looks” like and hone in on the kids who are disruptive. The girl sitting staring out the window daydreaming could have a more severe ADHD problem than the class clown, but the teacher’s not going to notice, so she never gets treated.
Mnemosyne
@ornery curmudgeon:
I would argue that’s because we now require kids to stay in school until they’re 18. In the times you’re talking about, it wasn’t that unusual for a kid to barely finish 8th grade before s/he dropped out and got a job.
It’s not that it exists more so much as that the way our educational system is organized makes those square pegs pop out more. Fifty years ago, your nephew probably would have dropped out of school and learned to be a mechanic.
Davis X. Machina
@ornery curmudgeon: A hundred years ago, your nephew would have run away to sea. He’d either a.) have gotten, as Lucky Jack Aubrey says, ‘knocked on the head’, b.) come back in three or four years a finer, better person, for having seen the world, married Sally and happily followed a plow for the rest of his life, or c.) become a great sea captain, and wound up owning one of those big white houses that line the main street of towns like Camden and Rockland, Maine.
But you can’t do that any more. And we’re the poorer as a country for it.
Karmakin
It’s that we’ve amped up pretty much all the aspects of our society, be it education, entertainment, home life, whatever, and it simply doesn’t work for a spectrum of our population.
Either we can choose to dial it down a notch…for everybody, or we can accept it and deal with it.
Edit:Also what Davis and Mnemosyne said. There used to be options for people in that situation. Now there’s not, or at least not even close to as many.
Mnemosyne
@kamper:
I lean more towards Montessori, myself, (it’s not just for preschoolers!) but that would have the same implementation and quality problems in a public school setting.
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@Davis X. Machina: There used to be a lot of options available to someone who might not be a genius, but was willing to work hard and learn a trade. Nowadays, you’re lucky to get a job slicing beef at Arby’s without a BA. At least, that’s how it is here in the northwest, though to be fair we have a higher than average population of people fresh out of college with a useless degree.
wonkie
Re: ficticious epidemic of ADHD.
It’s not an either/or. It’s not a case of ADHA being totally real or entirely a hyped up fake.
It is a real condition that is very, very over diagnosed. The epidemic is the result of that over diagnosis.
Annie
As someone who is part of the “education business” I have two comments. First, one problem with our current system and with education reform is that it is input oriented. Over and over we read that quality education requires a list of inputs that if given to all children, they have the capacity to succeed. The problem with the list of “universals” is that children are “different.” It is the difference we cannot come to grips with. Because children are different — have different cultural experiences, different support systems, different home and community lives, etc. — they respond to the list of inputs differently. According to the research the two most important determinants of success in school are teacher quality and parental involvement. However, how children react to teachers and their experiences at home are different. So, for inputs to work they cannot be massed produced and dispensed, but rather we have to understand more about how different children need different kinds of supports and opportunities.
The second thing is the importance of social capital — the types of relationships and networks that provide opportunities both to support what goes on in schools and the availability of opportunities outside of school. Some children come into school with a lot of social capital — strong relationships of trust and support, and strong networks outside of school that they can count on for opportunities. Other children have limited social capital, and this limitation is reflected both in how well they do in school, and what happens to them outside of school. Providing all children with the means to increase their social capital should be a priority.
Comrade Mary
@Mnemosyne:
Oh, boy, does that look familiar. I didn’t have anyone bring up the possibility of ADHD to me until I was in my 40s because I didn’t fit the stereotype. Several decades of being the bright but incompetent one who never lived up to expectations, who seemed to do well under a certain amount of variety and stress but who couldn’t manage long term goals and focus for the life of her, and who just plain “NEVER.FINISHED.ANYTHING!” (as my ex-husband loved to scream at me) — yeah, that left a mark.
@300baud: I accept that the etiology and full understanding of ADHD can be a hard thing to pin down (dopamine re-uptake seems to be a common problem visible on MRIs, and there’s some statistically significant but not terribly convincing research results suggesting that there may be a genetic component), but if you take away the noise of those misdiagnosed little boys, there’s something happening here.
Peter Grey seems to think that unschooled/homeschooled “ADHD” kids seem to be symptom-free in a better environment. I think those environments are a lot better for them (and most kids) than typical modern classrooms, but I know that I wasn’t the only bright underachiever who succeeded only in fits and starts at the awesome alternative high school I went to for several years. I think that school did a lot for me, but I still struggled in university and working life for decades after that.
Oh, and about those books and video games: one reason no one thought I was ADHD as a kid was because I read a LOT. I would read several books in a day. It was a family joke that I would walk down the street reading, barely avoiding cars. The stereotypical ADHD kid doesn’t have the attention span for reading. But what actually seems to happen with a lot of us is an attention switching problem. I can wander away and leave cabinet doors open, drawers out, and my contact lens case wide open on the bathroom counter, but I could also hyper-focus on a book for hours.
It isn’t that I don’t value being tidy. God, you have no idea how many systems and charts and books and to-motherfucking-do lists I’ve drawn up in my life in an attempt to stay organized and tidy. But even though I value these things, either I get frustrated even finding a place to start, or I just vaguely wander away without even realizing what I’ve done.
My story isn’t included here, but those of you who think ADHD is just a matter of being lazy or victimized by Evil Doctors should read it.
arguingwithsignposts
No offense, Kain, but I am not taking education prescription cues from libertarians.
Arclite
ADHD is certainly real. It’s very frustrating to have to struggle to do the things which come so naturally to everyone else. And it’s very frustrating for those around you as well. It’s akin to having a missing leg or arm and all the limitations that come with that, but no one else being able to see that you are missing a leg or arm and expecting you to be able to do the things everyone else does.
@ Earl Butz ADHD sufferers have depressed dopamine activity, and engage in ADHD behaviors to try and stimulate themselves. Playing video games or watching action shows produces dopamine and is totally consistent with that.
I don’t know if it’s an ‘epidemic’ but lots of studies have come out showing a correlation (and mechanisms) by which a wide variety of things can manifest/exacerbate ADHD including watching too much TV, artificial food coloring, and pesticides on produce. These things are widespread and growing in our lives.
In my case, it runs in the family. My daughter is exhibiting the same behavior I did as a child (and do today), and as my mother does. It certainly helps when I get enough sleep, eat right, exercise, and meditate. When I don’t do these things, I get worse.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Mary:
I hate when people say, “This,” but … this. If something catches my attention (like, um, an internet argument), it can keep me fascinated for hours while my insurance bill needs paying, the cats need feeding, laundry needs doing, etc.
ETA: That Metafilter thread was what finally convinced my husband I have ADHD. He wasn’t sure, because my ADHD doesn’t look anything like our nephew’s, but that made him seriously consider it.
ornery curmudgeon
Yeah, Mnemosyne and Davis X … I agree there aren’t the same options outside of the classroom for kids anymore. We don’t even seem to be making allowance for different rates of development or methods of learning. Surely there must be SOME advantage to living in our advanced tech-addled age … can’t flexibility be introduced?
We need some standards, but what about the flukes in life … people who simply can’t do math, but are great writers (or vice versa)? Maybe the ideal of honoring work itself, rather than just money, is part of a solution. Society is an interconnected web of specializations … we need everyone, imlo (in my liberal opinion :)
I do believe “too much” teevee in early years is a factor in some learning/discipline issues. Teevee is a drug of a kind, and it is having some kind of effect on our kids, imo.
Poor kids.
HyperIon
@Earl Butz wrote:
Yes, that is a interesting piece of info.
Which I’ve never heard anyone explain.
Things I like, I can focus on.
Things I don’t like, forget about it.
Part of the issue is WHAT counts as ADHD.
Davis X. Machina
@ornery curmudgeon:
There’s a lot of differential aptitude out there. I held the record at my (day, prep) high school for nearly 30 years for the biggest SAT V/M split, at just over 300 points. Traditional NE prep school was perfect for me — in the STEM-heavy (science-technology-engineering-math) public high school of the future, there’d be no place for me — just as faculty, there soon will be no place for me in a year or so — out on my ear, a 30-year veteran of the classroom, at 53. But that’s a story for another day.
Luckily I washed up in Classics, where the only math I ever needed to do was add up stuff from the Athenian Tribute Lists.
(I eventually ‘got’ trig, and spherical trig to boot, but that was from celestial navigation courses, and a little lab work with a sextant and a very up-and-down-y horizon….)
Stuck in the Funhouse
@Davis X. Machina:
I washed up in about everything until I discovered life science, then became a straight A student, though sometimes a B when the party favors got too much. It was kind of savant like, I rarely needed to study much for tests, and could remember about anything after hearing or reading it once.
Even now, sometimes I come across a new disease discovery or some other bio science that strikes a cord, and I will become completely engrossed and lose track of time looking for one tidbit of info I don’t quite get.
Mnemosyne
@Davis X. Machina:
The only math I ever did well in was geometry because they had us write all of the proofs and propositions down on index cards and let us refer to them during tests. That at least gave me a fighting chance to go, “Hmm, okay, it’s a triangle, so I only need to look at the triangle-related proofs …”
Arclite
I checked out the local charter school when I was looking at schools for my daughter a few years ago. I was impressed by the cooperative, project-based learning, but the school had very low test scores. It was as if they eschewed all book learning for building paper mache animals. I ended up getting her into one of the better public schools in the state (last year rated #4 out of 350) and she’s doing great. Despite not teaching to the test, she scored mostly 99th percentile on the national standardized test.
I did really like the project based learning, and I like many of the ideas behind Waldorf (a good friend of mine went 12 yrs) and Montessori. Some balanced combination of these would seem to be ideal.
The public school teachers my daughter has are bright, energetic, and organized. They love the children, and they love teaching. The students, parents, and teachers at the school are all satisfied with it (according to a state-wide poll).
Could it be better? Sure, with good schools and just a little bit of extra teaching by me, my daughter reads and does math a full grade above her level. She’s no genius: it’s the fact that she doesn’t watch TV more than once a week, and doesn’t own a Nintendo. She reads, does word puzzles, swims, does hula, paints, and does all sorts of other stimulating activities. If kids were a full day (8 to 5) in school more days with more teachers, smaller class sizes, and more activities, they would all be there too.
WereBear
The stark fact is that our present school system was originally designed to turn out factory workers. They learned reading and writing, but equally important, they learned to do things by rote, act on the bells that rang, and learned how to not talk back.
Any plans to revamp our school system has to figure out what the heck we need school at all for, when the only jobs are greeting people at Wal-Mart. My niece can do that, and she’s not three yet.
MBL
@Earl Butz:
I can’t imagine how something that prioritizes fast-twitch reflexes like video games or requires no concentration at all like television could possibly be different from a school environment.
There’s probably a way, though.
Adrienne
@Comrade Mary: Wow. I’ve never had my experience summed us as perfectly as this. Your journey is eerily similar. I’m the girl that leaves things half-ass done, cabinets open, bedroom like a cyclone ran through it but can laser beam focus on a book or magazine. My family used to joke that I must’ve came out of the womb reading because they never saw me w/o a book! Lol.
I was recently diagnosed w/ ADHD last year. I found that I was having a difficult time staying on task and being able to manage and *switch* tasks efficiently at work. I went to a psychiatrist and as he’s asking me certain questions, I’m start to realize that I’ve had ADHD my entire life! Like you, I read a lot and I am and always have been recognized as being very intelligent (I’m talking gifted programs and the whole nine) and while I had periods of bad behavior growing up, noone ever suggested I might have ADHD.
I think the issue is that school always came so naturally to me that I never actually had to pay attention in order to learn until college, when I found myself struggling under the workload. In grade school, I was notorious for doodling during lessons instead of taking notes but yet I could always recite the information that I’d heard or read. I’m scatterbrained and forgetful, messy and unable to even wash dishes for more than 15 mins. I constantly start tasks/projects that never get done. I’ll often be very excited to do something, focus like laser on it, obsess about it, make a plans, etc and yet never get it off the ground. It’s crazy.
MBL
@Earl Butz:
I can’t imagine how something that prioritizes fast-twitch reflexes like video games or requires no concentration at all like television could possibly be different from a school environment.
There’s probably a way, though.
eyelessgame
> ADHD is a fictitious epidemic
I will buy that there are behaviors that are misclassified as ADHD. I have a son who is likely on the Aspergers spectrum, who also exhibited some ADHD-like behavior.
For fourth through sixth grade we were essentially homeschooling him, as he stared out the window for hours on end, paying virtually no attention to anything, unable to summon the concentration to learn, unable to focus on the simplest tasks, requiring soul-crushing work from both parents to get him to do, or care about anything.
To our immense good fortune, our children attend a phenomenal school district, and the teachers and principal got on our case enough to get him first counseling, and then medication.
And for the last three years he has been an energetic, engaged, positive, straight-A student, through junior high and now into high school. He is starting to look toward a future in law, as an advocate for the disabled among other concerns.
So I will stipulate there are misdiagnoses out there. And I will forbear from issuing a hearty “fuck you and the horse you rode in on”, because I’m sure you have seen some misdiagnoses, and all I have is my own child’s experience – plus my own life, which is much like Mary’s above.
ADHD may be overdiagnosed today. It was incredibly common a generation ago but nobody knew what the hell it was; we were just “underachievers”.
Hell with it. “Fictitious”? Fuck you.
'Niques
Just to speak to overdiagnosis . . . when my son was three, I brought him to my local Hospital’s residency program for a check-up. After the typical waiting room time spent with a welcome arrangement of toys, then 40 minutes or so in the examination room with nothing but disposable rubber gloves to keep him occupied, we were joined by the new 2nd year resident who was to be his doctor for the next year. My boy was, of course, bored and had begun hopping up and down to expel some energy. Being three. This young doctor, relatively fresh from medical school, took one look at him and asked if I “wanted something for that”. I must have looked confused, so he spelled it out . . . he could prescribe something to calm my son down, if I wanted. This, for a patient he’d not yet examined. I politely refused, but was appalled at the ease with which a parent could turn their child into a medicated zombie at such a young age.
Upper West
@wengler: Thank you Wengler. The whole “Waiting for Superman” crap is just another chapter in the scapegoating of schools and teachers. (I was a teacher and supervisor for 20 years.) It’s always the same — Sputnik, “a Nation at Risk.” — phony crises designed to push one agenda or another. Now it’s for profit
Now we have the demonization of teachers being part of the larger demonization of public employees. Today at my office some colleagues were begrudging public employees pensions, saying why should they get them if the private sector doesn’t? (He even begrudged his father’s being able to retire at 55 with a pension.) Of course, this is upside down — the question is why doesn’t the private sector get pensions anymore? The conventional answer now is that pensions killed, e.g., the auto companies, and we just can’t afford it.
We can afford, however, increasingly regressive taxes, monstrous CEO salaries, wars, etc.
eyelessgame
@arguingwithsignposts: I haven’t been paying enough attention to the bylines. Kain is a libertarian?
Or Peter Gray is, I guess. Well, hell, that explains it. A libertarian who doesn’t understand that not everyone in the world isn’t exactly like him, and that failures to act automatically in enlightened self-interest aren’t necessarily evidence of character flaws better off bred out of the population? I could die from not-surprise.
MBL
See, the problem is that you need to replace “medicated zombie” with “person who is able to act like a human being” if you want your sentence to accurately resemble anything taking place in our schools. There are certainly cases of parents pushing for ADHD diagnoses which may not be warranted and there are certainly cases of kids diagnosed with ADHD who don’t have it.
That happens with the flu, too, I imagine. Doctors screw up sometimes. It happens. Parents pushing for unnecessary diagnoses is a rich white school’s problem and frankly I don’t care about it.
Here’s the thing, though: I can think of a half dozen kids without trying hard where I can tell if they’re on their meds from across a crowded gym, just by their body language and, more often than not, the presence or absence of rage on their faces. Kids who are able to come to school and act like functional goddamned people because of ADHD medication, who without it are basically little more than feral animals.
Strong language? Yeah. Entirely accurate. My first year in my current building one of my students, who I wasn’t even aware was on meds and had always been a pleasant, fun, intelligent kid had his prescription run out. He ran, not walked, into my room and started jumping up and down in a corner. I asked him to sit down. He told me to fuck myself and threw a chair at me.
Eleven fucking years old. ONE DAY off ADHD meds.
Twenty years ago this kid would probably be in jail already, and he sure as everloving hell wouldn’t finish high school. Gripe all you want about overmedicating our kids. The meds give them a chance to have a damn life.
Karen
When I was 4 years old (1969) I was already diagnosed as “hyperkinetic” which was what they called hyperactive kids at that time. You may feel ADD or ADHD is not real. Sorry, it is.
'Niques
@MBL: I tried to edit my previous post, but failed.
Of course this is a legitimate disease, and children correctly diagnosed benefit tremendously from the proper medication. I did not in any way mean to downgrade or obscure that.
At the same time, many “professionals” have relied on that diagnosis, and the subsequent meds, to make life easier for the mother, teacher, principal . . . not to mention the pharmaceutical push to get their meds on the street.
Each case needs to be determined on its own merit. That is, I think, where society falls short.
And yes, of course the teacher who is with the child for several hours a day is better equipped to see a problem and encourage treatment.
Arclite
@Comrade Mary:
Thanks for describing my life (and my mother’s and my daughter’s).
My daughter too, reads to the detriment of all of the things she is supposed to be doing. Only in 3rd grade, yet she reads several hundred pages of novels per day. It’s like pulling teeth to get her to do her homework. What should take 10m takes an hour or two.
Yes, and it is defintely not laziness or a desire to be messy. It is not because I enjoy the smell of mildew that I have left my laundry in the washer for 3 days dozens of times in my life. Or leave the knife on the edge of the counter dozens of times where my 3-yr-old can get it despite my wife yelling at me each time. Or misplaced my keys in the strangest of places hundreds of times.
“Well, you just have to remember” I am told. Yeah, right.
“You just need a list” I am told. As if I can remember to check it or even where I put it.
Thank God I work at a computer. When I forget something, I just alt-tab and there it is.
Arclite
@Mnemosyne:
I had no idea until a few years ago. My wife went to a seminar and the speaker said, “Your children might have ADHD if they do W, X, Y, Z.” She thought, OMG, my husband does all those things. I was glad I found out. It was a revelation to know I wasn’t alone and there was actually diagnosis and study of how I operated.
Arclite
@ornery curmudgeon:
Article on TV’s effect on the developing brain:
http://www.brainy-child.com/article/tvonbrain.shtml
Arclite
@Adrienne:
Ah, my twin! We must have been separated at birth.
It’s surprising how many ADHDers are coming out of the wood work. I suspect we’re political junkies b/c of ADHD in part. It’s so stimulating!
mclaren
“Standardized tests…unthinking conformity and mind-numbing medication” represent the future of the American electorate. In fact, if you removed all those things, commenters like Mnemosyne would disappear in a puff of psychopathology.
America now languishes under effective martial law in a garrison state, so unthinking conformity and mind-numbing medication are absolutely necessary to keep the population docile and willing to submit to the usual random pat-downs and “papers, please” warrantless searches. Constant loyalty tests (AKA standardized) tests complete the picture. GO AMERICA! NUMBER 1! BRAWNDO — IT’S WHAT COMMENTERS CRAVE!
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
Yawn. That’s all you’ve got tonight? You’re slipping, mclaren. I was expecting at least 2000 words from you on how mental illness is all bullshit and all you wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi, and we wouldn’t give it to you.
I give your comment a C-.
joe from Lowell
@Mnemosyne: Srsly. This.
I see these kids who cannot pay attention all the way through a sentence. They try hard, and they can’t not look away before they get to the end of reading or hearing one sentence.
No, it’s not that their i-phone is interesting.
Stuck in the Funhouse
@Mnemosyne:
That’s what all the sociopaths say. My guess is you will get your 2000 word opus from crazy little fingers that are busy typing as we speak.
Martin
@Earl Butz: Fuck your anti-science attitude. We don’t do that shit.
My son has ADD. Whatever grabs his attention keeps his attention. If he’s in his room reading a book, he’ll read it until he finishes. He’ll miss meals. He’ll miss practice. He’ll miss his chores. The book has his attention. If he’s reading a book and the TV grabs his attention (because that’s what it’s designed to do), then the TV has his attention and it will keep his attention until something else comes along and grabs it from him.
His problem is that he gets so thoroughly focused on something, that he can’t easily trigger it off. In school they’re doing math and then they go to switch to english, and he’s still doing math and he can’t get off of math. He’s a great student, but it’s incredibly disruptive to the class. And it’s disruptive to him – he doesn’t want to be the kid that the teacher has to stop and knock back on task. He doesn’t want to forget about his chores. It was so bad he became clinically depressed.
But, we put him on antidepressants and on Ritalin. After a while, he was off the antidepressants because the Ritalin was working so well. His grandparents only see him every few months but they remark that he’s a totally different kid.
He wasn’t lazy. He’d sit down with a book and read it through without a break. He’s read everything in the house. He’d start a project and 9 hours later still be working on it. He just didn’t have those little bells going off in his head telling him to *stop* doing those things, and well, eat, or what have you.
So, take your armchair ‘bunch of lazy whippersnapper’ bullshit and shove it up your ass, okay?
Martin
I’d like ED to front page the topic of education reform again soon. It’s a good topic, but don’t derail the potential for discussion in the first paragraph next time. There are a lot of educators here and the structure of education deserves a good once-over here.
Logan
@Mnemosyne:
We currently have our children at a Montessori School and love it, but they still do need some chemical assistance in getting their work done at that school. Granted, these children were 25 week preemies so some of their issues stem from their first couple of months, but they are getting much better at understanding what they need to do.
I hope we can lower the dosage as they get into UE in two years (4-6th grade for non Montessori). They both tested at 95+% in ADD and 97% in IQ so it’s a matter of figuring out how to get them to access their skills.
300baud
@daveNYC:
Yes, exactly.
As analogy, suppose doctors were vigorously treating people for Melanin Deficiency Syndrome. Symptoms included short-term tendency to red, painful skin after sun exposure and long-term tendency to sometimes-fatal skin cancer. With daily treatment, symptoms go away, and companies in the industry are coming up with better (and of course, more expensive) treatments all the time. Is MDS a real disease?
My answer: no. There is a range of skin colorations. Some people are white; some are very white. That trait was adaptive when evolved. In today’s unnatural lifestyle, and with the particular expectations we have circa 2010, the trait is no longer adaptive. But that does not mean that MDS is a disease. Calling it one medicalizes a genetics/environment mismatch and is sloppy science. And that’s true even though there are actual disorders, like albinism, that have similar symptoms.
I believe that ADHD is basically the same thing. And I say that as somebody who has been diagnosed with it and tried pretty much all of the treatments.
SatanicPanic
When this society stops hating learning and starts valuing facts, it will be possible to educate our children.
300baud
@Earl Butz:
That would be true if you could learn all you needed to know about just by reading the name and letting your imagination run wild.
As Hallowell, a prominent ADHD expert, says in one of his books, a better term would be “Attention Inconstancy Disorder”. Laser-like focus is a characteristic part of what people call ADHD.
That it isn’t a medical disorder doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. As pretty much any book on the topic will tell you, it is not a lack of moral fiber.
Karen
@Martin:
What you describe about your son is me! Exactly me! That is so eerie….
Xenos
@Martin: Thanks for that comment – describes one of my sons to a ‘t’. He couldn’t handle transitions, and would sit in the hallway and cry when his class would spend 30 minutes on a subject then get up and march off to gym, or to music class.
At the point he was taking off his shoes and running out the door into the snow, in first grade, because he could not handle the stress, we knew we had a problem. A light dose of stimulants, and a lot of work from us and the school, turned it around. Otherwise, he might have ended up like my uncle, who was cycled through seven prep schools, or my father-in-law, who was expelled from school permanently in grade three.
dcdl
@wengler: That’s what I feel about the smaller class sizes and better paid teachers. I would also suggest all year school. My children are in elementary school and I find that for the first month or so after summer break it’s all review from last year.
I’m also finding that in one aspect of school good teachers do matter. I have twin boys and each are in a different class, but same grade. This year one has an involved teacher and the other has a uninvolved teacher and I’m seeing the differences.
Mnemosyne
@300baud:
Okay. I am calmer now than I was this morning, so now I will politely ask: can you please define what you mean when you use the term “medical disorder”? I think you’re using a definition that the rest of us don’t recognize.
E.D. Kain
@Mnemosyne: I said (quoted, really, from the video) that ADHD is a fictitious epidemic. I know very well and from firsthand experience that it exists. But it’s much, much rarer than many people think, and we overprescribe for it.
300baud
@Comrade Mary:
I absolutely agree there’s something happening here. I just don’t believe it’s a disease.
Consider, for example, morning people and night owls. The difference is real. It’s biologically based. It includes measurable differences in brain chemistry. Many strong night owls feel that it has a substantial negative impact on their lives. Is that a disease?
I say no, and if doctors or pharmaceutical companies claimed it was, and even had a good treatment, it still wouldn’t be a disease. We would have medicalized normal human variation because it was inconvenient in our current constructed environment in light of particular cultural expectations we have. As, I say, we do with ADHD.
Whether we want to use drugs to force people into conformance with the demands of modern society is an interesting question. But just because many people need coffee to survive an office job doesn’t mean that X% of people have Caffeine Deficiency Syndrome, or Boredom Surplus Disorder.
Mnemosyne
@E.D. Kain:
Here’s my anecdata for you:
As I mentioned, my nephew is severely ADHD, and has been diagnosed that way. If you look at his father, it’s pretty clear that he’s also severely ADHD, but he’s never been diagnosed. He’s also lower-class and African-American and has spent his entire adult life in and out of jail.
ADHD is overdiagnosed in middle- and upper-class white kids. It’s severely underdiagnosed in minority communities. If you’re a middle- or upper-class white kid, you’ll get doctors and psychiatrists and all kinds of help in school. If you’re a lower-class kid, you’ll get juvenile detention and jail.
That’s my problem with the whole “it’s overdiagnosed” meme. It’s only overdiagnosed in a specific population, while another big chunk of the population that desperately needs help gets ignored.
300baud
@Mnemosyne:
Thanks for saying so.
By medical disorder, I mean a biological difference (in this case a congenital, possibly genetic one) from “normal” that creates physiological or behavioral differences that are purely maladaptive in both prehistoric and modern environments.
E.g., measles and Down syndrome are medical disorders. I think ADHD isn’t, and upthread I’ve used circa 5 different examples to explain why. If none of them work for you, let me know specifically why and I’ll see what I can do.
Part of the problem people are having with what I’m saying is that they’re using a binary model: perfectly normal/generic human or person with a medical disorder. I’m saying there are other categories of thing in the world. When you’re looking at a platypus, asking the question “Is it a mammal or is it a reptile?” does not help the situation.
For an actual doctor’s take on part of this philosophical issue, search Google for “last psychiatrist organophosphate adhd”. Whenever I try including the link my post gets eaten, but it’s a fantastic piece of writing.
Norwegian Shooter
@Jon H:
Well said! Onto education.
“stagnated traditional public schools” really? Did you know that public schools are better educating 9 and 13-year olds and holding steady for 17-year olds? And that racial gaps are decreasing? No? Then you don’t read The Daily Howler and you’ve never looked at NAEP data.
“the wisdom of the unschooling movement” and “the sensibility of the one-room-schoolhouse” Wow, you are an idiot. “I’m really not sure.” Well, knowing is half the battle.
Norwegian Shooter
@Mnemosyne: I’m with you all the way!
@E.D. Kain: any epidemiology studies that agree that you can point me too?
Comrade Mary
@300baud: There’s normal human variance, and then there’s being sufficiently out of step with your friends and family and reasonable, minimal demands of daily life that achieving more than the bare minimum required to keep you alive is a genuine struggle. I’m not trying to live the kind of high-consuming, high maintenance, highly social suburban life my sister is living. I just want to be able to live in a city, rebuild and maintain friendships, work in my chosen fields (I’m a freelancer who works mostly at home), keep a reasonably clean home, and have enough time and energy left over to focus on my art again, which has been lost in the vortex of chaos that has been my life for the past 25 years. Achieving that doesn’t feel like being forced to conform to the demands of modern society: in fact, I think I’d have fared pretty badly in all sorts of rural, hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies, too. I can’t go Galt from my own brain, because no matter where I go, there it is.
We don’t have a single, well-defined cause for ADHD, and there’s a range of treatment (including but not restricted to specific drugs) that seems to work well for some people but not others. But what is the one single cause of depression and schizophrenia? Why do some drugs work for some depressives and not others? If there’s not a clean-cut etiology and treatment that works for almost all sufferers, the way that, say, quinine worked for malaria, how much of what we consider mental illness would survive the cut? Walk along that line long enough and you turn into Thomas Szasz.
Mnemosyne
@300baud:
Okay. First of all, you need to work on your metaphor, because measles is an outside pathogen, and Down syndrome is not. It would work better if you used, say, Down syndrome and club foot since those are both natural birth defects not caused by an outside pathogen and they’re both clearly maladaptive — no one has ever found a “good” reason for club foot.
Also, by your definition, sickle cell anemia is not a disease, because it was adaptive in prehistoric and some modern environments — it prevents malaria. It was only once people were removed from that environment that it became maladaptive and deadly.
Okay, but “not a medical disorder” doesn’t get that across, because it makes it sound like you think it doesn’t really exist. “Not a disease” would help, though I’m assuming you’ve already tried and discarded that word.
I would put ADHD in the same category as the autism spectrum disorders: not something that was terribly helpful at any point during our evolution, but also not something so harmful that it would vanish from the species. I think a lot of people with ADHD (probably most) would benefit by having doctors and teachers focus more on self-care and adapting the environment around you than on medication. As the author of the book on ADHD I’m reading right now keeps saying, “Pills don’t teach skills.” Medication can be a useful tool, but leaving it at that is like handing someone a hammer and telling them to fix the kitchen sink.
Xenos
@Mnemosyne:
There has been some interesting (but unscientific) speculation by folks like Thom Hartmann that ADHD, or at least ADD, was useful for individuals relying on hunting to survive. Anything that smells so strongly of evolutionary ‘just so’ stories are pretty suspect, of course, but it can be a useful narrative for explaining to one’s 11 year old that maybe society is more maladaptive than he is.
In the case of my father-in-law, raised in a deeply rural area of a small country under Nazi occupation, being thrown out of school at age 9 meant he was given a flock of sheep and sent off into the hills for a few years. For my uncle, whose father owned a couple factories that supplied wire to the war effort, when he was nine he misbehaved so badly that his third grade teacher quit rather than face him each day. One individual remains a farmer, the other went through the half-dozen prep schools, still went to Yale, and proceeded to have a successful career as a lawyer. So you could say class is pretty determinative of likely outcomes.
Socratic_me
I was following along through the Peter Gray articles with some interest and an open mind and then I hit that third article, which is an unmitigated POS. He tries to pass the whole thing off as an interesting “study” he did, but all it really says is “Look, my readers agree with me!” It is utterly unscientific and painfully surface level and, in the end, just made me go back and question everything else he had said.
300baud
@Comrade Mary:
Hey, as I’ve said several times in this thread, I have been diagnosed with ADHD, as has half my family. I get it. And as I said in my first post, nobody’s trying to deny anybody’s pain.
I also get that you think you wouldn’t do well in hunter-gatherer societies. I disagree in part, but also think your definition of “do well” is not necessarily the same one that a field biologist would use. As Grey and seven zillion other people point out, there are contexts even in modern society where ADHD is a net advantage. It’s therefore not a stretch to say that it could well have been a reproductive advantage in certain contexts, especially if it’s only part of the population that has it. It’s not like ADHD is pure downside; in one of Hallowell’s books (Driven to Distraction?) he’s gets almost poetic about the many positive characteristics he sees in his patients.
300baud
@Mnemosyne:
You seem to be looking for reasons to disagree with me, rather than trying to understand what I’m saying. I don’t know why that is, but I don’t see much benefit to either of us in continuing.
For the record, yes, I am aware of many fourth-grade science facts, including that measles is caused by a virus. It’s still a biological difference from “normal” that is purely negative and therefore fits my definition, which is not a metaphor for anything except itself. Also for the record, I too have read books on ADHD, and quite literally have a shelf of them.
Xenos
@300baud: The same standard you maintain here would apply to most psychiatric disorders. The bipolar person today would have made a great shaman 100,000 years ago… Of course, in our modern economy, a disorder is pretty much a marketing definition that arises once a marketable medicine or therapy is developed to deal with it. That does not make it completely invalid, especially when we still are struggling to understand the variations in neural conditions and to distinguish effective therapies.
The social world is as real as the physical world, even if humans create it, and children need whatever tools we can bring to bear to help them adapt to it.
jcg
@wengler: Exactly. There are 2 issues: Where and how is our money being spent in the current privitization model mandated in RttT? and Why are reforms not empirically sound being advocated by the privitizers and Arne Duncan? Why not invest this money directly into public schools?
The following links might answer that question:
http://www.stickwithanose.com/2010/04/08/and-the-public-looting-continues/
http://www.stickwithanose.com/2010/01/24/that-giant-sucking-sound/
http://www.stickwithanose.com/2010/02/17/charters-real-estate-speculation/
Unions, bad teachers, saving kids are red herrings. A smokescreen for corporate looters. It’s shameful they exploit poor kids and parents to feed their naked greed.
Teachers have wanted reforms for years but ever since Reganomics and his anti-tax screed, schools have been starved of resources. Reforms that are supported by teachers unions and empirical evidence (e.g. small classes,social services, in school health clinics, flexible planning time, broadened curriculum, up to date materials and technology, and greater influence over curriculum) cost money. Education should NOT be a for profit business.
Russell
@artem1s: I agree 100%. When schools have to cut out all field trips but the football, baseball and basketball teams can still make every ballgame, sometimes multiple times a week something is wrong. As a teacher, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard a parent say “I don’t know why they need an education, I don’t have a diploma and I’m making it” or “it was good enough for me it’s good enough for them.” It’s time that sports become an after school program and good old fashion PE becomes a class and that math, science, and reading become the focus.
YellowJournalism
@Martin: I want to echo Martin’s request. This is a serious issue that is being affected directly by the election, the past eight years under Bush, and the last years under Obama. There is a major backlash against the Obama administration from teachers and teachers’ unions because of programs like Race to the Top and the way Arne Duncan seems to favor the charter school model for the public school system. I would love to see one of the front pagers give this a go without the ADHD derailment.
eir
I understand that many people find it annoying to hear about the new syndrome du jour, and that such syndromes are usually named when a pharmaceutical treatment becomes available.
However, two points:
1) We had an entire lecture in med school about how simply “naming” a medical problem provides some relief to patients, probably because they now have some ammunition with which to rebut scornful comments about vague symptoms being “all in their head” or to just “stop whining.” A non-patient’s irritation with new syndromes does not trump an improvement in a patient’s quality of life, IMHO.
2) Great, you might say, but why medicate the syndrome you consider fictitious? It’s true that there is a range of human variation in things like sleep schedule, activity level, and mood, and we define some part of that range to be “normal.” That said, again, why would you be against improving the quality of life of someone in the disadvantageous, but nominally normal part of that range? If, for instance, someone were a natural night owl but could take a drug to make it possible/easier for her to shift her sleep schedule, would it be wrong for her to do so? What if it meant the difference between a career as a surgeon (major early rising) and a bartender (possibility of waking up at noon)? Similar situations arise with ADHD; as previous commenters have noted, it can mean the difference between having a productive career and being a high school dropout, which is pretty much a ticket to poverty in modern society. Or, worse, and again as others have pointed out, for already-disadvantaged populations, medication can mean the difference between a career and imprisonment.
I’m not a psychiatrist, and I’m a firm believer in trying non-pharmaceutical/non-surgical treatment options first. However, certain commenters should really consider the dramatic impact that non-diagnosis can have upon a person’s life.
Mnemosyne
@300baud:
I’m pointing out that you’re putting things in what seems to be deliberately inflammatory language and then getting defensive when people respond to that. If you did not use those inflammatory words, people wouldn’t get upset with you right off the bat and there could be an actual discussion.
But if you’d rather go around pissing people off, that’s your business. Just be clear with yourself that that’s what you’re doing and that you will get a bad reaction from people.
And I’m sorry, but comparing ADHD to measles is just plain stupid. Outside pathogen =/= genetic disorder.
JoeK
Haven’t read the thread, but on the topic of bringing un-schooling sensibilities into public schooling:
I think it would be a great thing if the democratic principles embodied in the Sudbury/Summerhill model http://www.sudval.org http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk were to be at least possible to deploy in US public schools. Read some of the student accounts at sudval.org. You’d think that a school that literally is run democratically by the students would lead to a Lord of the Flies scenario in short order, but no. Kids seem to be just as good as adults when entrusted with serious responsibilities, as long as they know they’re trusted and expected to act accordingly. What you end up with are people who are good at deciding what they want to do with their time and brains (rather than being led around by the nose intellectually), and who become very effective agents in a democratic setting. This works much much better when kids are raised in the school’s democratic culture from an early age, but even teenagers coming from public schools have succeeded on occasion in these schools. No doubt there are downsides, but the Sudury model avoids what I consider to be the single greatest failing of US public schools: the fact that they actively destroy childrens’ curiosity and thirst for knowledge and understanding.
Happy weekend, everyone.
Christopher Carr
I think it’s important to remember as we move in the direction of more school choice that not everyone can be Leonardo da Vinci, and with more creativity-focused education, many more otherwise clever and capable people will fail trying to do something spectacular instead of being moderately successful at something ordinary.
Perhaps the Amish have the right idea: everyone should at least learn a trade.
300baud
@Xenos:
Agreed. I’m all in favor of helping children. And adults, really. I just don’t think the we should try to cram every natural human variation from “normal” into the disease model.
Don’t get me wrong, the disease model has been great. It’s made our lives almost incomprehensibly better. But to take the next leap, we need other models. Partly because it’s being abused, as with medicalizing kids who aren’t well suited to the industrial model of education when they become inconvenient to teachers. And partly because there’s only so much it can do.
In my view, ADHD meds like Ritalin aren’t treatments for a disease. They’re performance-enhancing drugs to help people do better in our particular modern environment. (And I say that having tried pretty much every ADHD med out there.) That may be fine, but it’s not until you take it out of the disease model that other options become apparent, like changing the environment, or changing our expectations, or changing our notion of “normal” and appreciating that people can be usefully different.
300baud
@eir:
I agree with almost everything you said, but want you to take it further.
I disagree that just naming something as a disease is a good idea just because it makes people feel better. If we want people to have imaginary reasons to explain things and feel better, we already have astrology; distorting medical science and medical practice is excessive and will have side effects.
But I do agree that we should help people to succeed and excel, and as I mention just above, it’s plausible to me that performance-enhancing drugs are part of that. If we want to do that, fine; we just shouldn’t medicalize it.
Basically, I’m saying if a scrawny kid really wants to play varsity football, we shouldn’t just pretend he has Androgenesis Deficiency Disorder and give him a steroid script, no matter how much his parents and his coach want the doctor to “do something”. Maybe he should take drugs and maybe he shouldn’t, but saying he has a disease is pretense and a distraction. If we face the truth and discuss it honestly, that doesn’t reduce our power to help people lead better lives; it increases it.
E.D. Kain
@Mnemosyne: Hey – I believe that, actually.