In writing this post over at the Commentator site earlier today, I got to thinking about how similar the ADHD diagnosis is to what we used to call “childhood”. And, frankly, I’m a little disturbed by it.
Now, this should be construed as some rant against mental health professionals or the like; I was helped immensely a few years back by therapy and an SSRI (Celexa, all fine but the dreams). However, I do think that ADD and ADHD are severely over diagnosed. It seems to be that any kid who doesn’t sit quietly, do the class activities, and do whatever the tall person at the front of the class asks is diagnosed as “hyper active” and put on pills. Sure, some kids really cannot function, period, without medication but I bet a lot more could do fine without it.
I’d like to offer an alternate hypothesis, one that might go a little way toward explaining this massive surge of “hyperactivity”. First of all, most of school is boring. Really boring. Bored kids find ways to entertain themselves, and some kids are going to find the mindless horror that is primary and secondary education more boring than others. This is particularly true of kids who are advanced beyond their peers in things like reading, math, critical thinking, and science. If your parents read to you and all that, like teachers in particular are always saying to do, you’re long past the Dick-and-Jane claptrap by the time you’re in elementary school. What’s more, if you’re even slightly precocious you’ll be reading on a “college level” (whatever that means) around fourth grade, so it’s not like Hardy Boys books are really goign to stimulate your little mind very much. Here’s the thing: it isn’t a kid’s fault if he/she is bored in class, that’s the teacher’s fault.
And it’s pretty easy to see why that happens. When was the last time you saw a national initiative to help smart kids stay interested in school? When? The last national programs on education I can recall are No Child Left Behind and HeadStart. Neither of which really seem to be doing all that much. Having grown up in Oregon, we had that horrid CIM/CAM thing, which was designed to make sure that all kids were meeting certain minimum standards (fortunately I graduated just before it was fully implemented, the class of 2000 being the test class, which should’ve shown them it was a terrible idea). Nothing, absolutely nothing, is being done for smart kids. Everybody figures they’ll get by on their own.
I can tell you exactly why my scholastic performance up through Junior High* was mediocre: it was all boring, and I knew most of it already. How? Am I some sort of wunderkind? No, but I did have the good fortune of family and family friends who taught me all sorts of things before I reached school. How to read, how to diagam a sentence, basic copy editing, a short course on US History, math up through basic algebra: I picked these things up simply by growing up around the people I did. Putting me in an environment where I was expected to read McGraw-Hill primers didn’t exactly challenge me. They didn’t introduce fractions until I was in 4th grade, and I was a year ahead in math. The first time I had an assignment in school that was interesting was 6th grade**, the first time I had one that was intellectually challenging was 8th***.
Oregon did have the Talented And Gifted (TAG) program for “smart” kids, but it was laughable. Often I was pulled out of math and science classes, the only things even sort of interesting in an otherwise boring day, so that I could draw pictures; build towers out of newspaper; or solve brain teasers with a few of my classmates. This accomplished two things: 1) made me even more bored in school, as the only things I was usually present for were bloody “art appreciation”****, etc and 2) further social stigmatization attached with being nerdy. The latter, well, whatever, that’s how kids are and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it so meh. The former, to this day, makes me incredibly angry to think about. What did I learn from any of that? That art is boring (especially when some guy’s mom is reading off museum cards to slides of 13th-century oils), and that there wasn’t a point in even trying to learn anything in school because it simply wasn’t there to learn. Not exactly what my primary educators were going for, I’d guess. And I’m not special, there are literally millions of individuals of similar intelligence to mine. The “highly gifted” category or above that comprises ~.7% of the population as a whole is 2.1 million folks in the US alone (on balance, usual statistical qualifiers).
Understandably the required curricula of public schools aim to satisfy the average child, and I’m sure that many an average child has been perfectly well educated by the public school system, the problem is once you get more than one standard deviation from the mean, especially on the upper end. The reasons that the smarter kids are largely ignored are many, but I think the two biggest is that they comprise such a small percentage of the population relative to the kids who’re about average, and the general perception that they’ll do fine on their own and not need any extra attention. There isn’t a one-size answer for this. We’ve developed an almost fetishistic urge to make sure that below average kids “get the help they need”, while at the same time devoting fewer and fewer resources to help exceptional kids stay interested and ahead. Often these are conflicting goals, but they needn’t be.
The solution is a combination of school choice and local curriculum selection. National, and to a lesser extent State, curricula beyond the basics such as reading and arithmetic impose a one-size model on all kids. Clearly, this fails all too often. If municipalities had more control over their programs, they could select options that benefited the distribution of students in their areas most. But that’s only part of the solution.
Current districting schemes, with children assigned to school largely by geographical area, do nothing to put kids into the best academic environment. Were parents allowed to choose any school in the district for their children, schools could specialize in one sort of student: below average kids, the average, the gifted, or any combination that might pop up. Oddly, this is an idea Milton Friedman has been putting forward since 1962. Granted, Friedman’s reasons for proposing school choice are different, but the principle is the same. Ideally, beyond setting very basic requirements and giving parents vouchers, the government would get out of the school business all together. Maybe then everbody could have a decent primary and secondary educational experience.
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* By High School one is responsible for one’s own academic performance. My mediocre performance there was simply a refusal to work at things I thought were boring. Pretty much the same deal in College, but plus the OC and a booze habit.
** Some sort of project that involved building an island out of salt dough and doing some stuff related to being stranded on it.
*** Having to do an in-depth research project on one important battle from the Civil War, including reconstructing it tactically on a map of the battle field. Yes, you had to make the map yourself. I got an A.
**** Fuck this bullshit, seriously.
