In the old days (i.e. the days before mandatory public schooling), a person with high levels of energy (now called hyperactivity) was able to channel that energy into success at farming, ranching, business, whatever enterprise he or she was interested in. It is only because of the institutional setting of the public school system that we now feel that something must be wrong with these high-energy children, something that needs to be medicated and squashed. It is no wonder that these children often become discipline problems, and, later on in life, some become criminals and drug addicts. It is not the children who need to be fixed; it is the system that needs fixing. At no other time in a person’s life is he or she required to sit still and be quiet for six or seven hours a day. Some careers may require it, but people are not forced into those careers, and usually, high-energy people will not choose those careers. We are wasting the potential of these young people by stifling them and trying to eliminate their high-energy, making them into angry, self-loathing adults who think they are flawed. Instead, we should be channeling all this energy in creative and productive ways so they grow into energetic adults with a thirst for success. This is nearly impossible in the current system of education.
According to the National Institutes of Health, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects only 3-5% of the population, yet nearly half of school-age boys in this country are now diagnosed with the disorder and prescribed psychoactive drugs to make them more manageable in a classroom setting. As Peg Tyre, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, says in her book The Trouble With Boys,
“That such large numbers of boys are being diagnosed with a central nervous system disorder suggests two things: Either we are witnessing the largest pandemic in our country since influenza struck the United States in 1918, or school-age boys are being overidentified and overdiagnosed.”
In The Myth of the Hyperactive Child, Peter Schrag and Diane Divoky contend that
“[a] small percentage of those children [taking amphetamine-type drugs and other psychostimulants] suffer from some diagnosable medical ailment sufficiently serious to warrant chemotherapy. Most do not; they are being drugged at the insistence of schools or individual teachers, to make them more manageable.”
Even as early as in 1862, Leo Tolstoy realized that
“[c]hildren’s conversation, motion, and merriment [in school] … are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons, questions, conversation, and motion are prohibited.”
Many so-called hyperactive students are also highly intelligent and get bored with the slower paced learning of the “normal” students. They need to move ahead, be challenged, to work at their own pace. Many hyperactive students have one or more learning disabilities (which are not an indication of intelligence) that cause them to lag behind in one or more subjects. The snowball effect of missing vital building blocks in those subjects cause self esteem problems that, in turn, cause the student to give up on learning and on themselves.
In effect, what the system is doing is trying to make all children, with all their ranges of human behavior, fit into a narrow definition of what is “normal” and desirable for the institution of public school. Figuratively, they are changing the various shapes of children, which may include ovals, squares, triangles, and even polyhedrons, to fit into a perfectly round slot. In order to do this, the system must resort to subjecting children to behavior modification and drugs. Instead of changing the shape of the system, the system chooses to modify the shape of millions of children, with little or no thought to the long-term effects of these strategies on the children they are forced upon. According to Schrag and Divoky,
“millions of children are no longer regarded as part of the ordinary spectrum of human personality and intelligence—children who are quieter or brighter than the average, children who are jumpy, children who are slow—but as people who are qualitatively different from the ‘normal’ population, individuals who, as a consequence of ‘minimal brain dysfunction,’ ‘hyperactivity,’ or ‘functional behavior disorders,’ constitute a distinct and separate group.”
Our school system needs to be a system that provides a flexible opening (as opposed to a perfectly round one), which can change to accommodate the shape of each student without having to modify the student with drugs or psychotherapy; where students can work at their own pace in each subject, never having to worry about where the rest of the class is; where teachers can modify and personalize the lessons to teach to the learning abilities and disabilities of a student and give one-on-one attention when needed; where students can excel in the areas they are naturally good in, giving them a shot of well-earned self esteem, while getting the help they need to succeed in the other subjects as well; where high energy can be encouraged and nurtured through alternative methods of learning instead of being suppressed.
To read more from Stop Beating the Dead Horse, visit www.stopbeatingthedeadhorse.com.
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