The Schools Are Pathological, Not The Kids

I read this article today, and it claims that 1 in 10 boys at age 10 are taking prescription meds for ADHD.  I was appalled, and yet sadly unsurprised.  My opinion might not be popular, but I do not believe that many children have a disorder, any disorder so severe that they need to be drugged.  Of course, doctors who want financial kickbacks from the drugs they shove on everyone and teachers who want obedient little zombies will tell you that the drugs will bring out the best in your child and make your and your child's life better. 

Photo credit: stoptherobbery.com

Now, I get that some people do have focus problems, and among them there is a subset who struggle so severely that they do, for a period of time or in certain circumstances, require intervention.  Drugs, though, should be an absolute last resort after all other options have been completely exhausted - and I'm not just talking about the patience of parents and teachers, which I believe is frequently the case.

I'm not necessarily blaming the parents and teachers; the Every Kid Gets a Trophy generation is grown up, and things have only gotten worse as they start having children of their own.  Generation Y has been raised on Ritalin and happy pills, while the real problems that exist in families and classrooms are not properly addressed.  Unhappy?  Here's a pill, because you must have depression.  Stressed out?  Here's another pill, because you must have anxiety disorder.  Having trouble concentrating in school?  Obviously you have ADHD, because there's no way it has anything to do with the mundane, repetitive, unfulfilling experience you shuffle through day in and day out with little to no reward for your efforts beyond what all those standardized tests say.

The larger problem is the structure of our society, particularly traditional education and the increasing demands on children with the concurrent deterioration of the real work of childhood, namely play.  Children need free time to grow and develop, but when are they getting it?  Childhood has been pathologized like a disease, while at the same time, schools are removing recess, shortening lunch and free periods, and burdening kids with huge homework loads so that they have no free time to develop who they are as people.  I guarantee that more free time, play time, recess time, and/or physical activity would do a child far more good than any prescription drug.  Big Pharma would disagree, as would the people who want that child's time to be their own.  I guess it works for the system, doesn't it?  Make sure kids' time is always accounted for, keep pouring information that they care little or nothing about into their heads like empty containers, structure their lives to the point they have no say or will, and medicate them into submission when they appear restless, frustrated, bored (termed ADHD, oppositional/defiant, and autistic by allopaths and drug companies).

Parents largely turn to doctors and drugs to help them with their children because the direction of our society.  When I grew up, my dad worked and my mother stayed at home.  Mother was a fast food junkie, but when she wanted to cook and we sat down for family dinners, it was great.  It was close and I felt like part of a family.  The painful regimentation of children's schedules, testing for the sake of scores to bring money into school districts, the degeneration of the family unit, the mountains of homework which effectively obliterates any potential family time and adds stress to the household, the epidemic of bullying, not to even mention the poison in our food, courtesy of Monsanto, are all contributing factors to the problems our children (as a societal whole) face today.

Even as a child, I realized the flaws in education.  Of course, at the time, I was simply a child who was annoyed with school and early mornings.  People do not generally listen to children.  That, in my opinion, is a mistake.  To maintain my sanity, I would ask multiple times per day to go to the restroom because I was so painfully bored in class.  The days were, in my opinion, far too long.  It felt wrong, and I often compared it to a 13-year prison sentence, having to be forced out of bed, day after day, into a place I didn't want to be with my perfectly age-matched peers.  Why were children treated so poorly, I wondered.  I used to look around at my classmates, wondering how they managed to sit there, still and at least feigning the appearance of attention, for that duration.  That was not how I learned.  I suspect, if I were that child in school now, people would recommend Ritalin or some mind-numbing drug to shove me into submission.  I was simply bored, and I don't comprehend how people can't grasp the concept that many children probably are.  That's not a disorder; it's the way the education system is set up that is pathological.

I consider traditional public schools to be brainwashing centers and prisons for children which slowly but surely detach them from their families and drain their will, individuality, and curiosity from them.  Education is not about learning, it's about test scores and money.  Children are miserable, then they get drugged, and then a portion of them do crazy things and people wonder why.  Healthcare has become sick care, where doctors no longer treat the disease, but prescribe pills to mask symptoms and to deal with normal feelings and emotions.  Childhood has become a disease with a number of diagnoses.  People are no longer eccentric, daydreamers, creative, or strong-willed; now they are autistic, ADHD, defiant, and need to be medicated.

The public education system needs serious overhauling.  Will it actually happen?  Not soon enough, if ever.  The trajectory doesn't look good, and I have little hope.

This is why I homeschool.

Recommended reading: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto, Thomas Moore

State Testing: An Education Super Fail

It's 4:16 AM.  Instead of sleeping, I'm here drinking coffee and blogging.  Why?  Because today was absolute utter hell in my home, and my daughter just got to sleep about two hours ago.  I'm still running on pure adrenaline and righteous anger.

Let me back up a bit.

Last year, I began homeschooling my children.  The reasons are many, but it mostly comes down to my belief that education is not one size fits all.  My children are both diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders, and my son additionally has a diagnosis of expressive/receptive speech disorder.  Both of them also have sensory processing disorder.  Mostly, in everyday life, this means little.  They have coping skills, they are really great kids, and they deal with the things that pose challenges like a couple of champs.  We realize, though, that it is having the freedom to be who they are in a supportive and loving environment which allows them to really shine like they do.  A public bricks and mortar school was not that environment.

K12 seemed to be a perfect fit for us.  I loved the curriculum.  Yes, I am using past tense words here, because I am beginning to realize that K12 is susceptible to the very same pitfalls, in terms of actual education, that any other public school suffers.  Perhaps it hit me extra hard this year because the language arts curriculum reading materials were severely slashed in terms of quantity, while at the same time we received a pile of test preparation materials which seemed more than a bit over the top.  The only reason I can think of to remove so much of the reading materials is that kids struggled with the amount of it, and spending additional time working through it would mean less time spent on test preparedness.  It also affects the kids' grades, and thus the school's reputation.  Now, I'm not blaming K12 for this at all; the state regulates their schools just like any other public school.  If anything, I think K12 is fucntioning exceptionally well given the circumstances and all of the red tape.

I wondered to myself, what would a curriculum look like if the schools were not being judged and the children were not being dragged through this nightmare known as state testing?

Today, I sat beside my daughter as she worked through a math Scantron assessment, her eyes welling up with tears, shaking with frustration, rocking back and forth.  She is good at math, but she hates it.  Her mind is definitely geared more toward right-brain activities than the logic-based, left-brain activities involved in math.  She hates math that is typical for her grade level, but this is the type of problem she had to work on:

Forgive me, since it's been quite some time since this was first introduced to me, but isn't this something you'd expect 7th-9th grade students to be working on?  I know a lot of adults who would struggle with this.  I almost wonder if they gave her the wrong assessment or something, because the problems were almost all at this level of difficulty and this was complete and utter torture for a 3rd grade child who detests math to begin with.

I have no idea what is in store on the actual state testing, but if it's anything like this, I have no idea at all what the goal is.  This is ridiculous.

I hope I feel better about things at some point, but right now I've had a rough day and I'm not feeling very warm or fuzzy about any of this.  Kids should not have to go through what my daughter went through today.  And you know, I'm quite sure that these state tests and district scores won't mean a damn thing in 100 years, but the contributions these children make to the world because of actual knowledge and experiential learning (read: not from tests for pretests for pretests to prepare for the pretest for the actual test) will.  Einstein, Tesla, George Washington, Hippocrates, and Galileo did just fine without all of this state testing crap.

Alrighty, then.