The Plague of ADHD

01/18/2011

Once I spoke the language of the flowers. . . . How did it go? How did it go?
Excerpt from "Forgotten Language" by Shel Silverstein, 1930-1999

I have resisted sending ExchangeEveryDay readers to YouTube since you all get more links to YouTube than you can deal with about cats that swim and teenagers doing weird things on skateboards. However, when Kirsten Haugen sent in a presentation by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert, with his speech matched up with a clever graphics presentation, we were wowed. We decided you needed to see it. Here are some excerpts from his speech, "Changing Education Paradigms", where he talks about ADHD; but this is taken out of context and we encourage you to listen to the entire speech:

"Don't mistake me, I don't mean to say that there's no such thing as Attention Deficit Disorder. I'm not qualified to say if there is such a thing. I know that a great majority of psychologists and pediatricians think there is such a thing. But it's still a matter of debate. What I do know for a fact is that it's not an epidemic. These kids are being medicated as routinely as we had our tonsils taken out... And on the same whimsical basis and for the same reason: medical fashion.

"Our children are living in the most intensive, stimulating period in the history of the earth. They're being besieged with information and calls for their attention from every platform: computers, from iPhones, from advertising hoardings from hundreds of television channels, and we are penalizing them for being distracted.

"From what? Boring stuff, at school for the most part. It seems to me that it's not a coincidence totally that the incidence of ADHD has risen in parallel with the growth of standardized testing. Now, these kids are being given Ritalin and Adderall and all manner of things, often quite dangerous drugs, to get them focused and to calm them down...

"An anesthetic is when you shut your senses off and deaden yourself to what is happening. And a lot of these drugs are that. We are getting our children through education by anesthetizing them. And I think we should be doing exactly the opposite. We shouldn't be putting them asleep; we should be waking them up to what they have inside of themselves...

"I believe we have a system of education that is modeled in the image of industrialism... Schools are still organized in factory lines: ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects. We still educate children by batches. We put them through the system by age group.

"Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are? It's like the most important thing about them is the date of manufacture. Well, I know kids that are better than other kids of the same age in different disciplines. Or different times of the day. Or better in smaller rather than larger groups. Or sometimes they want to be on their own.

"If you are interested in the model of learning, you don't start from this production-line mentality. It is essentially about conformity and increasingly it is about that growth of standardized testing and standardized curricula... I believe we've got to go in the opposite direction. That's what I mean about changing the paradigm."

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