This happened long ago in human history, as my son is now in his early forties and I am pushing fifty. We placed our kids in Catholic schools, as my childhood indoctrination mandated. But that makes no difference. His teacher, a nice lady whose main job was to keep order, found him to be acting up. She decided it was time to have him drugged, and suggested we turn him over to the experts in the Billings, Montana School District #2 for testing for ADHD. My son is of normal intelligence, certainly not slow. I intuitively knew they would find him guilty of excess brain activity.
I rebelled at the idea, and instead decided to take him to a pediatrician for separate testing. I was burdened at the time with child support and alimony, so the $300 bill had to be paid off in $50 chucks, but I did it.
The doctor reported back to the school, the words etched in my memory: “The kid is bored!”
I knew that, but as a divorced, shattered, broke, preoccupied man I did not take time to get him or his siblings energized in curiosity and real learning. I was steeped in Chomsky, who noted that it was the job of a teacher to merely throw out a long rope and allow the child to follow it where it might take him, to areas not “taught” and books that might contain heretical content. His teacher reluctantly decided that since drugs were out of the question he would be assigned reading during times of boredom.
He’s got children of his own now, and I do hope he absorbed the lesson, that ADHD is a fad. In another family I noticed a young boy whose parents had heeded the advice, and drugged him. I watched him from across a room one day as he sat, and it was as if he was short-bus material, jaw slackened, not drooling, but close to it. No doubt the parents and teachers all answered a strong affirmative to George W. Bush’s question, “Is our kids learning?”
I noticed a headline in a newspaper yesterday that says “ADHD May Not Be a Disorder After all.”
No shit, Sherlock.
Piece of Mindful 