Big Pharma Elixirs For Dr. Frankenstein's Edu-Monster

Peter Gray has a good post up today - ADHD and School: The Problem of Assessing Normalcy in an Abnormal Environment:

According to the most authoritative recent data, approximately 8% of children in the United States, aged 4 to 17, have been diagnosed as having ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).[1] The same reports note that the disorder is about three times as frequent in boys as it is in girls, so this means that roughly 12% of boys and 4% of girls have received the diagnosis. Think of it. Twelve percent of boys--that's approximately one boy out of every eight--has been determined by some clinical authority, using official diagnostic criteria set out by the American Psychiatric Association, to have this particular mental disorder!

If only teachers' ratings were used, the numbers would be even greater. In one study involving 16 different schools and more than three thousand children, teachers filled out the standard ADHD diagnostic checklist of behaviors for the students in their classrooms.[2] In that study, where teachers' ratings were not averaged in with the ratings made by parents, 23% of elementary school boys and 20% of secondary school boys were diagnosed as having ADHD. What an amazing finding. By teachers' ratings, nearly one fourth of all elementary school boys and one fifth of all secondary school boys has the mental disorder, ADHD!

So, so-called teachers think 25% of their male students mentally disordered...

That's interesting because I'll bet 92.3% of said boys think their teachers afflicted with BBFBO disease!

"BO" stands for "brains out"; y'all can figure out the "BBF" part.

Kidding aside. Gray's post is worthwhile reading. Here's another excerpt:

Why Do So Many Kids Have Difficulty Adjusting to School?

From an evolutionary perspective, school is an abnormal environment. Nothing like it ever existed in the long course of evolution during which we acquired our human nature. School is a place where children are expected to spend most of their time sitting quietly in chairs, listening to a teacher talk about things that don't particularly interest them, reading what they are told to read, writing what they are told to write, and feeding memorized information back on tests. As I have detailed in previous essays, during the entire course of human history until very recently, children were in charge of their own education. They learned by following their own inner, instinctive guides, which led them to ask countless questions (their own questions, not someone else's), to converse with others as equal partners, to explore their world actively, and to practice the skills crucial to their culture through self-directed play in age-mixed groups.