It's more than "White Punks on Dope"

[Brad Shantz <bshantz@nwlink.com>]

Tim May Wrote:

> In recent decades, do-gooders have taken upon themselves to intervene
> in the parenting process and have essentially succeeded in making such
> sanctions harder for parents to impose. Schools routinely teach young
> children to inform on their parents if they have been spanked, touched,
> talked to "inappropriately," etc. Check out the parent's rights
> newsgroups (and father's rights) for tales of interrogations by agents of 
> Child Protective Services, who are empowered to remove a child 
> immediately and without court proceedings if they merely _suspect_ a 
> child has been treated in ways the State has deemed no longer 
>appropriate. 

...yadda yadda yadda...more on how we all agree that burning children is 
not a viable option....etc.

It is so much more than what the "State" deems appropriate.  Having grown 
up with both parents being teachers in the public school system and my wife 
a teacher in a private Montessori school system, I've seen that the feeling 
in society is, "Everyone is a victim."

In seattle a few years ago, there was a teenager who killed his girlfriend. 
(beat her face in with a rock)  Yes, he was caught, yes he went to trial.  
This 19 year old lame-o used this as his defense, "Fetal Alcohol Syndrome." 
  THEY LET THE MURDERER GO ON THE PRECEDENT IT WAS HIS MOTHER'S FAULT 
BECAUSE SHE HAD A FEW DRINKS WHILE SHE WAS PREGNANT WITH HIM.  So, he 
wasn't in control of his own actions?   I say bullshit to that.

At my wife's school the kids are being taught that the definition of 
harassment is if someone is doing something to you that you don't like.   
Oh, the third graders have a heyday with this one.  "Chris is looking at me 
and I don't like it."   Immediately, Chris is repremanded because he is 
harassing the other kid. What's wrong with this picture?  Well, it's not 
Chris' problem, is it?  The teachers need to be a little more understanding 
of what harassment is.  Chris could turn around and say, "By reprimanding 
me, you are harassing me for something totally stupid."  

There are so many different "syndromes" and "conditions" that you can't 
keep track of them all.  ADD, Hyperactivity, Fetal Alchohol Syndrome, 
Chronic Fatigue, Repetitive Stress (which is a physical ailment, but it 
came to mind), they are all names to psychological conditions.  Some 
because they are serious problems...like ADD in some children, but not all. 
 Some however are lame attempts by psychologists to put the human psyche 
into a bunch of prepackaged little boxes.  Eventually, you could build the 
perfect beast by just grabbing a handfull of syndromes from this box over 
here, mixing them with a few neuroses from this box over here.  Pour in a 
little Free Love, a little Self Preservation and give the entity a 
stopwatch in the shape of a heart and a scroll for a brain and you've got 
an average human being.

Sorry, no, thank you.

We are more a part of our environment than that.  Some people grow up to be 
just like their parents.  Some grow up to be the exact opposite.  However, 
our "raising" does have an effect on us.  
  
> So, what to do with children who are otherwise uncontrollable?
> 
> Ah, the State has the answer. And its name begins with "R." 'Nuff said.

At my wife's school, they do not use Ritalin.  They have started using a 
product called PhytoBears.   Don't laugh.  These are GummiBears made out of 
all natural vegetable extracts.   One of those, "100% of all the vitamins 
and minerals needed by the human body and mind in a day" kind of things.  
Apparently, the kids who were on Ritalin are now getting on much better 
with PhytoBears than they were with Ritalin.

>>     I will admit to the possibility of ADD being a "disease", but I
>>  think that the number of children who really have the disease is small
>>  compared to the number of childern recieving drugs for it.

Yes, I've read this entire thread, I don't need loads of flame mail telling 
me to go back and read the ENTIRE THREAD again.  I just want to say that in 
many schools, at least in Washington, ADD is no longer being treated 
strictly with drugs.   Someone mentioned being put in a "special" class 
while his brother was in a regular class (or the other way around).  That 
is more common than an automatic prescription for Ritalin.   I still claim 
that ADD is a syndrome that is serious in some kids and for others it's a 
crutch.  The diagnoses in Washington are getting better.

> This is the point I have been making. Not that ADD (aka ADHD,
> hyperactivity, etc.) does not sometimes exist, but that giving Ritalin
> and suchlike drugs to children has been a panacea for fidgeting, 
> wandering attention, boredom, "cutting up" in class, class clowns, 
> and so on. 

Dr. Cynthia Tobias (who just happens to be from Seattle Pacific University, 
just a coincidence) has done studies for her entire doctoral carreer on the 
subject of learning patterns.  Her findings are interesting.  They aren't 
practical in a public school system, but interesting nonetheless.  There 
are a number of different learning styles.  I won't go into all of them for 
the sake of brevity (I know, too late.)  One of the learnign styles that 
she has spent much time working on is the Kinetic/Kinesthetic learner.   
These are the kids who wander around, and fidget as Tim put it.  The goal 
of the teacher with a Kinetic learner is not to get them to sit down, but 
to get them to not distract others.  If the kid likes to do his work laying 
on the floor and he's not bothering anyone, let him.  There are some people 
(like me) who can't stand to sit at a desk all day long.  I get my work 
done, but I often lay on the floor, sit on the desk, walk around the 
office, etc.  Anyway, my point is that there are teaching practices that 
could be used to teach the child without resorting to labelling (as I think 
ADD is sometimes used) or drugs.

> And perhaps worse, _parents_, such as the example I provided, are using
> it to control children. Where once they would've paddled the kid for 
> using obscene language, or refusing to get dressed for school, now they 
> pop a pill in the child's mouth.

That is only in the example you provided, Tim.  Yes, if one person is doing 
it, there are probably more.  (It's like Cockaroaches....where there's 
one...)

> I didn't have ADD. I was simply bored by a system that either taught 
> me stuff that was irrelevant 
> 
> I suspect this was true of 90% or more of us on this list...we're a
> bright lot, and it's hard to imagine that _any_ school could keep us from
> being bored a lot of the time. (And hard classes can be boring, too.)

Agreed.  The teachers at my High School and even at Oregon State University 
always had trouble convincing me of the validity of some of the topics we 
were learning.  I'm sure it bugged them when I asked.
 
Brad