Passion (Not Drugs) As Treatment for ADD/ADHD

I’m having a respectful debate with Stephen Glassner on Twitter and over on his blog about the belief I share with Sir Ken Robinson that rather than anesthetizing students labeled with ADD/ADHD instead, we should consider "Fixing Boring Schools, Not Kids Who Are Bored." In my post on the topic I share how both I and 20-something multi-millionaire, Aaron Iba were both labeled as hyperactive/problem children (this was before ADHD had become a widely available condition to have). Yes, we both had issues listening to teachers drone on about things we could care less about, and sitting still all day and listening to 12 years of classes I never signed up for was maddening. Would drugs that dulled mine or his very active brains made this more tolerable? Sure. BUT THAT’S NOT THE ANSWER!

You hear that students with ADHD can’t focus. I say really? If there’s something they’re very passionate about, I’ve seen such individuals focus with laser precision for hours. For Aaron Iba it was computer games. His psychological eval said this was a huge problem. He focused on the games like nothing else mattered. That passion later made him the happy, successful passionate multi-millionaire, living in Australia that he is today. Their advice was to take away such “distractions.”

So, yes, while I acknowledge and agree that drugging kids helps them get through the unnecessary drudgery of school, I contend there is a better solution. The solution is making schools relevant, connected and interesting. As I recently shared in my post "The War on Kids. Zero Tolerance" for many, schools feel like a prison. In fact in the movie when shown photos of prisons and schools it often is impossible to tell the difference with prisons looking more appealing in many cases. While these drugs are helping students survive their days, there's evidence it is damaging their brains. If ADD or ADHD was an available condition when I was in school, I certainly would have been drugged which would have made my brain more dull and my teacher's lives much easier. Same with Aaron Iba and I have no doubt people like Einstein would also have been drugged.

In his post Mr. Glassner complains that while folks like Sir Ken Robinson share the frustration over the failure of schools, there are few answers...just problems shared. So, now I’ll move from the problem to some solutions.

First, purchase the book "The Element - How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything." Angela Maiers has also written a book on the topic of Passion Driven learning. I suggest you purchase that too. I might also recommend following the Twitter Tag #passiondriven

If you're wondering what a passion driven school looks like read
You Can Get a Dalton Education at a NYC Public School
and Immunization for an Uninteresting Curriculum Found at the iSchool and Hey Teacher! Leave Us Kids Alone!!!- There’s A School for That! and Lessons Learned at The Science Leadership Academy.

If you want to know important elements of passion based learning read Preparing Students for Success by Helping Them Discover and Develop Their Passions. If you’re wondering what it looks like when a student is driven by passion read Profile of a Passion-Driven Student.

My prescription for those with ADHD is simple.  Forget the drugs and empower students to pursue and develop their passions...either at their school, at home, or at a school that honors this type of learning.  Only after giving that a try, should meds be considered as treatment.

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Newly added information:
I coincidentally, just found this piece of information about freedom/democracy schooling.

 

My child has been diagnosed with "ADD/ADHD" ; what about him or her?

Experience at democratic free schools indicates that this is not a problem. They find that when children are allowed to expend their excess energy through play, they can then focus. According to John Holt in Learning All the Time, research by specialists in learning disabilities links so-called "perceptual handicaps" with stress. Such research has shown that when students with supposedly severe learning disabilities were placed in a relatively stress-free situation, their disabilities soon vanished. Millions of children in the United States are on prescription medication, sometimes called the "school drug", to control their behavior and promote learning. Democratic free schools have found that there is no longer a perceived need for these drugs when children are not coerced into learning, and when the need to be responsible for their behavior comes from within. The democratic process in particular promotes development of this internalized sense of responsibility for one's own behavior through honest, direct interaction with a community of friends and peers.

 

More newly added information

When I read this doctor's thoughts on ADD/ADHD, I felt as though I had almost plagiarized his words though I had never read them.   

 

Excerpts From periodical Touch the Future, originally published by Dr. Thomas Armstrong.

 

When parents hear me say that attention deficit disorder is a myth, they sometimes become very upset. They think I'm saying that their kids aren't jumpy, distractible, forgetful, impulsive, or disorganized. That's not what I'm saying at all! It's quite obvious to me that our nation's children have probably never been so hyperactive. 

The question is, what accounts for this? Is it a medical disorder called ADD (or ADHD as it's sometimes called)? 

I think not. I think instead that what we've learned to call ADD is instead a number of things all jumbled up together under this simplistic label. Kids can be hyperactive for any number of reasons: because they're anxious or depressed, because they're allergic to milk, because they're bored with school, because they have a different kind of mind and aren't being challenged, because they're overstimulated from television and video games.

I could go on. The point is that the ADD label makes it too easy to ignore what might be going on beneath the surface of things.

 

Studies suggest that many children hate taking Ritalin, yet you don't see this reported anywhere in the ADD literature. For kids who have that wide-focus attention span (e.g. paying attention to lots of different things rather than one single stimulus}, Ritalin can close them down to a fine point of attention, which is great for doing a math page, but can hamper more divergent forms of thinking associated with creativity. 

 

I'm very concerned that the literature on ADD has so much to say about what these kids can't do, and virtually nothing about what they can do. In my own informal research, I've seen countless examples of kids labeled ADD who are musicians, dancers, athletes, leaders, and creative in many other ways. Why don't we see these kids as basically healthy and creative individuals who may not function as well in certain kinds of environments (for example, the worksheet wasteland of many classrooms), but do great when given a chance to learn in their own way. Many kids labeled ADD in fact do great when they're fixing an automobile, or doing experiments in their nature lab, or performing in a theater piece. Many kids with behavior difficulties grow up to become great individuals. People like Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Sara Bernhardt, Louie Armstrong, and Albert Einstein. Why don't we start using models of growth to describe our highly energetic kids and throw this ADD disease label in the trash basket where it belongs?

 

In Rid of Him Chris Mercogliano co-director of the Albany Free School explains

My purpose will be to describe an approach to working with the kinds of kids who would otherwise be controlled by medication in conventional school environments that eliminates the need for any drugs whatsoever. It is not a new approach, but one which has been tested by time in the little school where I have taught for over twenty-five years known simply as the Free School.

Download Dr. Fred Baughman's free report here: ADHD fraud and the chemical holocaust against a generation of children.