Just this week in the news, a CDC (American Government) study has revealed that nearly 10% of children have ADHD, and about 2/3rds of them are being medicated for theis disorder.
In my own harrowing experience raising a very active child while single with no insurance coverage for anything psychological I found that there is, without a doubt, a heavy bias toward helping children who are higher in socioeconomic cl
ass. My daughter could talk at 9 mos., carry on a rather sophisticated conversation by age 2 and was reading by the time she was 3. She was deemed "a distraction" in class, and put off to the side of the classroom for the first 5 years of school. Urged to take her to a doctor to be evaluated for ADHD. Twice a pediatrician who claimed to be an ADHD specialist...didn't believe ADHD was the problem. She had a very high tactile sensitivity and problems with seams in socks, etc. We went to a community counseling program, and the counselor didn't believe that ADHD was the issue either. Her first grade teacher meekly suggested at an IEP meeting that she may be "gifted", but the "team" agreed not to test for that until the behaviors were under control. Stupid. She was a pest in class, primarily because she was bored out of her mind, and she actually said so nearly every day. Teachers refused to look at anything more than the "behavior"problem because it was a hindrance to the classroom. When she was in 4th grade I had a job for a short while that offered insurance for a psychologist, she was given a TOVA and found to be well above average in her ability to focus. She started to flounder in 4th grade, but at home on the internet, she was thrilled learning geometry through interacive games. By that time she absolutely hated school. I was exactly the same way and I barely got through high school. She got through and she's 18 now and taking classes at community college, but she just doesn't fare well in a traditional learning environment with one way learning. Teacher teaches, student absorbs. Ho hum.
I've been tech savvy for 12 or so years now, and I find Penn State's World Campus format to be a bit antiquated compared to what's available, and wonder why such a massive "learning institution" such as Penn State isn't on the edge of these advancements.
I think a lot of these kids are being misdiagnosed as ADHD... and I think the drugs do help the matters they are faced with, i.e., failure to conform to our expectations for their performance in some way, either academically, or behaviorally, or some combination of the two. I just can't buy into it all without some reservations.. The phenomenon we call ADHD is real, but I see it as primarily an American socio-cultural phenomenon. That's a pretty "macro" perspective, but I can't help but making some observations...
Kids are now exposed to so much so early on, and their minds are really busy because of it. Is a child with ADHD in some way defective? I don't think so at all. It seems to me they might be a byproduct of a dichotomy in our culture.. Consider a 20 year old today.... they evolved in a culture where their own parents were bored with "57 channels and nothing on" (to quote a Bruce Springsteen song)... Think "leap frog", teddy ruxpin, Amazing Amanda, interactive talking childrens books, video games, Disney movies and animation galore...By the time they're 5, they've all spent many hours of their lives physically strapped down and riding in cars with gadgets and games and videos and/or music. They get to these monstrous markets, and they're bombarded with stimuli.... riding in the shopping cart with mom, observing mom who is evaluating 200 kinds of toothpaste.
Kids come into this world I've described, and quickly develop minds that are less and less capable of learning in the system the way it is traditionally equipped to teach them. I suspect some places in the world have far surpassed the United States in terms of education and technology. That's the word on the street anyway. American traditions are not evolving and keeping up with the onslaught of modernitity and culture. Much of it is reserved for "kids today". It's really a widening gap that's accelerating. For the last 10 years, kids are constantly instant messaging, surfing the internet, watching videos, they have 3 million choices in "indie" music you've never heard of, and accessing a hundred-thousand times more media than the previous generation ever dreamed of. After their excessive exposure to a saturated culture, their put in sheep herd like conditions in the schools. Add to that, some antiquated ideas about the world that seem to express a denial of major, major problems we face as a world community, and kids are really not interested in fitting their thinking to the old system. Young people with high levels of creativity and interests are really turned off by information they're expected to learn and teaching methods are akin to dinosaurs for them. They seem to have a lot of brain activity that is not delegated properly to fit the schemas we currently navigate and we want them to fit the gestalt of what are, essentially, days gone by. Our culture, tradition, technologies and ideas from the past are failing them. The kids that seem to be affected the worst cannot conform on their own and are brought to the forefront as problematic.
So while I do think the meds do what they're designed to do, which is they are deployed to act on the brain, and alter the child so the child accomodates the system, the trouble with this is, the child then re-develops thought processes less spontaneous to fit the existing system. Meds are a way to mold the kids so they can accomplish what they'll need to to get through the day in our past, and still to a large extent, our current environment, which is a process oriented, steady paced, deliberating, in vivo world. Their behaviors are unacceptable in outdated systems, but we do little to update the systems. Particularly in America there seems to be considerable stagnation and an almost fearful attitude toward the explosion of innovation and advancements because of cultural manifestations of this burgeoning technology and information.
RSA animate lecture on Education Paradigms:
Ted talk on Education and creativity
To get a feel for what the realities for young people today, these videos were assigned to me in a cultural anthropology course:
We are the machine:
A Vision of Students Today
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Conformity is the New Black
Orwellian conformity has made inroads to the psyche of the youth more than at any other time in history. If you haven't identified this phenomenon, you might want to poke around on Orwell Today. Very interesting stuff...
To Orwell, the societal control is top down and we're sort of trapped by our limitations, fearful and in denial of the benefit to anyone's attempt to defy them.
I've always been more in the Aldous Huxley camp myself, but that's because I am such a nonconformist. :p To Huxley, control just is. We have evolved to incorporate it in our thinking and now it's intrinsic. Indeed, society is deeply engaged in a sort of perpetual mockery of itself. One giant mash-up. But to be fair, it's just that we've reached a kind of "creative critical mass". Truly "nothing new under the sun". We're deemed pretty darn harmless, but for those few very far-out fringe elements. It is nearly impossible to be original unless you're on some fringe, and then you will feel the eyes of the world upon you. If it's new, it's very likely to be quickly deemed suspect. We hear about the attempts to quell this sort of thing daily. Much about the fringes of society can be dangerous, no denying that. But in this mash up of all things deemed innocuous, has all else in between extremes been subdued?
To be cool now is to conform... and sort of just deny that one has done so. Denial is really an overarching theme now in so many aspects of life for so many...
Or, rather than go the denial route, some seem to jump right onto bandwagons knowing full well that it's total conformity... This seems to have really taken off with the Internet and all this endless "connectivity".
It's all very Orwellian and Huxleyan... Huxwellian? Orwhuxleyan? I do hereby take full credit for mashing these terms for perhaps the first time ever. :p You heard the inevitable meme here first!
We basically have a free market, where the buying and selling of just about anything legal, (and many things not so), are offered up to anyone wanting. Our freedoms are now defined by the marketplace. Our freedom comes to us in the form of the various "choices" available to us, by which we are able to exercise our free will.
A marketplace is kind of a living thing... it seeks to purchase or provide what other people will value. It isn't a new phenomenon by any stretch, what's sort of taken hold in the past decade, is this wreckless-feeling drive to conformity. We live, work and play in a worldwide market, much of our time is spent in the virtual environment open to the world. Most people have an online presence that has begun to overwhelm their physical, real time presence; Myself included. The market senses our need to survive and connect, and it responded with the products that facilitate us. So now our survival is tied to this sort of "perpetual conformity machine". It is energized by the things we do to survive in societal constructs.
The cosmos of cool might not revolve around one set of trends to one target market, but it's not any one force that's driving that, it's buyers themselves, and this market-entity responds to our preferences, which drives trends. If it sells, make another one! If it sells more, make more and charge a bit more! If it sells endlessly, make mountains of it and sell them to everyone relatively cheaply!
Considereth if you will the "Breast Cancer Awareness" Campaign. People mindlessly get on board with this stuff assuming it's good, when a lot of what's happening is bizarre, and ridiculous. Say I buy a pink can of campbells soup. (This wouldn't happen, but just humor me and pretend...) They donate to the Awareness Campaign. The Awareness Campaign is a non - profit, so their profits must go to producing more of what it is they are seeking to do charitably, which is, raise awareness of the issue of Breast Cancer. (note these are a compound "proper noun" in this context). It's been a very successful campaign, because, well, people tend to buy soup anyway. But now, packaging tape is pink. Bottles of rubbing alcohol are pink, tennis balls, pink, many many things are pink, and more and more support for this campaign is garnered every time you purchase any of these items. You're actually also supporting some products that may actually cause breast cancer with your dollars!
This from Think Before You Pink:
This type of increasing conformity is disturbing. I think the important thing is that barely anyone is actually thinking about it. Is it that "not thinking" is not only a recent trend, but a classic case of ignorance that's here to stay, at least until we're fully devolved into the Idiocracy foretold in the movie of the same name?
Please think carefully about how you spend your money and your time. These, your freedoms, are what's left for you and they comprise the larger part of any impact you have in the world. The choices you make are the main ways you exercise freedom and control of your life and contribute to making our future society a place for engaging in freedom to think and behave in ways that others may not find familiar or comfortable, or a prison where any deviation is easily spotted, and quickly called out and quelled.
If this isn't disturbing enough, when you consider the "bullying zeitgiest" (thank you Madonna for that term), you see the forces of conformity at work in a very acute way. Some may think that to be PC is to quell deviations from a norm, but one can be considerate of others and speak and act accordingly without conforming to any labels if they have the intellectual capacity to express themselves and their concerns with some degree of integrity, and without denigrating others.
To Orwell, the societal control is top down and we're sort of trapped by our limitations, fearful and in denial of the benefit to anyone's attempt to defy them.
I've always been more in the Aldous Huxley camp myself, but that's because I am such a nonconformist. :p To Huxley, control just is. We have evolved to incorporate it in our thinking and now it's intrinsic. Indeed, society is deeply engaged in a sort of perpetual mockery of itself. One giant mash-up. But to be fair, it's just that we've reached a kind of "creative critical mass". Truly "nothing new under the sun". We're deemed pretty darn harmless, but for those few very far-out fringe elements. It is nearly impossible to be original unless you're on some fringe, and then you will feel the eyes of the world upon you. If it's new, it's very likely to be quickly deemed suspect. We hear about the attempts to quell this sort of thing daily. Much about the fringes of society can be dangerous, no denying that. But in this mash up of all things deemed innocuous, has all else in between extremes been subdued?
To be cool now is to conform... and sort of just deny that one has done so. Denial is really an overarching theme now in so many aspects of life for so many...
Or, rather than go the denial route, some seem to jump right onto bandwagons knowing full well that it's total conformity... This seems to have really taken off with the Internet and all this endless "connectivity".
It's all very Orwellian and Huxleyan... Huxwellian? Orwhuxleyan? I do hereby take full credit for mashing these terms for perhaps the first time ever. :p You heard the inevitable meme here first!
We basically have a free market, where the buying and selling of just about anything legal, (and many things not so), are offered up to anyone wanting. Our freedoms are now defined by the marketplace. Our freedom comes to us in the form of the various "choices" available to us, by which we are able to exercise our free will.
A marketplace is kind of a living thing... it seeks to purchase or provide what other people will value. It isn't a new phenomenon by any stretch, what's sort of taken hold in the past decade, is this wreckless-feeling drive to conformity. We live, work and play in a worldwide market, much of our time is spent in the virtual environment open to the world. Most people have an online presence that has begun to overwhelm their physical, real time presence; Myself included. The market senses our need to survive and connect, and it responded with the products that facilitate us. So now our survival is tied to this sort of "perpetual conformity machine". It is energized by the things we do to survive in societal constructs.
The cosmos of cool might not revolve around one set of trends to one target market, but it's not any one force that's driving that, it's buyers themselves, and this market-entity responds to our preferences, which drives trends. If it sells, make another one! If it sells more, make more and charge a bit more! If it sells endlessly, make mountains of it and sell them to everyone relatively cheaply!
Considereth if you will the "Breast Cancer Awareness" Campaign. People mindlessly get on board with this stuff assuming it's good, when a lot of what's happening is bizarre, and ridiculous. Say I buy a pink can of campbells soup. (This wouldn't happen, but just humor me and pretend...) They donate to the Awareness Campaign. The Awareness Campaign is a non - profit, so their profits must go to producing more of what it is they are seeking to do charitably, which is, raise awareness of the issue of Breast Cancer. (note these are a compound "proper noun" in this context). It's been a very successful campaign, because, well, people tend to buy soup anyway. But now, packaging tape is pink. Bottles of rubbing alcohol are pink, tennis balls, pink, many many things are pink, and more and more support for this campaign is garnered every time you purchase any of these items. You're actually also supporting some products that may actually cause breast cancer with your dollars!
This from Think Before You Pink:
Pinkwasher: (pink’-wah-sher) noun.
A company that purports to care about breast cancer
by promoting a pink ribboned product, but manufactures
products that are linked to the disease.
This type of increasing conformity is disturbing. I think the important thing is that barely anyone is actually thinking about it. Is it that "not thinking" is not only a recent trend, but a classic case of ignorance that's here to stay, at least until we're fully devolved into the Idiocracy foretold in the movie of the same name?
Please think carefully about how you spend your money and your time. These, your freedoms, are what's left for you and they comprise the larger part of any impact you have in the world. The choices you make are the main ways you exercise freedom and control of your life and contribute to making our future society a place for engaging in freedom to think and behave in ways that others may not find familiar or comfortable, or a prison where any deviation is easily spotted, and quickly called out and quelled.
If this isn't disturbing enough, when you consider the "bullying zeitgiest" (thank you Madonna for that term), you see the forces of conformity at work in a very acute way. Some may think that to be PC is to quell deviations from a norm, but one can be considerate of others and speak and act accordingly without conforming to any labels if they have the intellectual capacity to express themselves and their concerns with some degree of integrity, and without denigrating others.
Friday, November 12, 2010
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