Was it better to be ADHD 40 years ago than it is today?

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06/03/2013

Was it better to be ADHD 40 years ago than it is today?

My wife and I were musing about the challenges we face educating our ADHD kids: how little willingness there is on the part of schools to embrace alternative learning styles and how much pressure there is to get them adequately medicated. The schools always tell us how much they love our kids. They say they want to give them the best learning experience possible and put them into a "position to succeed."

When I was growing up and zoning out in class, my parents were not nearly under so much pressure to bring me to grade level. While ADHD was gaining ground as a recognizable disorder in the late 1970s, apparently the news had yet to reach Columbus, Ohio. At one point in high school, I got my hands on my “permanent record,” which contained a report of an appointment I must have had in my early childhood years with a psychologist of some kind. It described me as “curious but inattentive.” The doctor never used the word “ADD” or “ADHD,” which leads me to believe he hadn’t been reading his medical journals. No entreaties were made to my parents to put me on medication.

Some are quick to exalt those simpler times, when school supposedly allowed kids to be kids. There was no “Race to the Top”, no “Common Core Curriculum,” no high stakes standardized testing. But there was a downside to the 1970s conception of a child. While teachers didn’t view me as ADHD, they just thought I was stupid, irresponsible and messy. They were completely blind to my strengths. There was no love, real or otherwise.

If I had grown up today in the Washington DC area, where I now live, there would have been no end to the love and concern school would have heaped upon me. Here, “every child” must be good at the same things at the same time and be tested on them, or the system itself is to blame. There's a big incentive to care and, to be fair, many actually do. The educators and guidance counselors would have paid lip service to my “creativity” and “strengths”--"he's just wonderfully imaginative"--but then launched into the litany of my supposed learning issues, followed by the recommended interventions.

The sad truth is that these "strengths"--creativity, critical thinking, teamwork--are nowhere to be found in the school's hierarchy of metrics. The following dialogue would never happen: "We know, Mrs. Smith, that Denise is a straight A student in all of her other subjects, but the D in creativity still stands."

My older son’s guidance counselor once said to me “I am well aware of his creativity and am very familiar with Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.”

"Great," I remember thinking at the time, "but the school you work for pays short shrift to these other kinds of intelligences."

When all is said and done, I think I'd take today’s educational farce over the one I grew up in. If nothing else, at least there’s a glimmer of a recognition that kids with learning differences can succeed, even if the schools educate kids as if that’s not the case. At least the guidance counselor had read Howard Gardner. The first step to change is awareness.

Posted by The Big Shift on 06/03/2013 at 10:20 AM in Education, Neurodiversity | Permalink

Tags: ADD, ADHD, Gardner, multiple intelligences

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