Education Matters US

Most of you have probably read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Have you ever thought about how these truly American boys would be treated in today’s government schools? One Doctor has contemplated this. Below is what he has concluded.

“Would Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn be on Ritalin today?” asks child psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence H. Diller in a meeting with the President’s Council on Bio-Ethics. “No doubt in my mind that they would be if they lived in my community. I see Tom Sawyers weekly.” (Hat tip: Evangelical Outpost)

There is a report in MedPageToday about a study of the effects of long term Ritalin use. The study found that this may cause “behavior-modifying brain changes that carry into adulthood”. In other words, Ritalin use may only provide short term gains while these children are being subjected to possible life long effects by medically altering their young brains. (Hat tip: ExtremeWisdom.com)

“These findings suggest that developmental exposure to high therapeutic doses of methylphenidate has short-term effects on select neurotransmitters in brain regions involved in motivated behaviors, cognition, appetite, and stress,” the investigators wrote. “Although the observed neuroanatomical changes largely resolve with time, chronic modulation of young brains with methylphenidate may exert effects on brain neurochemistry that modify some behaviors even in adulthood.”

You may be wondering why this is important. It is important because the use of Ritalin is growing dramatically. In fact, in the year 2000, Ritalin was being used to medicate 1 out of every 8 children. This number will be even higher today.

The question that must be asked is why? The answer is that many schools today are using Ritalin to modify the behavior of students to make them fit into the one-size-fits all of our government run schools. There are too many cases to highlight here. Just click on this Google search (ritalin use in schools) and you will see 1,460,000 results. Ritalin use in schools has become so prevalent that there is now a parody of School House Rocks called Dysfunction Junction that highlights this very issue.

A professor in the Department of Psychology and Program in Cognitive Science at Vassar College, Ken Livingston, believes there is a correlation between the rise in Ritalin use and schools systems that use outcome-based systems.

However, it may turn out that state departments of education and local school boards are finding themselves nonetheless hoist with their own petard. It may prove significant that the rise in the number of referrals for ADHD tracks the adoption throughout the country of outcome-based educational goals. Outcome-based systems are predicated on the idea that every child can and should be brought to some high minimal standard of performance in the curriculum. These systems are motivated philosophically by an egalitarian view of society; we are all entitled, on this view, to an equally effective education at the public’s expense.

But once you have adopted such a system, teachers cannot respond to uncooperative and inattentive students by simply passing them on to the next grade. Outcome-based programs make the teacher directly accountable for the child’s performance. Teachers now become desperate seekers after anything that will enable them to improve the child’s performance to the mandated level. Hence their eagerness to suggest the quick fix of drug therapy if the child’s problem seems attentional.

Our government school monopoly continues to claim that they must teach every child and deal with the problems these children bring. They claim to champion diversity. Yet, the solution many choose for handling individuality and diversity is medication. This allows them to force children to fit into their one-size-fits all school model. It also allows them to highlight problem children. Yes, the children they medicate are now the examples of the problems they have to deal with.

Parents should start asking themselves; can all of these children really need medicating? Or, is there a problem with the system we are placing the children in? The answer is very clear to many of us. The problem is the one-size-fits all system of our government run schools. They claim they must be the ones to provide an education to all children. They claim they need more and more money so they can individualize the instruction for each and every child. Instead of doing this they medicate the children to make them fit into their contrived system.

This practice must end. It is time we stop medicating our children so they fit into the system. It is time to change the system so it fits the children. Teachers unions and the government education bureaucracy stand directly in the way of ending this one-size-fits all system.