Posted by Rick Denney on February 12, 2003 at 10:44:30:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: When things seem to "fall" apart posted by John Edens on February 12, 2003 at 07:06:25:
In the last few decades, there has been an apparent rise in the need to class all behavior problems (for adults as well as children) as having a physiological cause. This absolves the person of responsibility for bad behavior. Because bad behavior is a disease, it is treated with disease therapies.
Of course, there are those who really do have physiological problems that come out as behavior or learning problems, but the cause of these people has been clouded by the widespread blaming of all bad behavior on external pathologies rather than on plain, old immorality.
It seems obvious to me that one solves physiological problems with physiological treatments, and morality problems with training in morality. The tricky bit is knowing which is which, when some of the symptoms may be the same. The pendulum swings to and fro based on the attitudes of society at large. Currently, there is a general societal attitude of blaming environment or physiology for bad behavior, though I see the pendulum swinging back. Unfortunately, what is now allowed to be considered bad behavior is "being mean" or in some other way violating the current standard of "niceness", which may sweep up some normal behaviors in children. Punishments no longer fit the crimes, and we no longer teach our children a predictable moral code. I hasten to add that I don't really care which moral code one chooses to teach their kids, from a purely societal view. If the ten commandments don't suit you, then use Hammurabi--I don't care. The problem is that in many cases there is no code, and kids have no established standard of behavior, other than to "be nice," which is subjective and murky. This is why some forms of so-called hate speech (which would have been roundly punished in my house when I was growing up) receive a harsher penalty than actual physical crimes, such as assault and burglary (for which my parents would have had to wait in line behind the courts to punish me were I guilty of such).
The real victims of the disconnection between punishments and crimes are those like you who suffer from a true physiological malady, because the treatment you need becomes controversial by its overuse.
In general, though, I hate to see kids drugged into an acceptable standard of behavior, and I think we should err on the side of training rather than drug therapies. Here are two examples: Ansel Adams, the famous photographer, was ejected from several different schools for bad behavior. When he was interviewed at age 80, he claimed that he would have been diagnosed with ADHD, had he grown up at that time (1982). How would his life have gone had he been given behavioral drugs? What turned him around was tutoring, where he could go at his own pace, and focus on his true aptitude with musical training (he was a trained concert pianist before he switched arts to photography). In short, he was not cut out for school, and had to follow a different path.
Another example is C. S. Lewis, the famous author. He was sent to typical English public schools (i.e. private boarding schools) where he was miserable and where his behavior was not acceptable. His teachers thought him stupid and spent little time with him, in general. His father finally sent him to a tutor out of frustration, and he blossomed. His tutor abandoned those subjects that Lewis could not learn (mathematics) and concentrated on those where he was a genius (languages). Lewis eventually held a chair at Cambridge in medieval English, after many years of teaching at Oxford.
In both examples, the children had to learn self-discipline, and in both cases, it was a matter of finding what it was that they could be self-disciplined about. That seems a better treatment to me than the use of drugs, but it definitely runs afoul of the current philosophies of the educational establishment.
Rick "who knows already that he will regret this post" Denney