How America made its children crazy

Now we know that computers don't help children learn and that drugs don't help them concentrate, because the establishment mandarins who sold us the computers and drugs have conceded failure. In the January 29 New York Times, [1] a prominent professor of child development shows that attention-deficit-disorder drugs only harm the three million children who take them. One out of 10 American children have been diagnosed with so-called Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and most of them have been medicated. [2]

Some months ago, the Times reported that test scores lagged in school districts that invested massively in digital education. [3] It does not seem to have occurred to the mandarins that computers cause attention deficit disorder. The brain is a machine, in the enlightened secular model, and so-called brain science teaches us to tweak its functioning with pharmaceuticals, or stimulate its development through digital approximations of intelligence. The grand result of a generation's worth of brain-science application is a generation of schoolchildren who are disproportionately illiterate, innumerate, anxious, angry, and unhappy.

Professor L Alan Sroufe's debunking of ADD medication in the New York Times contains this admission:
''Back in the 1960s I, like most psychologists, believed that children with difficulty concentrating were suffering from a brain problem of genetic or otherwise inborn origin. Just as Type I diabetics need insulin to correct problems with their inborn biochemistry, these children were believed to require attention-deficit drugs to correct theirs. It turns out, however, that there is little to no evidence to support this theory.''
That is an astonishing statement: in the mainstream view of the academic psychologists, the brain is another pancreas, except that its function is to secrete thoughts as opposed to insulin. That is to say that the psychologists have a pancreas where their brains should have been.

One really wants to light a torch and march on Frankenstein's castle, also known as the psychology profession. Until the passage of the 2005 Individuals with Disabilities Act, schools had the power to force children to take ADD drug, namely amphetamines, or bar them from classrooms, even when parents objected to the medication. I don't know how many children were harmed by the sorcerer's apprentices in school psychology offices, but the new research might provide grounds for some exemplary lawsuits. It turns out that the mainstream was dominated by cultists and loonies. The religious day schools, the home-schoolers, alternative schools like the Waldorf movement turn out to have been islands of sanity in a sea of delusion.

The psychologists of the 1960s also advocated instant gratification in all aspects of life, particularly sex, with the silly presumption that all individual and social problems were to be blamed on suppressing our urge to be gratified. Once children had limitless opportunities for gratification, abetted by ever-more-realistic (and ever-more violent and perverse) computer simulations, the psychology profession observed that attention spans shortened drastically, and presumed that a genetic deficiency was to blame. It sounds like bad science fiction, but it is standard operating procedure in every public school in the United States.

Learning how to learn is the point of education. We will forget the great majority of specific things we were taught: Euclidean proofs, the polynomial theorem, Roman emperors, French grammar, atomic weights, the poems of Browning, and whatever else was stuffed in our heads as schoolchildren. What we learned, if we learned anything, is to memorize, analyze and explain. If we know geometry, algebra or French today, it is not because we retained our knowledge but because we re-learned the subject. School, in short, taught us to concentrate. The most successful people are not the cleverest in terms of sheer processing power, but those who multiply cleverness with persistence.

The psychology profession, by contrast, thinks that the brain is a machine, and the best way to engage it is to use another machine, namely a computer. Computers, to be sure, do not kill brains; people kill brains with computers. Computers in the hands of people who believe that gratification is the highest human goal, and the quicker the gratification, the better, have devastated our mental landscape. Our children do not read; they only surf. They do not write; they only text. They do not plan and strategize in games; they react to visual and aural stimuli while inflicting simulated mayhem. They do not follow a plot: they cut among disjoined images in the style of rap videos. And when they fail to concentrate, we give them Adderall and Ritalin.

It is mouth-foaming, howling-at-the-moon madness, and it is our mainstream culture. The wired classroom hasn't worked, so the educational establishment recommends more of the same quack cure. The New York Times reported last September that computerized education has produced no measurable results, except for some negative ones (test scores fell after massive investment in computers). Yet the education gurus remain undeterred. ''The data is pretty weak. It's very difficult when we're pressed to come up with convincing data, ''Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation told the Times. Reporter Matt Richtel wrote: ''And yet, in virtually the same breath, he said change of a historic magnitude is inevitably coming to classrooms this decade: ‘It's one of the three or four biggest things happening in the world today.'''
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