All The Differences

There are a variety of mental disorders out there. I wish I knew the process medicine goes through to call anything negative.  I bet they don't think about it, they just giver it a negative name.  Consequently education looks at disorders as something to overcome rather than something to work with.  People look down on you if you have a disorder.  What if some of these disorders are more order than disorder?  What if we are just discovering new categories for humans?  Can we embrace such differences?

In an NPR article, the suggestion is made that there are more autistic children than anticipated.  The article mentions a South Korean study that looked at children on the broad spectrum of autism.  The study concludes that 1 out of 38 children have autism.  This means that there are more autistic people out there than we want to believe.  Can society come to acknowledge this?  Our society is stubbornly closed to the idea that people are different.  Science is increasingly showing us that individuals are more different and unique than we could imagine.

Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is more and more common.  If you look at the Government definition of it, you may find something of a lack of logic.  It says that children who have ADHD behave out of the 'norm'.  If individuals are unique then behaving out of the norm should be normal.  It also states that these children's brains are different from other children.  If they are different then where is the negativity to call it a disorder, or to talk about a cure or cause as if it was a disease?  What is normal is a social concept.  The social concept in this case is out of date.  The 'normal' people work for corporations, they have wives and kids and a dog, they live in suburbia in houses made of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.  This concept of normal people came from the social and humanistic thinking that spawned in the 19th century.  That is a very long time ago.  Consequently our public school system and most of private school models for teaching and learning is based on such antiquated idealisms.  Though the science behind ADHD definition may be sound, their interpretation and application is obsolete.

Just how different is everybody?  Consider the tests from today's psychology, there are personality tests, there are learning styles tests, there are Briggs-Meyers tests, and many more.  Each of them depicting another difference or uniqueness we have from each other.  This flies in the face of the concept of 'normal'.  We are indeed individuals, but where does that leave the 'normal' people?  Back in the 1970's I heard a DJ (it might have been Charlie Tuna or Casey Kasem) make one of those science revelations they did over the radio.  This particular revelation stated that 70% of Americans had some kind of neurosis.  Neurosis was what we term today as a disorder.  That means that in the whole population that 3 in every 10 people could be called 'normal'.  That makes 'normal' much more rare than we care to think.  Thus 'normal' becomes not non-normal.

Education helps everyone with disorders to operate and cope in and with society.  Not all of them need medication, but all need education.  The problem today is that there is a lot of people not getting the educational help they could use.  The primary and secondary educational systems major of educating the vast majority of students one and only one way, in mass.  Then for the 'special' cases they make some recommendations or requirements for educators to help the student.  If it's true that there are more people that have disorders, then the educational system needs to be restructured to accommodate the needs of the students.  Such a restructuring could benefit society at large by providing students that are better equipped than they are today to function in society.  Many educational programs that come out new often say that there needs to be like 1 teacher for every 10 students for education to be effective.  What happens today, due to budget constraints and other reasons, is that there is often 1 teacher for every 20 to 30 students.  This is a failure for education because students do not get the minimum individualized attention they need to learn skills they can use.

I think its time to reconsider, and upgrade our educational and societal philosophies to match what we've been seeing for the last 50 years.  People are vastly different than anyone cares to accept.  To manage people with disorders, society needs to provide them with tools to help be independent and productive citizens.  If we don't change, people with disorders will do what they have resorted to, street smarts.  Street smarts can be good but it can also lead to crime and gang violence.