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:

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.

Except I believe in digital education. The author’s opinion is wrong on that matter.

I believe in Alvin Toffler's formulation, "High Touch and High Tech."
That is essentially what Apple has been doing. And, in digital education, there is khanacademy.org. The high tech aspect of KhanAcademy is that the Internet delivers the content on demand, and provides sample problems automatically, giving a teacher or coach complete insight into a student's progress and any specific difficulties. The high touch aspect of it is that the lectures, by Salman Khan, are done in a very human and approachable way. Even though it would be easier for him to simply redo a lecture when he makes a mistake while lecturing, he has his team simply annotate the video to correct the error. That is humility, and it makes the experience very human.
The fact that the lectures are short, essentially spontaneous, and available on demand means that the student is unlikely to feel intimidated by the process. Indeed, the "on demand" nature of the video lectures has, according to Khan, made them even better accepted by students than live, interactive discussions with him.
Students can learn from KhanAcademy alone, but an even "higher touch" approach is to "flip the classroom" of a school, having the students view the lectures at home and devote the classroom to human interaction around the practice exercises which traditionally have been "homework."
So, yes indeed, very interesting educational work can be done with the aid of computers. I certainly hope Khan succeeds in "flipping the classroom" in education generally. Apple has made a significant thrust into education with its authoring tool, available free to Mac users, to empower textbook authors to port learning tools to the iPad. And with concomitant iPad software to view and interact with the educational content, making notes and empowering drill and practice.
I suppose that it is entirely possible to misuse such tools to the detriment of the child's education. It's not obvious that Khan needs those tools. He is on record as questioning whether textbooks are needed at all with his approach. I think that books are in their own way more accessible than digital content, tho . . .

This article wasn’t the place to argue the case, but to the extent I can speak of philosophy of mind as a non-professional, I sympathize with St. Augustine’s “Divine Illumination” theory. That is, what Kant calls synthetic a priori reason — our ability to understand certain things intuitively and synthesize a concept out of disparate elements — is made possible by participation in the mind of God. Kantian and neo-Kantian epistemology has roots in Augustine, but excises God from the picture.

My girls have used Switched On Schoolhouse since third grade. They have been using Saxon DIVE and Teacher for three years.

They are on their fourth year of Latin. The first year was in classroom (with a fourteen year old teacher, I might add), the next two years the class was on DimDim, right in our livingroom. This year they moved onto Powerspeak. The 11-year-old has a 90% and the 14-year-old is at 93%. There was a period of getting to know HOW the program worked that would have been solved by better technical support so, their grades would be higher with that.

Digital education rocks!

I believe, firmly, that there truly are mental disorders such as ADHD. My sister, for example, has severe attention deficit problems. However, her brain scan is not normal, and she has had a lot of inexplicable problems throughout her education. Medication has helped her to a degree.

I have also known some boys who really truly had a problem. Medication helped them.

HOWEVER, and it is a big huge however, MOST “cases” of ADHD are misdiagnosed by those who stand to make a buck off of the hysteria. The article is right in that the condition is overdiagnosed, even though I disagree that ADHD is basically fictional.

Prescribing ADHD medications for attention span problems in school is basically like saying that anyone who coughs has strep throat and should take antibiotics.

My sister and I were both homeschooled and we both are effective learners (even with lil sis’s disabilities, she is pretty good at learning things, if a bit slower. If she can’t remember something she will look it up again).

I agree with the conclusion that excessive use of electronics and the public school system has caused the behavioral and learning problems that we see today.

And the fact that ADHD is overdiagnosed gives a really bad name to the kids who actually have it. That is what makes me the most angry.

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