Tuesday, October 9, 2012

The Drugging Of A Generation

The more I think about today's Times story that reported on low-scoring students from low income backgrounds being prescribed ADHD drugs to pacify their behaviors and raise their test scores, the more I think about the damage being done to an entire generation of children as a consequence of education reform.

According to the story, the drug of choice doctors prescribe to low-scoring children from working class backgrounds is Adderall.  Risperdal is also prescribed to one child in the story after he has a psychotic episode from the Adderall and grows suicidal.  The article also mentions Clonidin, a sleep aid, to help all of those drugged children get to sleep.

What kind of society do we live in that this conscious drugging of children to get their test scores up and their behaviors pacified is happening?  What damage has education reform done to children that anybody - seriously , anybody - thinks drugging these kids to get their scores up is a good idea?

If these kids are lucky, they will end up in 12 step or other treatment programs for the inevitable drug and alcohol addiction behaviors they are learning from this.  That's if they're lucky.
 
More than likely we are teaching a generation of kids to become addicts when life gets hard and things don't work the way you want them to (or the way your parents or school want them to.)

Heckuva job.  Just what the education reformers want.  Pacifies the lower classes and keeps them under wraps.  Makes money for Big Pharma.  And get the test scores up.  It's a win-win-win - for everybody except the children.

6 comments:

  1. It also expands the school to (increasingly privatized) prison pipeline.

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  2. This is all about harvesting profits from children. It is abusive, pernicious and fascistic.

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  3. They do it because it's a lot cheaper (at least short term) and easier to drug them rather than to address the problems that cause the behaviors in the first place.

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  4. Children First. Students First. Adderall First

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  5. Emma Goldman's GhostOctober 10, 2012 at 8:42 AM

    If all the test prep and stupidly non educational activities required in classrooms would cease, you'd see a precipitous drop in children "needing" these awful drugs. Maybe some thought and creativity would help focus these kids, not awful deadly boring test prep. This prescribing of drugs to kids who are actually acting out, and may not be ADD or ADHD, is a crime. This is an outgrowth of the horror of 21st century education "reforms". The children are being experimented with without their or their parents' consent.

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