KNON radio posted my 8 minute podcast on Attention Deficit disorder. https://on.soundcloud.com/FeMl5V5wPqtjLp1MQO

I had already put on Spotify and posted it here and there. It was extremely personal for me.

You wouldn’t know it to look at this old man now, but at one time I had a daughter that I treasured more than I thought I could treasure anything. Her name was Laura.

At the same time, I was in the upper levels of graduate school for a Doctorate of Education. In the theoretical part of education, I was as well versed as just about anybody, and I was sure I knew as much or more.

The main arguments I was involved in had to do with the nature of schooling. My heroes were the reformers. Schools, we had decided, had a lot more in common with prisons than they did with any honest effort to help children learn what they would need to lead happy and fulfilled lives.

Our ideas weren’t new, I discovered. They were older than the entire idea of public education. More recently, there had been a significant progressive movement among teachers in the 1920s, but everything that they said and did was hidden from us.

At the root of the argument was coercion. Should school children be coerced into learning? More importantly, should they be coerced into behaving as society demanded? Certainly, they were being coerced. School whipping was standard procedure in the 1960s. Children were whipped in their classrooms, in the hallways, in wood shop spaces, and, above all, in the principal’s office.

I was against whipping children to make them behave. I was also against drugging them.

Among school reformers, there was a raging argument about ADHD. Thousands, millions of children were being forced to take Ritalin or other stimulants after their teachers demanded “do something about your unruly child” to the parents. The parents sought medical help, and the prescription was Ritalin. Doctors told the parents that drugs that stimulated adults had the opposite effect on children. Stimulants calmed them.

Stimulants, we argued, do not really calm children. They confuse them. In an addled state, they are more open to the demands of their teachers. They may not be thinking clearly or learning much of anything, but they sat quietly in the classrooms, and that was all the teachers required.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, some young people were analyzing their situations and trying to figure out how to make a better world. Others found it safer to cling to convention. I was one of the former, Laura’s mother chose the latter. A split was almost inevitable.

She took legally my little girl. That was horrible enough for me, but I played the part of weekend parent as well as I could. But one day, when I picked up Laura, her mother handed me a pill along with instructions as to when I was to have Laura take it.

It was Ritalin. Laura, I learned, was not quiet enough in her first grade classes. The psychiatrist who saw her had the easy prescription. I argued, but lost. The psychiatrist and the ex-wife explained to me that they were doing the best thing for Laura and that my wild ideas of liberation were destructive to the child. Their sanctimony was impervious.

That was long ago. Laura lives in another state and is old enough to be thinking about retiring soon. We haven’t discussed it in all these years because I didn’t want to create an unnecessary rift between her and her mother.

The arguments about ADHD continue. I read a long article in the New York Times this week. It also mentioned a BBC documentary against doping children. I sent the URL to Laura along with my hopes that the troubles of her childhood weren’t troubles today. I told her that I hoped she could forgive the people who, in the name of fitting in with society, had drugged her through her early youth.

But I also told her that I never will.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON.org and 89.3FM in North Texas every Saturday at 9. I publish and post everywhere I can, but some of my more personal stuff is on https://lilleskole.us