Thinking that kids are different or incapable of learning on their own is just people wanting kids to go through the same meat grinder of education that they did. My partner was unschooled, and after talking to her and getting over the initial reaction of "that's nuts" I feel like it actually makes a ton of sense. The data support it. I don't care if you're kid can't read at 7 -- if it's not due to a disability such as dyslexia -- and neither does their future education.
My partner made her own decision to go to high school as she was interested in going on to college. A lot of her friends were interested in college and managed to get in because of their work that they'd been doing on their own/SAT scores. Now she's a developer at Amazon, and a number of her friends went to top tier universities.
Of course a small number of them did nothing with their lives and live at home with their parents, but so did a larger percentage of people that I went to school with.
(also, I hate that I can't edit out that I put you're instead of your in a sentence about reading. the shame)
FUCK YOU.
This is the response you would have heard from 6 y.o. me, if only I wasn't scared that my parents would punish me for swearing. That's how far my respect for authority went :)
I had gone to preschool for one year. I remember it as being locked up for half a day with a bunch of infantile imbeciles under supervision of not much more serious adults. I despised all those alphabetes who didn't give a damn about anything farther than 1 meter away from their nose and equally despised the teachers who acted surprised that I didn't care to socialize with the former. I think they suspected me of autism, but this was clearly just psychological defense to cope with my rejection :)
Caring about the teachers attention and acceptance would have meant behaving like a little dumb shit running around screaming and quarreling with others such. Not an exciting perspective.
I remember how at one time the teachers complained to parents that I never greeted them (which means I probably did, ha ha). My parents had to enter the class with me after having threatened that they'd make a scene if I didn't greet the teacher :)
Actual school was only barely better. At least the other kids were forbidden screaming. Still boring as hell.
> Where things get serious is when a kid refuses to read AT ALL, or worse, is demonstrably incapable of focusing long enough to read.
Why would anyone focus on something he/she doesn't care about?
I strongly feel that the reason behind most of those learning disabilities is keeping kids in an environment where ability to read is completely unimportant except for those few unfortunate hours they spend at this asinine place called "school", hours they'd like to forget as soon as they end. I hated school for being childish and boring, but other kids apparently had their own reasons too. I don't think many kids there actually cared about school. Especially in the first few years.
BTW, regarding reading being unimportant, I wonder if the rising popularity of computers won't suddenly provide a magic decrease in "reading disabilities". I was raised in the age of TV, but I feel like nowadays it's harder to obtain entertainment with no ability to read at all.
Otherwise, I bet you're likely correct.
My sense of "me" was forming, and I was aware it was incomplete, and I didn't understand it. I had many authority problems, having rejected most of the school.
This went on for long enough, they eventually were wanting to intervene with drugs and a psychologist. Age 11 ish...
This, being the late 70s, scared me, and I remember a cold resolve to resist the entirety of it, for fear of losing that self before I even had a chance to understand and grow strong.
It did not go well. I did manage to convince the shrink the drugs were a non starter. Friends who went down that path changed. I could see it.
Never have quite got past that basic wrong.
Interestingly, the issues went away as soon as I managed to get some autonomy.
We're not currently at risk of under-diagnosing ADD. We're at risk to further over-diagnose it. The article and parent post did not say nobody should be diagnosed ADD. The article's author is merely shocked how many people are misclassified as needing to be medicated.
I added emphasis on an important word here. Of course kids don't like to be made to read something boring. Where things get serious is when a kid refuses to read AT ALL, or worse, is demonstrably incapable of focusing long enough to read.
While I think that ADD is over-diagnosed in kids, I also know from personal experience that some people (not just kids) really do have ADD and benefit from therapeutic intervention. To me it seems just as dangerous to over-diagnose political anti-authoritarianism as it is to over-diagnose medical ADD.
Anyway, 7-year-olds do not actually have an anti-authoritarian streak; they crave the attention, acceptance, and approval of their parents and teachers. But they are in the process of establishing an independent mental model of themselves, which means they experiment to find out where the boundaries are. Kids don't employ political thinking to reject authority, they are still stuck in the process of discovering and defining what authority actually is.