Beyond ADD

Beyond ADD, Hunting for Reasons in the Past & Present
Thom Hartmann, 1996

More a series of short articles and frameworks than a traditional, unified book. Perhaps this is a lesson, maybe it's just Hartmann's own ADD at work.

The literature of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) is enlightening whether one has ADD or not, for it teaches lessons of how all brains function and how to improve communication with those wired differently from ourselves. Hartmann and many others maintain that ADD, once labeled "brain misfunction," has gotten a bad rap. The ADDer's ability to be attentive to multiple inputs and to process in parallel may turn out to be the optimal way to perceive and prosper in our hyperworld.

ADD is something that was once an adaptive psychological and physiological mechanism providing our hunter/gatherer ancestors with an edge over the world in which they lived. Their distractibility was actually a continual scan for danger or opportunity in the world of the forest or jungle; their sense of doom was a hypervigilance that protected them from predators or enemy warriors; their impulsivity eliminated the problem of indecisiveness which could cause them to miss out on a meal if they were busy doing a task while something edible ran by; their seeking out of sensation and risk facilitated their hunt, leading them into areas where food could be found. ADD is a vestigial survival mechanism.

The U.S. has a sickness industry, not a wellness industry. The medical establishment makes more off smoking than the tobacco companies. (In ancient China, you paid the doctor each month you were well.)

By buying into the notion that a person is "damaged goods" because he or she had a painful childhood or is neurologically off the norm, we disempower that individual.

Schools are designed to condition, not to teach. American education is now part of and run as a medieval guild system, where no one is allowed to outperform of "show up" anybody else, no one is allowed to advertise or "become a star," and new technologies and improvisations are considered taboo without the approval of the guild.

Horace Mann went to Prussia to view the Teutonic school model and thought it wonderful. U.S. system was designed to prevent "over-education" from happening. There would always be a ready supply of drones to help build and maintain the railroads.

Solutions:

* Relevant curriculum (Rudolph Steiner, no specific subjects)

* Student participation

* Student empowerment in the classroom

* Recognize good teachers and pay them appropriately

* Break down the mandatory structures

An Atlanta teacher relates, "We are so driven these days by tests and scores, by standardized levels of achievement, that we have little time to handle what I'd consider the basics: how to study, how to learn, how to get organized and do your homework. Classrooms are viewed as places to impart information, and therefore we've lost the concept of mentorship, of teaching skills. Education should be about lighting the fire of interest which will burn for the rest of the child's life, but instead we've made it just the filling of the bucket of a white-bread curriculum."

Forbes: Would any management worth a damn put most of its dollars into its weakest divisions and starve the promising ones of capital?

Gottfried Muller: "When you walk through the world as a spiritual warrior, you quickly learn what is important and what you can ignore."

Beware the over-focused Farmers who want to set the rules and define the game. William J. Ronan writes of "The Salient Aspects of Farmers":

* Unable to think tangentially. Tunnel vision.

* Unable to remove nose from grindstone.

* Militaristic, rigid, inflexible, conservative.

* Loves monotony.

* Process oriented: results are secondary.

* Easily led by illusionary goals. Gullible.

* Conformist, obedient to authority.

* Able to attend to small details while the larger picture is left unattended.