The Myth Of ADHD - How 'Inclusivity' Denies The Bell Curve Of Intelligence

Digby Swinton was a good boy, obedient, dutiful, pleasant and kind although he had trouble from an early age learning how the world worked.  His inability to add, subtract, and make logical conclusions was just an indicator of his lack of more serious cognitive skills and his perceptual limitations. 

His parents were of course concerned that their pride and joy needed remedial help in every academic subject, that he puzzled over the simplest Legos, stumbled over the most basic readers, and at the age when most children were drawing complete representations of family, home, and environment, Digby was still drawing stick figures. 

When finally his school, unable to push him up the ladder any farther but were reluctant to keep him back (it was unconscionable to place a boy in sixth grade when he was barely doing third grade work), suggested to his parents that he needed professional help, Mr. and Mrs. Swinton abandoned the fiction that their child was just as bright as any other, just ill-adjusted to the new, highly competitive environment of today, and agreed.  

"He has ADHD", said Marfa Potter, a progressive activist and educational reformer, about the Swinton boy. Of course to the more objective observer unaffected by the wave of progressive 'inclusivity' making the rounds, he had nothing of the kind.  

To most ADHD had become a convenient cover for congenital slowness and indifferent parenting, and medication was an equally convenient and advantageous out for those who could not admit that they had produced a dummy.   

"We must do something for these children", said Mrs. Potter, "they try so hard".  

A generation or two ago, before the currency of dyslexia, ADHD, and Parker-Bing Syndrome, the boy would simply have been dumb - not developmentally challenged, but playing with fewer cards in the deck. 

  

In those days having trouble with math or reading was a given for many children.  No matter how teachers might have worked patiently with the likes of the Swinton boy, he would still be stumbling along sounding out his letters, guh-guh-guh, buh-buh-buh like a kindergartener, or wracking his brain to add two and two. That's the way it was, and the teacher would have moved on to more promising students. 

"Poor Digby Swinton", Marfa Potter went on, " he reads everything backwards, and God only knows what his brain makes of it", but this was the modern age and Digby was given all the latitude in the world to try to turn the sentences around.  Of course he finally figured out that English was not Arabic but remained befuddled by anything more than Dick and Jane or the McGuffey Reader.   

His teachers, especially those recently graduated from the School for Remedial Enterprise, a post-graduate institution designed to deal with the learning impaired, never looked beyond their noses.  

Marfa Potter like others in this progressive enclave of Northwest Washington, were convinced of environmental determinism.  The 'my child cannot possibly be dumb' syndrome of inclusivity.  To admit that Digby’s wiring had gotten crossed and his DNA spliced the wrong way was unconscionable.  The teaching paradigm was at fault, and the new crop of teachers trained at the School for Remedial Enterprise would turn things around.  Even Digby would soon be able to perform like his peers.

   

According to Mrs. Potter and her friends, there seemed to be no normal children in the neighborhood.  The bell curve did not seem to apply there, with all boys and girls grouped at one asymptote.  This one had ADHD, that one dyslexia, this one with Parker-Bing.  Then there were those who must have been neglected or even abused, left dangling, cognitively, emotionally abandoned, shuttled from pillar to post by two-income parents for whom childcare was donkey work.  These children needed care and professional attention. 

 

Learning disability has now become part of 'inclusivity', victimhood, and environmental abuse.  It was not, as in the old days, a stigma.  The idea was a statement against hyper-individualistic conservatism which only values the traditionally smart, able, and quick-witted.  These youngsters jumping over the bar and the herd on their way to Sidwell Friends and Harvard were bred not for success but dominion. 'The rich kids' shamelessly wanted nothing to do with the likes of Digby Swinton. 

Move a few blocks out of the Swintons’ progressive neighborhood into one of Washington's wealthiest and most conservative, and you hear no whining and whingeing about learning disabilities.  There are simply smart children and dumb ones, and everyone else is on some part of the bell curve. 

In the Potter-Swinton neighborhood everything was a psycho-social problem - children who ignored walk-don't walk signs were discipline-impaired; those who spoke scrabbled English were growing up in culturally positive families and needed to share their linguistic patterns with other rather than be corrected. 

It was a free-for-all, and Mrs. Swinton could simply not get over the fact that her son was 'otherly advantaged'  and would never be la creme de la creme of anything.  The cover was kept up well into the boy's late adolescence, and whenever she had a chance she touted his mastery of what just about everyone else took as a matter of rote.

"If only that Potter woman would shut up", said a member of the wealthy side of the tracks who heard her banging away about dyslexia and ADHD every time he stopped at the pharmacy to pick up a prescription.  She was loud, incessant, and bloody everywhere, he complained; but then again, it was but a hop, skip, and a jump back into his corner of Washington. 

The new American Secretary of Health and Human services, Robert F Kennedy, Jr., nephew of former President John Kennedy, has asked, 'Where was ADHD in my uncle's day?', a rhetorical question of course, because there was no such thing, although the bell curve was just as applicable then as now.  In those days school classes were divided by ability - the smart students were put in the top level, the most rigorous and demanding one, and the slower ones placed lower.  No one complained, each student felt accomplished and valued, and no one was ever consigned to a group.  If you showed higher level mastery of math or reading, you were moved up. 

The whole idea of social stigma, identity, and inclusiveness is only a latter day affair; but everyone is happy.  The pharmaceutical companies are delighted at the increased billions of dollars in revenue from Ritalin and its clones; doctors are happy they can serve their patients with a sure-fire treatment; teachers have a reprieve from having to bang away at impossibly slow learners, and parents suffering from Not My Child fantasies have a nice, comfortable explanation. 

Kennedy hopes to reverse the trend, eliminate the medicalization of dumbness, and get back to opportunity.  Push children to the limits of their intelligence, whatever that might be, and be satisfied with the bell curve.  Not everyone is equal. 

Progressives, of course, shout 'Racism' and insist that everyone is equal and only environmental pressures create a temporary inequality; but their objections, now familiar, old tired, and shopworn fall on deaf ears.  The country wants sense and sensibility to return.  Along with DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) ADHD and all other fantastical coverups of reality will go. 

It's The Emperor's New Clothes all over again.  Once Kennedy called out progressives for their idealism and Utopian fantasy, suddenly everyone recognized the truth they had always known but had been too intimidated to admit.