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The Right to be Odd
By Jan Fortune-Wood
All too often, education in
our society is little more than an arm of the state that insists on
constantly extending its controlling position by spreading its
jurisdiction into non-educational welfare concerns. This is most
apparent in the rise of disorders and syndromes that are attributed to
children who find it difficult or impossible to fit into the school
structure and so exhibit “behavioral problems.” The rhetoric goes like
this: to get a good education children have to be able to acquire
certain behavioral traits that will enable them to learn in a given
environment. It is necessary to equip children to conform to the
environment so that they can benefit from education. Children who resist
this conformity must be suffering from some type of “disease” that
threatens their educational functionality. This being so, interventions
– both medical and psychological – are justified and necessary.
Such thinking allows more
and more of normal childhood or even human behavior per se to
be diagnosed as a disease. The fashions come and go. ADHD was once
flavor of the month – a diagnosis that encouraged worried parents in
need of real support to label anything from a kinetic learning style to
youthful resistance to delayed gratification in a four-year-old as a
sign of a malfunctioning brain. Labeling a child with this so-called
disease took very little notice of the facts: facts such as the reports
of home educators that symptoms disappeared once children were removed
from noisy, chaotic classrooms full of stressed children and harassed
teachers, facts such as the rising numbers of children who “developed”
ADHD at later and later ages as stress at school rose. With the blinkers
firmly on, mainstream education and welfare thinkers were convinced that
the disease had to be in the children, not in the environment.
While ADHD diagnoses still flourished and
increasing numbers of children were subjected to Ritalin (which, in my
opinion, is little more than the illegal street drug Speed by another
name) another syndrome emerged as front runner. Asperger’s Syndrome was
once little heard of; now it is commonplace, proliferating in classrooms
everywhere, amongst stressed young children who are not fitting in with
the increasingly narrow definition of what it is to be normal in a
highly structured regime.
In an ethos where the product mentality is
operating, a child who waits until everyone has got started on the work
the group has been instructed to do, before asking, “And what should I
do?” attracts a host of faulty product labels. Options are worked
through. Should the child be seen as “deaf”? Should the child be seen as
“deliberately annoying” and brought up to specification with behavioral
modification? Faced with the prospect that their child is seen as a
stupid or weak product, parents, rather than questioning the fundamental
assumption that children are products at all, will all too often resort
to searching for a label to justify why their child is a “faulty
product”. Faced with a burden of angst and guilt, it is not surprising
that many parents are relieved when a scientific sounding diagnostic
label comes along to alleviate their worst fears, which are that they
have caused their child to be a faulty product.
Under the protection of
diagnosis, the list takes on the authority of not being merely a group
of commonplace and wrongly attributed labels that could be used to
diminish the humanity of thousands of other children who display their
individuality, but rather an explanatory framework for the child’s
inability to function within the demands of the institution. This does
not give rational credibility to such diagnoses.
The world is full of children (and adults) who
talk before others have finished their turn, who introduce non-sequiturs
into conversation or who use language very literally. Many children have
apparently quirky fears. Not everyone responds to social signals and eye
gestures. Not everyone likes to be hugged. There are hosts of people who
can amaze us with memories all the way back to babyhood, but still
forget the last thing that was said to them. Many people never conquer
spelling and handwriting, but still soak up factual knowledge or become
totally engrossed in specific topics to the exclusion of all else. It is
not unusual to find able people who seem to have great co-ordination in
an activity like playing the violin, but nonetheless wander around with
untied shoe laces, seeming clumsy, awkward, and ill at ease in their
bodies.
The list of differences, many of them subtle,
some of them slightly surreal could go on. Having a unifying label for
the set of characteristics that make up a parent’s perceptions of one
child at just one moment in time is no substitute for taking the child
seriously as an autonomous individual in her own right. The problem with
such diagnoses is that whilst they might describe some true things about
some people some of the time, they essentially fail most children in two
important ways.
Firstly, they reduce a child to a list of flaws
and insist that the child must be treated according to adult’s worst
perceptions of him. Secondly, they refuse to acknowledge that many
so-called syndromes are only significant in certain social contexts:
stressed classrooms, learning environments where stillness is more
important than what is learnt, learning environments where a bell rings
to change the subject being studied just at the moment the child begins
to engage with the initial subject, for example. The “illness” depends
on the social context being present to provoke the symptoms and yet what
society most commonly tells us to adjust is not the environment, but the
child.
Within schools, more and more children whose
individuality does not fit them to an increasingly restrictive
environment are being diagnosed and “treated.” The costs are enormous.
There are economic costs to fund the health service and resource the
special educational provisions committed to forcing children to fit into
the system, as well as horrendous personal costs, which have the
knock-on effect of massive social costs in the wasted lives of young
people who are harmed.
The monolithic system of “free” compulsory state
education has done a great deal to convince us that children who are
perceived as square pegs are being helped if they are treated in such a
way that they will eventually fit into round holes. The latest fashion
in child labeling and fixing comes in the form of psycho-babble’s most
daring “disorder” to date. ODD stands for oppositional defiance
disorder. The crux of this diagnosis, which will soon outstrip others in
popularity as a control device to use against children who show any
difference at all, is that a child is sick, disordered, and in need of
either behavior modification or drug treatment or both if she resists
authority.
To actually make having your own will a disease
is at once inspired and wicked in my opinion; ODD has to be one of the
trump cards of coercion. It is a diagnosis with an incredible list of
unquestioned assumptions. Is the role of parenting to assist children to
nurture their own autonomy and learning or to lay down the law and be
obeyed at all costs? We might debate about where we locate ourselves on
that spectrum, but I believe that only the most extreme or fascist
dictators hoping to break the wills of a whole generation of youth would
wish for children who obey without question simply because the speaker
is an adult or parent. A preponderance for cultural gullibility in
mainstream thinking combined with a constant and unhealthy desire to
have children who are mere blank canvasses sadly give certain
psychologists carte blanche to go on making up this rubbish with
impunity.
We need to begin asking some hard questions. Is
it the children who are faulty? Or is it that the system, which requires
all children to imbibe an entire curriculum in a set order regardless of
its intrinsic interest to individuals, is wasteful, inefficient and
oppressive? Are the children mentally ill or is the system a poor fit
for the vast wealth of highly individual learning styles, creativity and
human range of personality that exist in our children? Are we so afraid
of human nature and so mistrusting of children in particular that we
believe that without a bland, one-size-fits-all approach we will fall
into a state of uneducated chaos?
Individual children are being consigned to a
medicated hell to satiate this pessimism and fearfulness. It is not only
the children, but, ultimately, all of us who lose. Children are not
products and they do not exist to fulfill a list of required functions
for society. If we nurture children to pursue intrinsic motivation and
self-fulfillment, the spin-offs for both individual and society at large
will be optimally creative and beneficial. It is not in anyone’s best
interests that children should be forced to fit into a homogenous system
at any price. It is a tragic waste of real creativity and learning
potential, one that does not need to happen when schooling is not
compulsory.
There is a certain irony in the fact that the
latest disorder to sweep through unsuspecting children bears the acronym
for the word “odd.” Individuality, idiosyncrasy and the persistent
questioning of absolutely everything are hallmarks of genius and
creativity, but not to be tolerated by mainstream education, it seems.
The beauty of the alternatives we espouse is that they give our children
the right to be odd; or simply to be themselves.
Living consensually with our children and
nurturing their intrinsic motivation and learning means that instead of
reducing children to their flaws (or, even worse, to an adult perception
of their flaws) and then teaching them according to the label’s
prescriptions, we treat our children as real individuals, sometimes with
problems, sometimes making mistakes, but unique, trustworthy and fully
human.
Living consensually with our children does not
mean that we put on rose tinted spectacles and ignore real problems.
Some children have specific learning difficulties or particularly
idiosyncratic learning styles that demand some input and assistance.
What it does mean is that we will treat each problem situation as it
arises, rather than responding mechanically. It also means that we will
take into account problems that are not solely about psychology, but
also about structures and social contexts. We have the flexibility to
fit the learning environment to the individual rather than struggling to
do the opposite. Of course, good psychology might be helpful at times
and learning to fit into certain environments to meet intrinsic goals
might be an aim worth pursuing. But living outside the mainstream gives
us time to pause and seek more complex solutions to learning and life
than simply and sadly adjusting our children with behavioral programs
and drugs. Long may we celebrate a certain amount of being odd!
Jan Fortune-Wood is a freelance
writer, poet, and parenting adviser, who home educated her four children
and lives in the UK. She is the author of four books on home education,
autonomous education and non-coercive parenting, “Doing It Their Way”;
“Without Boundaries”; “Bound To Be Free”; and “With Consent."
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