Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

This article about the pathologizing of adolescent rebellion reminds me of how fortunate I was in my education. From a very early age, I had little respect for adults unless they could show me that they were intelligent and worth listening to. I refused naptime in preschool because I didn’t see the purpose in lying down if I wasn’t tired (a minor rebellion, I know); fortunately, this particular center lived up to the “creative learning” in its name and allowed me to go play outside with the older children. In first grade, since I had no respect for my classroom teacher and was miserably bored when I wasn’t in the gifted pull-out hour, so I acted out and made up ludicrous stories (for instance, that I’d been up all night playing poker) as excuses. In my moral calculus, these were not really lies, since any reasonably intelligent adult would have realized they were untrue.

I was lucky enough back then to score sufficiently high on an IQ test (despite my questioning the whole concept of the test as revealing potential since it relied on one’s ability to recognize things they may have never seen) that, instead of being medicated or placed in a behavior disorder class, I was allowed to enter an all-day gifted program in second grade. Assignments were more creative and, otherwise, higher up along Bloom’s Taxonomy. I wasn’t bored and, for the most part, my teachers gave enough of an impression of intelligence for me to respect them.

When high school hit and the program ended, I found myself back in much the same situation I’d been in before the gifted program.  What made it worse, however, was that due to my constant reading, I found that I knew not only the information being conveyed in the course but also, sometimes, more than the teacher knew on the subject. When, in World Civilzaitons,  we had an anachronistic assignment to create a Medieval newspaper, I included a classified  ads section with multiple ads for the same relic, and my teacher thought this was an error! Needless to say, listening in class was not a strength of mine in those years, though by this point I mostly resorted to writing poems in my notebook instead of being disruptive. Mostly.

There were teachers I did respect, however.  The teacher foremost among them died my sophomore year. I honestly can’t imagine what would have happened had I been forced to take literature from some of the other teachers on that campus. Instead, because of the Running Start program, I was able to take courses at the local community college.  Even if this was an imperfect solution, it did give me an opportunity to learn from instructors whose intellect and knowledge I could respect.

At any point along the way, I could have been medicated– dulled and dumbed down– so that I could pay attention without being bored and so that I wouldn’t challenge my designated superiors. Had I been medicated, I never would have used my hours in class to develop my writing. It’s from this context that I question the pathologizing of autism spectrum disorders as well.

Differences should not be regarded as things to be annihilated simply because they make some things more difficult. Advocates of medicalization would have you believe otherwise.

Related posts:

1. How to Kill Artistry

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.