Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild

Withholding school from children (in a developing country) in a long term experiment is completely unethical. You can't ruin a child's future just to make a point. Such an experiment should never be conducted.

I think you should really research ADHD more thoroughly. I don't understand how you could be writing so much nonsense about it if you even took five Minutes to read the wikipedia article.

ADHD medication has been tested in double blind studies in hundreds of thousands of cases, in dozens of seperate studies, for several different substances. It doesn't get any better.

ADHD diagnosis in terms of questionnaires PREDICTS anatomical, physiological and psychological differences. It also predicts negative consequences: higher risk of depression, higher risk for delinquent behavior, low academic achievement (compared to IQ), lack of social skills etc.

And many of these predicted (and well-observed) consequences can be prevented by medication and therapy. How much more "scientific" can it get?

Insisting on ADHD not being a diagnoseable, treatable syndrom is almost as dangerous as saying "vaccines cause autism".

I take your point -- unschooling is perhaps best done by parents who are at least self-educated, who are intelligent people, curious about the world, and enthusiastic readers themselves. If the parents can't feed the kids' minds in some way, they should recognize that and find someone else in the neighborhood who can (other parents, perhaps), or use some source of lesson plans, or something.

In this case it sounds like it might be too generous to call this unschooling -- it sounds more like simple neglect. If parents aren't unschooling out of a conviction that they will actually give their kids a better education than the schools would, why are they doing it? Sounds more like sheer laziness to me.

Anyway, the question now is, what can these kids, now adults, do about their situation? I'll hazard a guess that they watch as much TV as the average American. If that's anywhere close, I'd say the first step is to get the TV out of the house. That will free up several hours a day. The second step is to get online. That will give them a reason to read and write. Even just doing that a few hours a day will, in a few years, change their lives. There's Wikipedia, there's Khan Academy, ... well, I don't have to explain this to you, I'm sure.

I can't accept that it's too late for them to turn this around, but it will take quite a bit of initiative on their part. If their work ethic is as good as it seems, maybe it's possible.

I don't know how close you are to them, but if you have any ability to reach them, I would encourage you to try. Their lives could be very different in ten years. I know that and I hope you know that, but they don't (else they would already be working on it).

I know I'm being presumptuous here. Please forgive me if I'm belaboring the obvious. I hate to see wasted potential.

> Withholding school from children (in a developing country) in a long term experiment is completely unethical.

Yes, I agree, and that is why the required science cannot be done -- the science you think exists in psychology.

> I think you should really research ADHD more thoroughly.

I have researched it, I know this topic much better than you do, and at present ADHD is firmly in the pseudoscience category. This is not to say it's not real, it is to say that no one has any idea what it is, and we cannot objectively diagnose it. This means it's open to various kinds of abuse, in particular if its diagnosis relies on self-reporting and questionnaires, the bane of modern psychology.

> It doesn't get any better.

Science is better. But to understand that, you would have to understand science.

> ADHD diagnosis in terms of questionnaires PREDICTS anatomical, physiological and psychological differences.

Questionnaires? Self-reporting? This is worse than I thought. You show me a microphotograph of a pathogen (or a distinctly abnormal group of brain cells, or a cluster of genetic defects, or anything objective at all) that causes ADHD, and I will grant that the required science has begun. Until then, an ADHD diagnosis depends on how a questionnaire is filled out, which means people can get the diagnosis if they want it and if they know what to say in the questionnaire (or the reverse, if that's their preference).

> Insisting on ADHD not being a diagnoseable, treatable syndrom is almost as dangerous as saying "vaccines cause autism".

You're obviously unaware that Thomas Insel, chairman of the NIMH, holds the same views on this topic that I do:

Link: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

Quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."

"Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever ... Patients with mental disorders deserve better."

Ten years ago I was having the same kinds of conversations about Asperger Syndrome. Now Asperger Syndrome is gone, discredited. Does this mean that ADHD is another phony condition? Not likely, but no one knows, because no one is doing the required science.

I'll say it again for the record -- ADHD will become a real condition when we know what causes it, and not before.

Science requires testable, falsifiable explanations. Psychology is stuck at the description stage, and has been for decades.

>I have researched it, I know this topic much better than you do, and at present ADHD is firmly in the pseudoscience category.

You refuse all the decades and heaps of evidence by some summary hand-waving over what science is supposed to be. The idea, that double blind trials are required to call anything science is ridiculous, and you prove it by not admitting any double-blind trials as evidence in favor of the existence of ADHD...

Your rant about the DSM is completely off topic. Which might be explainable by your obvious complete lack of medical training, and arguably little understanding about scientific methods in general. Otherwise I just can't explain why you want to prove the non-existence of ADHD by saying that some diagnostic manual (which isn't the only way or manual to diagnose ADHD, btw) is not useful in medical research. You don't even acknowledge the difference between medical research and medical practice.

There is a course by coursera called "Pay attention: ADHD through the lifetime". This course offers a thorough examination about diagnostic criteria, symptoms, neuroanatomy and treatment. ADHD is a physical thing that can be shown physically.

If you were inclined to listen to scientific evidence, you could go to google scholar and read any of the dozens of double-blind studies where children are diagnosed with ADHD, get treatment, and improve in several objective and subjective measures.

But, probably, while thousands of real scientists aggree on the validity of these studies, you will probably find some reason, why this evidence is not clear enough to draw conclusions you donb't like.

"DSM contains conditions which don't have physical/physiological manifestations" is not proof for ADHD not existing. For one thing, because these physical and physiological features have been well studied...

Spit the hook. lutusp is effectively trolling when the discussion is anywhere near psychiatry.