Kids often say "school is prison". Not only do kids show poor tolerance for boredom (at least at first), they also show poor tolerance for immobility (at least at first). In Montessori classroom, walking around is allowed. In most schools, kids are restricted to their benches for 30-45 minutes at a time. For a healthy 6-year-old boy, immobility is excruciating. Over time, through learned helplessness, kids begin to tolerate immobility and can sit through a class without problems. Despite my age (55 at the moment of writing), I hate immobility, esp. in most creative moments, or when problem solving. This inspired me to write a story about a puppy in prison. If you consider drugging your kid for fidgeting or being unruly, read my story. If your kid does not want to go to school, and you have no time to dig into neuroscience, consider my Puppy in Prison metaphor.
Imagine a playful puppy running up and down a sunny hill. You throw a toy. The puppy brings it back. There seems to be no limit to the energy resources in the puppy. It can seemingly keep going on all day long.
Now take the same puppy indoors, and tie it up to a wooden box. Make it focus on a single point on a wall. Perhaps put up a TV screen there to keep the dog's attention. To make things easy, let the TV run a video of dog play. Your puppy will not like the limits, esp. if you ask it to sit still for an hour. If the doggie refused to sit still, you might use an amphetamine-like stimulant to keep it motionless and still seemingly happy.
What if you asked the dog to sit down like that for 6 hours with short toilet and feeding breaks? That would be quite unusual. If you did that to your puppy daily for 10 long months, it would be cruel. The dog's health might suffer. Both physical and mental. If you did this year after year for 8 years (i.e. most of the doggie years life), it would be cruel and unusual punishment. That would be inhuman. And yet we do that to our kids! We tie them up for years in wooden benches, ask to focus for long hours, daily, and if they refuse, we prescribe Ritalin or Adderall to those who fidget too much. Or we prescribe other cocktails for other "mental issues" (read: Ritalin will backfire).
Puppy restrained in a classroom will rip at the leash, bite, chew, and gnaw, but the resistance will keep diminishing. The attempts to break the leash will get sparser until they wane into the apathy of defeat. Humans perfected the art of breaking the will of young dogs and horses. Out of options, the defeated puppy might even watch that boring TV dog play or just sleep. Leashed puppies learn helplessness, and we start teaching helplessness already in the kindergarten by limiting mobility and setting up a system of rules and restrictions (see: Learned helplessness).
A proportion of individuals, those with a special type of personality, might not give up that easily. On occasion, they will keep jumping up and ripping again, even if they have no hope of succeeding. Those will be the kids that are likely to get the ADHD diagnosis. The difference in temperament has been proven to be genetic, so it is not a thing that can be easily modified by "better upbringing" (a phrase often used in reference to troublemakers like myself). Some moralists will even tell you that inattentive kids are caused by inattentive parenting.
Some eager government officials would like to add more years and more hours to schooling. Some eager parents pile up extra hours in cramming schools. If the day starts getting short, early waking regimen might be a solution. Some governments take away the option of homeschooling. Some scholars propose a ban on homeschooling. Metaphorically speaking, for many kids, there is no alternative. The only option is: prison and drugs.
Let's rewind back to the sunny hill. Imagine you wanted to give your dog a lecture. For example, read a book or play a video. If you let the dog run up and down, at some point, it is bound to come back to you for companionship. You could then try to read a bit. Perhaps you could do the same with your kids. They are like puppies. They want to burn that energy. This is a natural evolutionary thing. They were born like that. In addition, kids are smarter than puppies. They crave novelty even more. They are even more curious. Their learn drive is out of this world. They will come back to you to learn. Voraciously! They will gladly read a book, or ask you about numbers, or geography. Even if they come back for a fraction of the time, as compared to those tied up at school, the progress will be stunning. This will be their own self-earned, self-directed, and self-paced progress. I call it free learning. The kind of learning they will love, cherish and appreciate. Moreover, with all the running about, they will be less likely to need that Ritalin fix
Caging giftedness
Smart kids play more, run more, fidget more, daydream more, and use private speech more. They are a teacher's nightmare.
What we diagnose as ADHD does not need to be bad news. See: Confusing creativity with ADHD. If you send a kid with ADHD to a democratic school you may discover the problem did not even exist in the first place. If you read biographies of great explorers or inventors, you will often see similar symptoms. You can engineer high runner mice that will look similar to those ADHD puppies and respond nicely to Ritalin. ADHD kids will not perform in the classroom as well as the subdued ones. However, in life, the same individuals might show higher creativity and higher mental energy. They will be future CEOs or perhaps crazy scientists. Those high-energy kids may also make for good students as long as they can burn their energy at school. One of the best ways is winning. If they can find an outlet in the class, they do not need to show deficits or pathology.
Those high-energy wild extroverted kids do not need to be a nightmare for a patient teacher who got only one kid to take care of. In one-on-one constellation, the teacher can always wait a bit for a kid to react, to learn, etc. That wait can be frustrating. Keeping the whole class in check is inherently exasperating. That mutual frustration works for a pretty bad behavioral system. Teachers will naturally drift in the direction of well-intentioned abuse: verbal or physical. In response, kids will naturally drift towards disliking teachers. This is the school system imposing on a natural social interaction between children and adults. Instead of the warm flow of inspiration, smart kids and well-intentioned adults resort to cheating and abuse. We love to chat, we like to learn, but we hate to be taught and lectured.
Caged adults
Cultural transmission makes it hard to free the kids. If we cage adults in office cubicles, those adults are less likely to be empathetic for their own kids. Through learned helplessness we tolerate modern incursions in our lifestyles. We pay with obesity, depression, cardiovascular problems, and more. Instead, we should bring the adults back to the savannah. That's the recommendation from evolutionary psychology. I tried it. I live it. It works (see: Simple formula for happiness). Wholeheartedly, I support uncaging all humans.
