Unschooling And ADD/ADHD

There is a trend towards bringing children home to educated them because traditional schools are failing to provide these children with a positive learning experience. Oftentimes, these are bright and personable children who are being diagnosed with ADD/ADHD simply because they are on the outskirts of the learning environment. In fact, many of these children do not even fit the criteria for ADD, which includes distractibility, impulsivity, restlessness and difficulty staying on task. Instead, schools are now saying that if a child is bored, frustrated or daydreams then they have ADD, which is not true.

Most of the time children with ADHD actually score higher on tests than other children do. These children are also very creative and personable. In fact, they can take pieces of information that are not similar at all and join them together in ways that you would not imagine. For this reason, these children often go on to become artists, musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, scientists, mathematicians, engineers, troubleshooters or inventors.

Another thing that is interesting is that children who have ADHD often score as gifted on the "National Foundation for the Gifted and Creative" test. This is because they have a lot of the following characteristics:

1.They are very sensitive.

2.They have a lot of energy.

3.They easily get bored and thus appear to have a short attention span.

4.They need to have a stable, secure adult around them.

5.They will resist authority if it is not a democracy.

6.They have a preferred way in which to learn things, especially when it comes to reading and mathematics.

7.They are easily frustrated when they do not have the resources or people to help them carry out their big ideas.

8.They are exploratory learners and resist learning by listening.

9.They cannot sit still unless they are absorbed in something they are interested in.

10.They are very compassionate but they also have a lot of fears.

In 1993 Thom Hartmann wrote a book entitled, "Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perspective." He then went on to write "Beyond ADD." Hartmann truly believed that those who have ADHD would have been the hunter-gatherers in early human societies and now that we are no longer hunter-gatherers they have to find a way to fit into this society. Now these children are being told that they have ADHD. However, they are merely reliving what they would have done as a hunter-gatherer. For instance, Hunter-gatherers would scan their environment for prey and for danger. Today we call this "distractibility." Another example is that hunter-gatherers would have to make quick decisions. Today we call this "impulsiveness."

Of course, all of this makes sense whenever you take the time to look closely at it. In fact, this can actually be advantageous today as we live in a time of rapid and radical change. It also makes great sense that unschooling these children is very beneficial. These children will thrive whenever they are allowed to put aside textbooks and learn from hands-on experiences. With these experiences children are allowed to be active. They can run around, play, jump and climb whenever they want while still learning what they want because they have the support of a loving parent. This works because everyone is a natural learner at heart, especially whenever the constraints of institutionalized learning are removed from their lives. So, children who have been labeled as "ADHD" in a traditional school setting are able to show their positive side in an unschooling environment. As such, disabilities are now seen as differences that can open the gateway to discovery and wonder.