Early interventions are in place at the pre-school level for the disabled and disadvantaged children in our society as the concept of health, education, and economics interdependence is understood. Adverse childhood events increase the likelihood of poor health as well as poor health increases adversities in childhood. Children with neurodiversity such as ADD, ADHD and Autism Spectrum disorder symptoms become more prevalent in the classroom as children of the same age without these differences mature and settle down. As negative attention is placed on these children for behaviors that are beyond their control these adverse events affect them both emotionally and socially further deteriorating the child’s health. Now these children become the patient and are prescribed medications to conform; while these medication may have benefits they further risk the child’s health. Poor health along with the stigma of mental illness increases the risk of these children not completing high school. It is understood that educational attainment increases earning power and the distribution of wealth back into society while health care expenses drain society. Rather than having health care as the leading industry, society’s success depends on improved education for all. Statistics has shown with increased numbers through the years that higher education leads to lower mortality.

In History:

Historically, according to Davis, the Progressive reformers: Quetelet, Marx, Galton, Darwin and Freud, contributed to the ideology of norms and the “concept of deviations or extremes” (p 3) which led to the creation of what is called disability. It was the intent of these progressive to eliminate disability from the gene pool as they looked to advance a more perfect society. Marx was attracted to the ideal of the norm in relation to “wealth and production” and with Galton’s statistical measures plotting those outside the bell curve “a symbiotic relationship exists between statistical science and eugenic concerns” that for Marx relates to economic concerns. (p 2-3). Galton advanced measuring differences outside the norm in a hierarchal ranking system as attributes beyond the norm are favorable and deviance should be eliminated. “When Marx used Quetelet’s idea of the average in his formulation of average wage and abstract labor, socialists as well as others embraced eugenic claims, seeing in the perfectibility of the human body a utopian hope for social and economic improvement” (p 6). Rehabilitation of the population was seen as essential to the prosperity of the economy as it still is today. Institutionalization had removed those who were deviant from society while today we medicate.

Impact to the Disability Community:

Education is essential to health and mortality; persons with disability should not have to negotiate their presence through pill popping or ABA therapy. 

“The desire to be freed from forced behavioral conformity, when such conformity is not seen by an individual to be in their best interest, is probably the most central concern of the neurodiversity movement and community.” (Bounty, 2008, p 5)

With medical advances disabling illness of the past had waned. As a result, educators push for fidgety children to be tested and diagnosed with disorders such as ADD and ADHD and in doing so this is adding to the anxiety of children to fit in while telling them they are ‘different’. In support of this premise according to Abigail Zuger, M.D.’s article Doing an About-Face on ‘Overmedicated’ Children (2010) review of Judith Warner’s “We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication” I have provided an excerpt.

Ms. Warner points out that she was hardly alone in her previous assumptions: it is accepted wisdom in some circles, including, oddly, liberal-left “moms” and right-wing radio audiences, that the milder variants of attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder and autism are just different ways of saying “normal, but not good enough.”

Both groups share a disdain of parents who buy into those diagnoses, a horror of the medications used to treat them and a deep nostalgia for the simpler childhoods of past eras, when the child in question would definitely have been left alone.

Ms. Warner is sympathetic: “Believing that our toxic world is either producing symptoms in children or classifying them as abnormal when they don’t conform is seductive. After all, there is so much wrong with the lives of children today.”

She concedes that all the pressures to achieve socially, intellectually and financially can make a toxic brew. “We have to do something about our current social environment,” she writes, “because it’s creating some pretty big problems.”

Learning Objectives: