The Black Informant

originally posted 11/9/04

This is a continuation of my series on America’s school system. In this posting, I will talk a little bit about the drug Ritalin and how it is being used to make our men more docile.

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Even as infants, boys have higher levels of testosterone, which stimulates aggressive behavior, and lower levels of serotonin, which inhibits it. Researchers have found that infant boys cry more when unhappy while girls tend to comfort themselves by sucking their thumbs. Even at this early stage, girls seem to have more control of their emotions.

Boys, on the other hand, freshly sprung from the enforced immobility of the classroom, are often raucous, rowdy and rambunctious. They play in large groups, in a constant struggle for one-upmanship which serves to reveal the leader of the pack. Their games are structured, complex and focused on scores. Boys want to win.

And that can present a problem. Nowadays, many educators regard the normal play of boys with disapproval. Picking up on the Steinem theme, they have done their best to disrupt boys’ natural patterns of activity, attitudes and behavior. Many schools, disregarding boys’ need for decompression time, have scrapped free-play recess for more structured activities with no competition.

Competition is out in the classroom as well. Games with winners—even musical chairs—have been replaced by more cooperative activities. If that sounds good to you, it’s because you’re a woman! Studies consistently show boys do better in competitive environments, so the competition-free atmosphere of some classrooms can actually cause them to become frustrated and aggressive.

Despite past research to the contrary, new studies have found that today’s elementary classrooms are more geared to the success of girls than boys. Coming into kindergarten, boys are more immature: besides needing plenty of gross motor activity, they learn to read later and their fine motor skills (such as finger grasp for writing) usually lag behind those of girls. One way to compensate is to have boys start school a year later—an option many parents choose.

Some “experts” read the active, more assertive behavior of boys as indicating a propensity to violence. But this line of thinking shows a lack of respect for the unique qualities God has built into boys—the qualities that will someday make them men. (full article)

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Enter Ritalin.

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The ‘earliness’ push in education, in which schools try to have all students achieve the same standards by the same age, is more damaging to boys, who tend to be developmentally behind girls in reading and writing. Pollack argues that schools should be more conscious of the differences between the sexes and how they learn and that failure to adequately deal with such developmental differences may account for the increase in diagnoses of attention-deficit disorder or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. The use of Ritalin in the U.S. has increased 500 percent in the last decade, most of it by boys, and according to Paul Wolpe, psychiatry professor at the University of Pennsylvania, there are school districts in which 20 percent to 25 percent of the boys are on the drug: ‘Ritalin is a response to an artificial social context that we’ve created for our children.’ (full article)

Boys are diagnosed with the condition three times more often than girls, studies show. Experts believe boys and girls have ADHD at similar rates, but boys are diagnosed more often because they tend to exhibit more disruptive behavior. (full article)

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Ritalin is a “drug of choice” amongst many parents of high-energy children. This drug is used to combat a disorder known as ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). The above excerpt describes the differences between men and women even at a young age. Because we live PC society, there are many in the public school system that will see the differences in men as a threat to the progress of women in our society. I am not saying that there aren’t any cases that justify the use of Ritalin; however, I do wonder why has the issue of high-energy children (especially boys) only been an issue within the last decade or so. Public schools have also been doing it part in recommending this drug to parents of children that seem to be hyper-active.

No one ever questions the sugar intake of most Americans as being a likely suspect in this growing number of high-energy children.

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“…Americans ate more sugar than ever before, the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is urging the federal government to advise consumers to limit their sugar intake. According to new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data, sugar consumption in 1999 was 158 pounds per person — 30 percent higher than in 1983. Consumption has risen every year but one since 1983. (full article)

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In short, sugar provides a quick rush of energy to the human body. But as we all know, after the sugar high comes accelerated fatigue. Needless to say, when a child constantly consumes a diet filled with white sugar, all types of negative phenomena occurs in the human body.

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The modern diet, with its white colors i.e. highly refined sugars and flours and energy-empty industrial foods is at the root of all evils. These refined sugar-laden foods stimulates suprarenal glands, forces the pancreas to secrete insulin in excess. Suprarenal glands are then constantly used to force the liver to convert glycogen (and therefore its sugar reserves) in glucose.

This constant stimulation eventually deregulates the whole mechanism, resulting in frequent severe drop in blood sugar during the day, leading to reactive hypoglycaemia. The brain, which feeds itself with large quantities of glucose, is therefore deprived and the consequence is a general state of nervousness and fatigue that can lead to losses of consciousness.

The body cannot cope with an insufficient blood sugar rate (low glycaemia or hypoglycaemia). Dizziness, cold sweats and hunger are defence mechanisms used by the body to warn of danger and to say that it urgently needs sugar, otherwise it will not function.

Hypoglycaemia is a medical emergency. The body cannot cope with a glycaemia higher than normal either. Some sugars, with a high glycaemic index, create hyperglycaemia and its partner, insulin secretion. Insulin inserts sugar in fat cells, increasing thus its volume using circulating fats. Insulin is so fast, so efficient and in such quantity that, one hour later, all the sugar is stored and there is low blood sugar. The body immediately feels deprived, which results in hunger therefore more food and this way, we have a phenomenon of intoxication. (full article)

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All of this has a large impact on how a child performs in a school environment.

So when you have a young boy that has a daily consumption of sugar, all of their natural characteristics become (in many cases) dangerously amplified. Ritalin stimulates the nervous system causing the high-energy child to become “more relaxed”. What we are telling our young men is that it is not ok for you to be yourselves because your natural aggression is a danger to society and needs to be controlled. This is the message that we endorse to our children when we throw our support to any school system that insists on the use of these drugs on our children.

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In general, while white parents are more prone to believe the drugs help children succeed, black parents sometimes view the pills as potentially dangerous tools to control their children.

“The system should not be so fast to apply medication when there are problems,” said Yvonne Pettis, head of the Charlotte NAACP chapter. “It’s really a classroom management and discipline issue.” (full article)

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Statistics show that White children use drugs like Ritalin at a much higher rate than most Blacks; however, for the blacks that have been diagnosed with having ADHD, most of them tend to be boys