Homogenized Children

In retirement I have dabbled in tutoring High School students. One day while sitting in the Guidance conference room waiting for one of my students I noticed shelfs full of books on children's learning and other disorders. There must have been twenty or more carefully catalogued maladies with symptoms, prognostications and early-intervention treatments. Here are just a few of them: Autism, ADHD/ADD, Written Expression Disorder, Asperger Syndrome, Mood Dysregulation Disorder, Encopresis, Rumination Disorder,Tourette's Syndrome, Selective Mutism, Transient Tic Disorder, Conduct Disorder, Stereotypic Movement Disorder, Enuresis, Stuttering, Attachment Disorder, Encopresis, Mathematics Disorder, Intellectual Disability, Separation Anxiety, Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder. There are many more.

I was struck then and still am by, in an attempt to make all our children "normal," we are homogenizing them. We are lopping off the tails of life's Bell Curve. And, I am sure that this is good for our children and their families. But is it that good for our society? Are we are early-interventioning away our future Van Gogh's, Steve Jobs', Thomas Edison's  and Robin Williams''?

It seems that, once, the suffering and dislocation of these "different" children sometimes produced what was recognized as genius. Their eccentricities caused them often to take a tortured  path through life which opened up wondrous windows for the rest of us. So what was a downside for them could be an upside for us. These abnormalities were the crucible from which wondrous works were sometimes forged ... a "syndrome synthesis" if you will.

One might even take his analogy a step further by pointing out that our current rabid embrace of diversity" and then "inclusion" might be causing an equivalent downside ... in that we are causing a certain cultural entropy and blandness that is making things all too predictable. Maybe we need to ease back a little on our societal and rearing homogenizations ... for the ultimate good of us all.