The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [51]
Public schools are safer, studies show, than other locations where kids hang out, such as cars and homes. Attacks of all types against kids occur far more often away from schools than inside them. So do the bulk of non-crime-related injuries and accidents, the exception being sports injuries, a majority of which are sustained at school.64
Municipalities do not raise taxes, however, to buy state-of-the-art safety equipment for student athletes. They raise them to buy more surveillance cameras and metal detectors, and to station more police officers in schools. A few years ago the city of Dallas built a $41 million school that includes a high-tech command center where officers scan thirty-seven cameras that monitor nearly every inch of the building. Some of the school’s 2,100 students complained that the five full-time security officers and numerous teacher-monitors invade their privacy. Teachers and parents raised questions about diverting so much money from educational programs into policing and about what one Dallas newspaper referred to as the “authoritarian style” of the school’s leadership. But Dallas officials defend the facility as a haven from the ills of the larger community.65
Are Children Sick?
Another way we adults justify our excessive fears and brutal policies toward the nation’s children is by shifting the blame to nature. We convince ourselves that millions of children are born defective. Children whom adults find frightening and difficult to control are said to suffer from various psychological or biomedical disorders.
Melvin Konner, a physician and anthropologist at Emory University, has suggested that, were Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn alive today, they’d be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and put on Ritalin (methylphenidate). The drug of choice for kids who talk back, can’t sit still, get in trouble, and are easily bored, Ritalin is taken daily by more than 1 million children in the United States. The number of kids on Ritalin quadrupled between the mid- 1980s and the late 1990s. With more than 11 million prescriptions written each year—up from 4.5 million in the early 1990s—this country uses five times as much Ritalin as the rest of the world.66
The upsurge may have resulted from greater recognition and treatment of ADHD symptoms among parents, teachers, and doctors in recent years, as a report from the American Medical Association’s Council on Scientific Affairs concluded, or from overdiagnosis and overmedication, as other research suggests. Either way, crucial questions remain, central among them: At what cost do we choose to view hyperactive children as neurologically and chemically damaged? The point at issue was put well by the psychologist Kenneth Gergen of Swarthmore College. “As we have so painfully learned in recent years, whether homosexuality is or is not a disorder is essentially a matter of cultural politics. Similarly, children may vary biologically in their activity levels, but whether we view a high level of activity as Attention Deficit Disorder depends on our conception of the ideal classroom,” Gergen wrote in a journal article in 1997.67
Our view depends as well on conceptions of the ideal medical practice, as other social scientists and medical ethicists suggest. From the point of view of managed care companies in the 1990s this ideal sometimes boils down to spending as little as possible to remove a patient’s symptoms. Why provide expensive individual or family therapy to address a child’s emotional, developmental, or family problems when with a simple prescription you can dispose of the behaviors that distress the child’s parents