… The experience of school has changed rapidly in recent generations. Starting in the 1980s, a metrics-obsessed regime took over American education and profoundly altered the expectations placed on children, up and down the class ladder. In fact, it has altered the experience of childhood itself. This era of policymaking has largely ebbed, with disappointing results. Math and reading levels are at their lowest in decades. The rules put in place by both political parties were well-meaning, but in trying to make more children successful, they also circumscribed more tightly who could be served by school at all. “What’s happening is, instead of saying, ‘We need to fix the schools,’ the message is, ‘We need to fix the kids,’” said Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College and the author of “Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life.” “The track has become narrower and narrower, so a greater range of people don’t fit that track anymore,” he said. “And the result is, we want to call it a disorder.” … Later in the article: “Rather than wait for changes to come, many parents are giving up on the system altogether. A poll in 2023 found that about one in three home-schooling parents were unhappy with how their schools had educated their children with special needs, prompting them to leave. Parents are also increasingly turning to microschools, essentially learning pods with small numbers of children who can receive more individual attention. “Some of these parents identify as being part of an “unschooling” movement, in which they believe that school has done more harm than good for their children. They may be onto something. A 2016 paper showed that many young adults with childhood diagnoses of A.D.H.D. saw their symptoms improve once they left school and began working in a field that interested them.”

has supported the notion that people with ADHD are more likely to reach higher levels of creative thought and achievement than those without ADHD…. What’s more, recent research by Darya Zabelina and colleagues have found that real-life creative achievement is associated with the ability to broaden attention and have a “leaky” mental filter– something in which people with ADHD excel. Recent work in cognitive neuroscience also suggests a connection between ADHD and creativity (see here and here). Both creative thinkers and people with ADHD show difficulty suppressing brain activity coming from the “Imagination Network“ [what we usually call the default network].