Oppositional Defiant Disorder and School

One afternoon, when “Mike” was in the 6^th grade, he had had enough. He was bored and angry, tired of being told what to do, what to read, and how to spend every minute of his day. He stood up and said, loudly, “I’m leaving, and I’m not coming back!” He climbed up onto his desk and strode across several other desks, shocking the teacher and entertaining the other students. Then he jumped down and walked out the door. When he got home, he knew from their expressions that his parents had gotten a call from the principal and prepared himself for the conversation that was coming. The principal had mentioned something called “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” (ODD); his parents were terrified and had no idea what to do.

According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, “In children with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), there is an ongoing pattern of uncooperative, defiant, and hostile behavior toward authority figures that seriously interferes with the child's day to day functioning” (AACAP no. 72 January 2019). As many as 16 percent of children (about 12,000,000) in the United States are diagnosed with ODD. It seems to be more common in boys than in girls and is often associated with ADHD. What’s going on with these kids? Is it bad parenting? Bad genes? Or does this resistance to authority have something to do with the modern environment.

Traditional schools, whether public or private, are based on flawed assumptions about human learning. With few exceptions, kids are put into age-grade groups from K through 12; thus, younger kids have little opportunity to learn from older kids, and older kids don’t learn about younger kids. All the kids in each grade get the same curriculum, whether they’re interested in it or not. Consider all the rules that kids in public schools are forced to obey: they must arrive at a particular time, sit in designated seats, do what the teacher says, go to a different class when the bell rings, request a hall pass to go to the bathroom, etc. None of these rules has anything to do with learning. They have been created to maintain order and efficiency, and sometimes they are merely a teacher’s or an administrator’s whim. If kids complain or react negatively to these rules, they are diagnosed with some sort of disorder and often given medications to help them cope with this unnatural learning environment.

But learning itself is natural. Children do it automatically; they are naturally curious. They watch adults and older children and begin to imitate their speech and behavior. They explore their world and make discoveries. These ways of learning are characteristic of most mammals, and they are the means by which the children of our hunting and gathering ancestors learned how to survive and how to get along in a group. Children today still employ these same ways of learning, regardless of school rules, canned curricula, threatened punishments, or parental angst.

So, what happened to Mike? His frantic parents learned about an alternative education program and made an appointment to talk with an advisor. The first principle of the alternative program was, “Learning is natural; school is optional.” An advisor asked Mike what he wanted to do in life. Mike said that he wanted to skateboard. The advisor asked, “Do you want to ride? Do you want to build skateboards? Do you want to compete? Do you want to film skate boarding?” Mike said that he just wanted to ride. The advisor said that was fine and they’d talk again in a week or so. So, Mike sat and watched what was going on. On good days, he rode his skateboard; on bad days he just sat and watched. He saw that most of the kids were excited about what they were doing. They played music, wrote stories, learned other languages, developed hands-on science projects, and did internships in their communities. There were no grades, no tests, and no required curricula. Mike had invested so much energy in fighting school, and adults in general, that he had never thought about what he wanted to do.

Mike joined a writing group and eventually became the co-editor of the program’s newsletter. Just down the road was a climbing wall, and he got interested in climbing and realized that he had a talent for it. Without the rules that didn’t make sense to him and the pressure from adults to learn things that didn’t interest him, his ODD vanished.

Eventually, he enrolled in and completed an outdoor education program at a local community college. Then he got a job, saved some money, and went to Peru to climb in the Andes. When he returned, he worked again, saved up, and went to California where he climbed El Capitan in Yosemite. After that, he got a job with an outdoor education program, and today he is helping kids who don’t like school take charge of their own learning. Will he go back to college? Maybe. But that’s up to him.