Students Are Never Wrong

Today in my Education class we talked about classroom management. As my attention waned in and out, I heard my teacher mention the possibility of a student suffering from “Authority Opposition Disorder.” I filed that away and Wikied it when I got home, finding an article on “Oppositional Defiance Disorder.” In order to be “diagnosed” with ODD, a child must exhibit four of the following traits on a near-daily basis:

• Losing temper
• Arguing with adults
• Refusing to follow the rules
• Deliberately annoying people
• Blaming others
• Easily annoyed
• Angry and resentful
• Spiteful or even revengeful

The article goes on in an expectable direction, proposing scientific sounding treatments for this clinical ailment. What I found funnier was the fact that there’s no mention of this occurring in adults. It’s not even mentioned that this is commonly found in children, it’s just assumed, because of course we’re not dealing with a real disorder. We’re dealing with children and how they are. If a 34 year old man started showing these signs, we’d think he was either psychotic or a rock star.

While looking this up, I also ran across an article on Drapetomania, which proved that this passing of the blame onto science for our own idiocy and faults is nothing new. Drapetomania was the psychiatric diagnosis explaining why African slaves in the South wanted to flee their masters. Dr. Samuel Cartwright proposed medical treatment for slaves who were “sulky and dissatisfied without cause,” in the form of “whipping the devil out of them,” as a preventative precaution.