L K's List: SPR: Education

• These anti-democratic trends are driven in part by a supposedly meritocratic selection process with high school students from the upper strata of the middle class performing better on SAT and ACT tests than those from poor and working class families.
• Contrary to those who say that this is the meritocracy at work, differences in scores on standardized tests do not fully explain class disparity in educational outcomes. When high-scoring students from low-income families are compared to similarly high-scoring students from upper-income families, 80 percent of the those in the top quarter of the income distribution go on to get college degrees, compared to just 44 percent of those in the bottom quarter.

• Underlying many of psychiatry's nearly 400 diagnoses is the experience of helplessness, hopelessness, passivity, boredom, fear, isolation, and dehumanization—culminating in a loss of autonomy and community-connectedness.
• • Education Week
• Thus, the standard classroom could not be more imperfectly designed to meet the learning needs of young people who are labeled with ADHD
• there is a fundamental bias in mental health professionals for interpreting inattention and noncompliance as a mental disorder.
• Thus for many MDs and Ph.Ds, people who rebel against this attentional and behavioral compliance appear to be from another world—a diagnosable one.
• Some of us rebel by becoming inattentive. Others become aggressive.
• Still others become addicted to drugs, illicit and prescription.
• appear crazy.
• When we have hope, energy and friends, we can choose to rebel against societal oppression with, for example, a wildcat strike or a back-to-the-land commune. But when we lack hope, energy and friends, we routinely rebel without consciousness of rebellion and in a manner which today is commonly called mental illness.

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• Veterans who exhibit PTSD symptoms, who are fearful of social stigma, no longer need to suffer in silence: they can interact anonymously