Pills to Help in School...for Everyone!

Just a quick story before I talk about how I came upon this topic.  One of softball coaches is a teacher for special education kids in grades 7 and 8.  Last week, I was talking to her about school and she brought up the topic of showing her kids the Presidential debate.  She told me that they did not know what a president was or who the president of the United States was.  The only concept that they knew was that a debate was a type of "fight".  We then got on the topic of the medicine these children take, and she explained to me how so many children take drugs like  Adderall, whether they were diagnosed with a disorder or not.  This week I was inspired to look up an article about this topic.  

The title of the article reads "Attention Disorder or Not, Pills to Help in School".  The article mainly focuses on the drug Adderall, which is commonly used to treat children with ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.  More often now, this medicine is used in children who do not have this disorder, but struggle in school and seek aid in this medicine.  Parents who cannot afford tutoring to help their kids, turn to Adderall to help their children succeed in school.  Medicaid pays the full price of the medicine, so basically parents are receiving free "tutoring" for their children. The part of this topic that I do not like though, is that some kids who already receive high grades, use Adderall to boost them even more.  The children who do poorly in school without ADHD have a better justified use than these kids who use the medicine to make them geniuses.  

A cultural universal shared by all parents is the need for their kids to succeed in school! Who would have thought that they would go to such extremes as to putting their kids on medicine to achieve this? The part that bothered me so much about this article was that using Adderall for kids academic acceleration is  becoming a norm in some parts of our country!!! How could our education system be coming to this? I don't think it is morally correct that some kids in school are succeeding with the aid of drugs, while others are succeeding solely on hard work.