And if this resembles a lot of American families, the kid will eventually go to college, borrowing thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in the process (or else asking his parents to pay that amount). He'll dislike the classwork, and won't get much out of it. He'll graduate with a degree that either 1) allows him to get an office job that he'll hate as well, or 2) is of no use because he ends up in some sort of mechanical job anyway, except now he has lots of debt and four or more years of lost earnings.

Something I wish I would have read before I posted below...

From David Foster Wallace's review of Garner's Modern American Usage in, among other places, Consider the Lobster:

"The insecurity that drives AE (Academic English), PCE (Politically Correct English), and vocab-tape ads is far from groundless, though. These are tense linguistic times. Blame it on Heisenbergian Uncertainty or postmodern relativism or Image Over Substance or the ubiquity, of advertising and P.R. or the rise of Identity Politics or whatever you will — we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation. In rhetorical terms, certain long-held distinctions between the Ethical Appeal, Logical Appeal (an argument's plausibility or soundness), and Pathetic Appeal (an argument's emotional impact) have now pretty much collapsed — or rather the different sorts of Appeals now affect and are affected by one another in ways that make it almost impossible to advance an argument on 'reason' alone."

-kd

Re: your nephew, I agree. Myself and my three siblings were all like that. We didn't "fit in" in school, the teachers couldn't get us to pay attention, and while I was generally the quiet reader, two of my siblings were the bully-ish rock throwers and biters.

Then we started homeschooling. Now we are all sucessful by our own definitions, we have all followed our own paths, and we all trust ourselves far more than any authority that would try to tell us what to do. Not that it's "special" necessarily, but I am in law school (which is how I found this blog, thanks Professor Baude!) and one brother will be next year.

It turns out, school just wasn't for us. We had too much energy and too much brains to be shoved into a corner for our formative years. It happens.

And, just as a side note, one of my brothers was just such a "late bloomer" as you're talking about. He refused to learn to read until he was 10. We were afraid he never would when one day he just picked up a novel. People are different, and those differences should be celebrated, not supressed with heavy drugs.

I just read the article. Is being defiant really a disease? You could have slapped that one on me at 16, but I'm not sure there are many teenagers who aren't in some way defiant. That is what becoming an adult is, my parents realized that I was just trying to assert some independence. I'm sure some of these children are "over-parented" and some of these parents are looking for any medical excuse to pardon their parenting. On the other hand some of these kids are probably really sick, but are those kids getting good treatment with all the persumed "false positives" out there crowding for resources?

"Certainly, speaking for myself, I paid almost no attention [in] elementary school, and got into occasional trouble because I just read novels in class."

Ditto. However, I think it's reasonable to press kids to develop better attention habits and work ethics if their problems at school seem to be attributable to failures in these areas. Sometimes you just *have* to pay attention even if you're not that interested, and sometimes you *have* to do the work even if it's dull. Anyone who is a first year associate at a large law firm knows this, and indeed these are traits/ abilities that are pretty necessary no matter what one does. My family went in the opposite direction of the ones in the Times article -- my mom bought exactly one parenting book, called "Homework Without Tears," of which I read more than either of my parents did -- and just scolded me based on negative end results of my bad habits. If I was just as inattentive, lazy and procrastinating, but managed to pull out an A anyway, they didn't worry about it. However, you can get away with a lot of bad habits if you're reasonably intelligent and in undemanding schools, but this gets more difficult as your environment fits your real abilities, and so I wouldn't counsel parents not to worry at all about the kid who doesn't pay attention in elementary school.

The story about your cousin-ish is interesting and certainly illuminates a certain type of conformity that's prevalent more or less across American society.

But I don't quite get the connection to your larger argument. I think lots and lots of people are amazingly tolerant. The number of ways of living one's life that I, and most of my friends (who tend to be a liberal or liberarian crowd) find objectionable pales in comparison to the number of ways that people out there live their lives.

I do think--and I don't expect you to agree--that politically liberal types tend to be more tolerant than average, and perhaps libertarians even more so. It's true that there's no shortage of conformity within, say, young liberal types, regarding clothes, music, lifestyle, and so on. But how many things would put someone out of bounds for friendship within that crowd? Overt racist, sexist, or anti-homosexual views; and uh... I don't really know what else.

I think that's slightly less true, on average, in politically conservative circles. But in absolute terms, given the sheer range of human behaviours, the amount of tolerance is still pretty astounding in most (not all, I concede) circles across the political spectrum. So much so that I wonder if I'm misunderstanding you. What exactly do you mean by tolerance?

Christopher - I don't think what you describe is tolerance at all, at least necessarily, not in the way Stuart meant. I think you're right that people are very good about ignoring others views and staying friends, and I have many liberal friends. But try telling a friend here over the dinner table that you think their political views are crazy, and then having a long discussion about it, and then having literally no hard feelings. That's tolerance. And that is more or less missing in this country, especially during election season.

You cannot simultaneously support our presently ruthless capitalist system--which now not only steps on economic losers (nothing novel), but fixes all the blame for their poverty on their personal failings and begrudges them the most fragile of safety nets--and object to parents' frantically doing everything they can to keep their kids from being amongst the stepped-on. Forty years ago your cousin wouldn't even necessarily have had to finish high school to go into a factory job with decent pay and benefits. That world is gone. But we're all *ever* so much better off.

"But try telling a friend here over the dinner table that you think their political views are crazy, and then having a long discussion about it, and then having literally no hard feelings. That's tolerance. And that is more or less missing in this country, especially during election season."

I wonder if Europeans tend to be more born into their political views, though. If you are a Tory because your family always have been, then you don't have to take politics personally because it's not all that much of a choice you made that's vastly reflective of you as a human being. If your politics are more a reflection of certain quasi-inherited traits -- religion, socioeconomic status, education -- then you don't have to get more fussed about someone's picking on them than I do about Duke alumni picking on the UVA basketball team. It's just a side that you're on, and the fighting about it is more for fun than to change anything or anyone.

On the other hand, if you've spent a lot of time thinking about whether you, personally, are OK with the legality of abortion, and have decided that you are, and someone tells you that such a position shows that you hold a cheap attitude toward life, I would be surprised if you didn't take it a bit personally. Or if you have decided after much thought that the institution of marriage will be imperiled if it is changed to allow same-sex couples into it, and someone tells you that this is the same attitude that upheld anti-miscegenation laws. Perhaps the rhetoric of argument in Europe is less extreme: did your friends there ever say or strongly imply that you were a racist?

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