Youth who are labeled as having ADD and the modern classroom environment are completely incompatible. The list of incompatibilities is quite long. Head strong, often a loner, questions authority, excessive curiosity, has an internal compulsion for excitement, dislikes sitting still for long periods, gives the impression of being lazy, a procrastinator, and maybe even impudent. Often, in elementary school, these youth have considerable trouble with reading, spelling and math. Simply said, these youths are somehow very different from their well behaved, easy to teach classroom-orientated peers. My message to teachers is that, as frustrating as they can be, as much distraction as they can cause in the classroom, and as much difficulty as they seem to have in learning, there is nothing at all wrong with them. They don't suffer from some mysterious malady, nor do they have brain defects, chemical imbalances or many of the other "guessed at" reasons for their actions. They are however, definitely different, and they are different in many different ways. They are not only late to mature socially but their ability to handle symbols such as those used in reading and math is often late to mature. (Some times these abilities will not mature to the level of a first grade student until as late as their third grade in school). Trying to make them read before the ability has matured is like trying to get a young child to chew a chunk of good steak before they have cut their first set of teeth. They may be able to go through the motions of the required activity, but they will not be very good at it, and may even grow a life-long hatred for being forced into a particular study before God has gotten around to furnishing them with the required equipment.

ADD labeled youth seem to have about ten times the level of curiosity of the average youth. They simply can't pass up looking into a hole in the ground, watching a unique piece of road machinery or going through every drawer, cupboard and closet where ever they are. They pickup and closely examine all manner of things that the average youth takes for granted and never even notices. Most people have never considered that the first three years of conventional school is a continuing process designed to psychologically numb a youths curiosity to the point where they can sit disinterestedly at their desk regardless of what is going on outside, or in the hall. Squashing curiosity is an invisible and unquestioned "socialization process" that is assumed to benefit the student, the school and the parents because they will all profit from a "well mannered", "attentive" youth. But when a youth starts out with a much higher than normal level of curiosity, standard psychological tactics fail to bring their curiosity into line, and by the third grade the youth and their teachers often end up in an adversarial role. Some folks assume that the youth is acting that way because of some desire on their part "be bad", and they are punished accordingly.

My message is that there is a growing body of evidence that these youth are not only different, but that they are in reality, a "different breed" of human kind. They are genetically pre-disposed and mentally hard wired for what we call the "Edison trait". Some of the Edison trait features are; 1) High levels of curiosity 2) Late in developing symbol and social maturity 3) Early in developing maturity of their extraordinary conceptual thinking skills (unfortunately these conceptual thinking skills are neither taught to, nor measured, in conventional schools) 4) They seem to search out excitement 5) They are dedicated adventurers/explorers 6) They tend to be hard headed, I'll do it myself types 7) In the extreme, these youth live in a forty-eight hour window that travels through time with them. (E.g., they have no future and no past and seem incapable of working on a long term assignment until it is within their forty-eight hour window of necessity). For some professions this is a highly desirable trait. Note: Somewhere between twenty and twenty-five years of age their sense of future and past will mature and they will start planning their lives. 8) Because of their unusual curiosity they often appear to be easily distracted by extraneous sources. I love the stories they tell of watching bugs crawling on the ceilings of their classrooms. 9) They have little appreciation of, or use for, conventional filing systems. They are what we call "piling people" as opposed to "filing people". They sort things by logical relationships as opposed to conventional schemes, and use highly accurate mental images to remember where something is piled. 10) A large percent or these youths have a great deal of trouble with rote memory of dates, names, and numbers. On the other hand, they have great memories for logically related data once they see the underlying logic. Such things as large electrical schematic drawings and engine layouts are easy for them to remember once they have mapped out the connectedness between the parts and their function. Those youth that are blesses with both rote and conceptual memory have the best of both worlds and do well in school even though they drive their teachers crazy. This is just a sample of some of the more obvious traits of these remarkable youth, there are many additional, and more subtle, differences in their way of thinking and their approach to life.

We believe that the ADD traits are observable in nearly thirty percent of the current youth population. Some youth seem to have more of the traits and in some of these, their traits seem to be much stronger and more pronounced. The ones who fall into the more and stronger group (the top five percent or so) are singled out as having ADD. The others are able to hide their differences (we call this accommodation) well enough that they eventually get through school with only minor skirmishes. We also believe that these remarkable youth are genetically designed to be exactly the way they are and they are just as incapable of being taught to change their ways as a zebra is of being able to change its stripes in order to impersonate a horse. What most teachers and medical professionals fail to appreciate is that these youth belong to a exclusive minority of explorers, inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs that have changed the paradigms that we all live by. Some of these minorities names are Tom Edison, Henry Ford, and Albert Einstein. Each of these remarkable men shared the so called ADD characteristics with these kids. The very traits that their parents, schools and society dislike so much, and are trying to change, are at the seat of their curiosity, creativity and hard headed approach to life. These traits are the absolutely necessary ones that are used in bolstering and sustaining their curiosity driven lifestyle.

Recently we have found preliminary evidence which indicates that maintaining a strong and active curiosity is also extremely important to their maintaining good mental health. The same traits that cause so much trouble in the classroom are the ones that lead them toward questioning everything and accepting almost nothing on face value. They are also the traits that open their minds to new thoughts and processes and leave them with little respect for tradition and blind obedience to authority. Minds such as these are the ones that have consistently broken through the culturally generated, imaginary, shells of "it can't be done", and have dramatically changed our world from cave dwellings to skyscrapers.

I strongly suggest that the kids who are being castigated as having behavior problems due to ADD are the progeny of the labeled political and social misfits that were pushed out of Europe and who built America into the strong, vibrant, creative country that we all enjoy today. Unless we recognize these creative, resourceful, hardheaded youth for the extraordinary values that they possess, and develop a different kind of school that teaches to their strengths instead of struggling with their weaknesses, we will continue killing the goose that laid the golden egg for our society. Project Lab is just one of many efforts world wide to design a learning environment for these youth. Project Lab is a continuing experiment in developing a curriculum and learning environment that will combine the right combination of ingredients for enhancing the exciting traits that these very special youth possess. We consistently observe youth who in their regular class have a reputation of not being able to "stay on task", but who will diligently work for hours while solving some problem that is of current interest to them. We have found that they can learn almost anything, (excluding the memorizing of logically unrelated names, dates, and numbers) when the subject is related to an internal interest of theirs. If there is magic in Project Lab, it is that we believe in self-directed-learning and have faith that these youth are entirely capable of teaching themselves everything up through the highest of college level courses. They will not learn the material in the same order, or even in the same way, that you or I did, but through a process of hit and miss, start and stop, back and fourth, try and fail, size and fit, feel and experience, they eventually master anything that they can visualize.

They do however, need help in accomplishing their goals. In the early stages of their introduction to self-directed-learning, if their level of frustration is allowed to become to high, they will break off the direction they were going and start out on a different path, usually on a totally different subject. It is the function of the Project Lab's Advisors (mentors) to grease their path by answering their questions, helping locate needed information, tools and supplies (in a timely manner) and having a genuine interest in the youths efforts and accomplishments. We have found that it is extremely important that a youth be allowed to fail. The best scientists fail over ninety-five percent of the time and are fully aware that failure is their best friend and most reliable teacher. All of what is known as "good engineering" is based solidly on the observation of failure and then finding ways of overcoming the problems that the failure has made visible. Nowhere in conventional schooling is failure considered a virtue but is instead considered a grave personal defeat. Helping youth overcome their society taught fear of failure is one of our toughest jobs.

We have only touched on a few subjects but I am sure that you have gotten the idea. Teachers are always welcome at Project Lab, but they usually feel so uncomfortable that they soon leave. There is no regimented arrangement of youth sitting in neat rows. There is no regulation as to who can talk or whistle. There is no starting time or quitting time. The youth are in charge and this is their place for having fun. It took us years to discover that the most fun thing that they can experience is their "process of self-directed-learning". Adults who are unaccustomed to such free wheeling classrooms find it impossible to believe that any education is actually taking place. The funny thing is that the youth are also unawares of learning anything. They are having the best time in their lives. It is only when they go on to college that they discover how much more they know about "things" than most of their classmates who have only been exposed to the "approved" body of knowledge. When they get out of college and into the work place they find out that they can easily accomplish tasks that the other employees are hopelessly lost at.

We have never had to "control the group". It sort of builds up to, and cycles about, a self regulating point where creativity is maximized. It takes about an hour to reach this level and few youth are ready to leave when the time comes that they must. The times when we have had trouble at Project Lab have almost always been when someone felt called upon to "teach" something in the conventional manner. Although these youth are dedicated learners, the most tedious moments of their lives are when they are confronted with someone that is dedicated to teach them something for which they see little value in their current lives.

It takes a year or more for Project Lab Advisors and the youth to get to know each other well enough that the advisors are significantly able to affect the direction of their youth's learning process. At that point students can be directed into math and English and other related subjects. To the youth's amazement, they find that they also enjoy learning these subjects. This is a strange world, but there are few stranger or more precious commodities than the youth who are being labeled as having something called ADD. We must find ways to protect these youth from the mind numbing effects of conventional show-and-tell, pencil-and-paper education. It has been our observation that the typical youth who has been labeled as having ADD and who has graduated from college but has not been in a program that brought out their remarkable potential, often accepts work at a level far below their capabilities. I can only assume that it is from their years of feeling "somehow different" that results in their not having the self image required to search out premium employment.