I am not broken, but I feel like I live in a society that tells me I am. Like everyone, I have my strengths and weaknesses, but every time I struggle, I see the architecture of a society that was not built for me.

I have what psychologists call Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or AD/HD. It’s similar to Attention Deficit Disorder, except I fidget. OK, it’s little more complicated than that, but that was the quick and dirty way my physician described it.

Typically, young children struggling academically are singled out and screened for ADD and AD/HD. Those children are then enrolled in cognitive or drug therapy as a way to make it easier for them to advance in school. Some therapists, though, disagree with the label ‘disorder’ and instead propose that ADD-type people are not disordered but simply represent a different kind of normal.

Bear with me, because this is about to get abstract.

Thom Hartmann, an influential author and radio personality, proposes a different model for examining ADD AD/HD. His model is known as the hunter vs. farmer model, first proposed in his bestselling book, ‘ADD: A Different Perception.’

The premise of Hartmann’s hunter vs. farmer theory is that ADD and AD/HD are ‘expected evolutionary adaptations to hunting lifestyles.’ In essence, people with ADD or AD/HD retain the same genetic traits that were dominant before the agricultural revolution that occurred around 10,000 years ago. Those traits that were advantageous include being able to react quickly and manage multiple sensory inputs at once.

Farmers, on the other hand, were better-suited to careful planning and dealing with repetitive and tedious actions. And when human beings no longer had to hunt to survive after the agricultural revolution, the hunter traits began to disappear as society was constructed around farming lifestyles.

I like this theory. To me it shows that my struggles are not because I am a disordered human being, but a normal person with different behavioral traits. And the people like me have trouble in school because the system plays to the farmer traits. I know I am a fast learner and value my education, but I cannot deny that there is a restlessness in me that causes me to procrastinate. I have trouble functioning in schools because, in general, the American educational system largely set up to learn through similar, repetitive tasks.

What education in this country needs is to open its mind to different learning styles. Even in higher education, where alternative classroom formats flourish, evaluation usually falls into one of two repetitive actions: writing papers and taking exams. New ways for evaluation, such as graded seminar discussions, can open up new ways to foster learning.

When I think of ADD and AD/HD in the hunter/farmer way, I am reminded that I am not broken, and although medicine can help me function in the farmer world, I would prefer to stay who I am, a hunter. Instead, maybe the educational system needs to be fixed so that all the hunters can succeed on our terms.

Ben Peskin is a featured columnist whose columns appear Thursdays in The Daily Orange. Email him at [email protected].

Published on April 11, 2007 at 12:00 pm