Teaching the Restless: One School's Remarkable No-Ritalin Approach to Helping Children Learn and Succeed

This is a heart warming book. The author recounts the year with children at the Freedom School in a manner that is insightful and deeply moving. I could picture the children in my head. Teachers and parents will both benefit from this truly beautiful book, the dedication and patience of the teachers at the school, and also the struggles of both parents and students from the urban environment the school is located in. When I finished the book I was sad to let go of the children and their stories, and could not shake the nagging question, "if it works in a place like this, why not everywhere?" You may ask yourself the same thing.

I found this book to be a very compelling read. The author makes his case for not medicating kids through personal stories of several students at his school as well as siting some scientific research. He also gives his opinions, and clearly labels them as so. This book is not a how-to book to turn to if you are the parent or teacher of a restless child. However, it is a book that will give some insights surrounding the larger pictures of how we as a society educate some of our more difficult children.

This book is a caring, compassionate examination of what's amiss in our educational and medical systems' approach to non-conforming children. Mercogliano offers his extensive experience and insights to explain how children can grow into motivated learners when they are given a non-threatening, non-repressive, and caring environment. Having worked several years as a mental health clinician I have seen how accurate this author's insights are and how disempowering and counterproductive the expedient, coercive approaches to challenging children are. When a physician says a child needs psychotropic medication that person is basically acknowledging that they are ignorant about how to truly help and they wish to repress the symptoms to appear that they are able to offer a solution or to conform with what all the other misguided "professionals" have been indoctrinated into doing. When you rely on unnatural behavior modification systems and disruptive synthetic chemicals to control a child's attention and behavior you are likely to impair that child's natural self-expression, intrinsic motivation, and internal regulation of biochemistry. It's wonderful to see a knowledgeable teacher offering insights into how to help children in a caring supportive way and to shun the demonstrably erroneous beliefs that some children "need" drugs that artificially manipulate chemistry in fundamentally the same ways as illicit drugs that children would get in trouble for using.

It speaks of this book's greatness that it is useful for both private, home, and public education. Mercogliano cares about the children he teaches. His caring passes from the page to the reader. I got more ideas to help my restless students than any other education book. Though working in a public school, many insights from the book were helpful to me and ultimately the children. I used Teaching the Restless to help parents make better choices for their children in a public school setting.

As a homeschooling parent, I picked up this book just to see what "secrets" might be revealed. I was happy to see everything we do reinforced by the writer's experience as an educator. This book mixes scientific facts and studies in with the tale of a school year. He shows repeatedly that we need to let our children be. He explains how we have gotten ourselves to this point of drugging children en masse. He runs down the many ways of reversing this trend if we choose to do it. Turn off the TV, pay attention to the kids, spend time with them, help them feel useful, allow them to contribute, let them set the pace. So much great stuff- read this book!