“ADHD” or incomplete evocative processes? Pedagogical “hyperactivity” across time and space

Abstract

The lack of genuine attention, respect and listening on the part of the adult world—whether parents, pedagogists, or teachers—together with teachers’ insufficient neuro-pedagogical knowledge of mental activity, gives rise to difficulties in teaching–learning processes. When these difficulties are neither recognized nor addressed, they are labeled in young people with the stigma of hyperactivity and attention-deficit disorder (ADHD), without considering the responsibilities of the school and of the adult world more broadly. The solution is neither chemistry nor psychotherapy, because these children do not need labels or clinical interventions that pathologize them, persuading them to accept the role of mentally ill individuals and further separating them from others. On the contrary, they need inclusion and pedagogical attention; they need an affectively warm form of authority from adults. Schools, moreover, require targeted neuro-pedagogical strategies—that is, strategies that act rigorously at the level of the young person’s mental activity—implementing a “management” of so-called hyperactivity in mental time and space. By promoting awareness of one’s own modes of evocative thinking, this approach enables children and adolescents to harness their inclination toward movement and their “felt mental experience” as a genuine springboard for associating visual and auditory evocations, that is, for the mobilization of both logical and creative thinking.