Let me tell ya' something. Back in my day, we had a think called Discipline. It did NOT involve a prescription from a licensed dope dealer. "Being sent to the office" didn't mean the psychiatrist's office for a few pills and a bill; it meant the Principal's Office. Sittin' in that office was a big fat bald man with a purple face and a paddle. If you didn't behave, you'd discover the business end of his perforated "Attitude Adjuster" connecting with the soft tissue of your tender and soon-to-be repentant backside. Back then, "Sit down and shut up" meant something. Of course, that kind of thing is now as ancient history as Coca-Cola with real sugar, and kids are being told to let their ADHD run rampant for the sake of fighting flab. That's right--no need to sit still and listen; heck, let's jump around while listening to iPods instead of this multiplication and spelling crap.
I don't know what certified chimpanzee thought up this scheme, but I just wish ol' Mr. Richardson could get at 'em with his Attitude Adjuster. A few solid whacks, and we've have far fewer quacks conducting these sick, twisted "experiments" with our youngsters. For God's sake, who cares if these kids have a few pounds on them? Back in my day, that was a sign these kids had an A+ mom at home cookin' up a heap of powerful good fixins. Jumpin' jehosephat, my grandma, bless her soul, would've called the sheriff if she heard some "parents" were puttin' their perfectly healthy kids on a starvation diet and askin' them to gyrate for the sake of some weirdo's amusement. If it ain't deep fried to a golden crisp and doesn't come with a steaming mass of greens, it ain't fit for human consumption--and the only gyratin' these kids need to be doing is in PE class, where a highly trained Coach is there to make sure these kids stay in shape.
discipline or drugs: a false dichotomy?
I'm entirely in agreement with your view that schools today have become a legalized drug den for pharmaceutical companies, but I'm not sure if discpline is the answer (perhaps you mean it ironically). I havn't see any empirical evidence to suggest that a valiant attempt at democratic education in the best sense of the term, as John Dewey for instance elaborated, is obsolete. Discipline, it appears to me, naturally follows when the inherent intellectual curiosity of students are aroused and the latter can only be done through passionately articulate communication on the part of the educator. This, of course, doesn't mean that students are allowed to do whatever they want, with no understanding of civility in the classroom, but even such civility, if it's genuine and doesn't breed out of fear, cannot be disciplined into being but only emerges out of a free mind that questions all authority, including that of the educator. The function of the educator is to allow such questioning and critical thinking to flourish and, of course, this a matter of neither technique nor program but of character (like a teacher that makes you want to intently listen and participate in conversation through his or her presence, expressive love of learning and wisdom).
The problem rather stems from deeply structural sources, I think, with the underpayment of secondary educators, the general underfunding of public education and other essential aspects of civil society, to say nothing of the incursion of corporate commercialism into the educational system, with its vending machines and monopoloy over cafeteria food (this you allude to in relation to "Coca-cola"). And the fact that the teachers themselves have not discovered their vocation through the passionate furnace of reason and imagination, that it has invariably become for them a job with all the suffocating imperative of power and hierarchy. Drugs, in this context, are no more than a mechanism for imposing disciplining students into drone-like dullness, to prepare them for a lifetime of ceaselessly tedious work under command.
drug reference
Faced with a choice between the "do bee" and the "don't bee," I think we can predict with some certainty which one today's students might select.
-- Mike http://www.vitia.org/