Popular opinion: special kids should mine coal and we shouldn't waste a dime on their education except basic math and literacy.
I was a special needs kid (or at least I was in all of those special tutoring classes 90s elementary schools all had) and i'll go further: the truckloads of special attention I got
made my problem worse. It not only demoralized me, it put me into a constant feedback loop of wondering if my ADD was winning or not, "am i learning properly? Is this the way i'm supposed to think about this? Well how does this other thing work are there exceptions to this? Am i just retarded?" this was a problem all the way from 2nd grade to high school.
The thing that "cured" me was
my first job. Just like video games I now had a task that I had to do to achieve a tangible concrete result that somebody else needed. "every step of this process makes sense because it results in the customer getting their food, and keeping track of who ordered what", working at a gravel mill was even better. My brain was engaging with systems and critical thinking "does this matter? Oh no it doesn't because why would it.
Suddenly I realized that the way to learn is to think about the thing I was doing to get it done rather than think about whether or not i'm learning properly. When I applied that mentality to school my grades skyrocketed and in general my life got better. I realized most of what I was doing was
overthinking, the solution to getting through school isn't to really understand something it's to just memorize what the teacher wants you to write down on the fucking test. If somebody had explained it to me that way I would have been fine.
I really think the core problem is we have (well meaning) women trying to teach boys the way they learned as little girls. Boys learn through knowledge application, trial and error, and doing. Women want to safely memorize the correct answer so they're never caught off guard. Obviously there's exceptions and overlap but I really think that's a notable difference and the entire education system is run by women.
All my best teachers were men who basically said "eh... you'll figure it out, just do it". That vote of confidence worked and it didn't communicate to me that this was something beyond me the way all these grandmas who treat me like a rabid dog did.
The military would be even better. People always asked what I was
actually interested in and the answer was war, combat, and guns. But i learned very early on that i'm not allowed to like that so i would just say "nothing". This is a recurring theme in old TV, boys get something out of our system when we get to live in a military environment and shoot shit. Even for just a summer.
All of this to say: putting them to manual labor isn't just a better use of societal resources, it's probably better for solving their problem too.
