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Here is a very interesting article in Business Week on the growing underachievement of boys in education. Both as an educator and as a parent I have experience of the Ritalin phenomena, and I can't help wondering whether gender together with contemporary expectations have a lot to do with the perceived need to prescribe these kind of drugs. In the past I guess kids that had ADD or other learning difficulties were just seen as under achievers. Now, I am happy to say that we take things much more seriously. However, not only have our expectations changed. We also live in a world of incessant change, a bombardment of images, sounds, and information, a world in which attention span has shortened to next to nothing, and where instant gratification is the norm. That does not make it easy for some boys who are already on the outer edges in terms of their ability to concentrate and follow through, instead it seems to push them further into a tendency they already have.