Twenty years from now, will your schools be conducting urine tests on kids before they sit down to take their standardized tests?
Today, it's a bizarre thought. But, then again, when you were a high school student, did you ever image teenage athletes taking steroids? Or that high school sports would become so competitive that any student would consider such a reckless pursuit?
But that's the 21st century for you. The coming years hold a lot of promise, but school leaders also are going to confront some unforeseen—and, frankly, disturbing—issues.
And one of those is going to be the misuse of drugs to enhance brain function -- so-called “cognition enhancers.”
It used to be so simple. When I was in college, the only drug-enhanced learning I observed consisted of the unhealthy but relatively benign practice of college students stoking up on caffeine the night before a semester-end exam. Some students seemed to think an overdose of nicotine couldn’t hurt, either.
Today's students, however, are beginning to tap the miracles of modern medicine. There's anecdotal evidence that some college students are using Ritalin, a drug designed to treat attention deficit disorder (ADD), to help them with last-minute cramming for exams, reports the Center for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland. And many of you already have heard talk of high school students turning to the drug.
That's dangerous and irresponsible, but that's never stopped young people. And it could get more serious. In Great Britain, the Academy of Medical Science recently warned that young people have taken note of the growing list of pharmaceutical drugs designed to treat ADD, Alzheimer’s, and day-time sleepiness. And, as BBC News has noted, these drugs are “being used by otherwise healthy people to boost alertness and memory.”
Some experts suggest the misuse of these drugs is only going to increase—and could become serious enough that urine tests will be needed to prevent students from “gaining an unfair advantage on exams and tests,” BBC News has reported.
Noted neuroscience expert Sir Gabriel Horn at Cambridge University added the obvious, “We see similarities in the future use of cognition enhancers with the current use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports.”
And it’s only the first decade of the 21st century. What's next? I don’t know, but I need an aspirin.
Del Stover, Senior Editor