The Girl Who "Couldn't Sit Still

1. A Letter from the School

In 1930s England, an eight-year-old girl received a "verdict" from her school.

Her teacher wrote to her parents: this child has serious problems. She can't sit still in class, she fidgets constantly, her handwriting is poor, she's always distracted, she disrupts the lesson, her homework is forever late. In an age before the word "ADHD" existed, the grown-ups' conclusion was simple — there's probably something wrong with this child's brain; she'd better see a doctor.

Her name was Gillian Lynne. Her mother took her, full of dread, into a consulting room.

2. The Radio the Doctor Switched On

The doctor was an older, experienced man. He was in no hurry to reach a conclusion. He sat Gillian on a chair in the corner of the room, her hands tucked under her, and then spent a full twenty minutes listening to her mother recount, one by one, all of the child's "faults" at school.

Gillian recalled later that during those twenty minutes, she was certain she was done for.

When the talking was over, the doctor stood, walked to the girl, and said: "Gillian, wait here a moment. Your mother and I are going to step out and have a word — we'll be right back." They left the room and pulled the door shut. On his way out, the doctor reached over and switched on the radio on his desk.

Outside, he said to the mother: "Don't say anything. Just watch her."

Through the glass in the door, the mother saw it — the instant the music began, the girl stood up and started to move through the room with the melody. On her face was an expression no one had seen before: absorbed, and open. That was not a "can't sit still" problem child. That was a person with dance living inside her, who could only think when she was moving.

The doctor watched for a long while, then turned to the mother and said the words that would change everything:

"Madam, Gillian isn't sick. She's a dancer. Take her to a dance school."

3. A Person Put in the Right Place

The mother did.

The day Gillian walked into the dance school, she later described like this: "The room was full of people like me — people who had to move to think." At last she was no longer the "problem" misfit. She had come home to the ground that was hers.

What came after, many people know. Gillian Lynne became one of the greatest choreographers of the twentieth century. In her long collaboration with the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber she choreographed *Cats* and *The Phantom of the Opera* — two works that have kept countless theaters alive and moved audiences around the world for generations.

It was the British educator Ken Robinson who made this story famous. In *The Element* he uses it again and again to make one point: everyone has an Element of their own — the place where talent and love meet; and once a person stands inside it, they shine. Then Robinson adds a line that cuts deeper: today, Gillian would most likely have been diagnosed with ADHD, given medication, and told to "calm down" — and that great dancer might have been quietly snuffed out, pinned to a desk by a pill.

4. Your Child Isn't Defective — Just in the Wrong Place

We tell this story again and again because too many parents are sitting in the very chair Gillian's mother once sat in.

The teacher says your child can't focus, can't sit still, doesn't fit in, can't keep up, has problems — and these words arrive home like verdicts, one after another. The parents panic, and believe them, and set about trying to "fix" the child every way they can: tutoring, rules, doctors, begging him to "be a little more normal."

But Holt warned us long ago, in *How Children Learn*: the very same child, on something he's truly curious about and truly absorbed in, has astonishing powers of concentration. What we call "can't sit still" is, very often, not a child gone wrong — it's a child pinned to a chair that was never his.

Remember what that doctor did. He didn't look at what Gillian was missing; he saw what she had. He didn't pin her down; he turned on the music and let her move.

Your child, in all likelihood, isn't defective — just put in the wrong place. Take him off the ground that withers him, set him on another, and perhaps he too will bloom into flower. What we want to do is simply find, for a child like this, the room where the music starts the moment the door opens.