I don't think school stifles learning in general, and I don't think it "creates" disorders. Rather, I think school tends to promote only one type of learning. Some people are better at this type of learning than others, and sometimes those who are bad at it are said to have disorders. I happen to be very good at school-learning, and I can tell you that I never once felt that my schools discouraged my intellectual curiosities. Instead, I learned to look at the world from the lenses of literature, language, math, science, music, and history. I learned to work with a huge diversity of students and teachers, some of whom had extremely different opinions and backgrounds from my own. I learned to force myself to sit quietly for a few hours and read. In a world of dwindling attention spans, this is probably the most important skill I possess.

If you don't flourish with that type of learning, however, school is often not very good at catering to you. I've known people at both ends of the bell curve--the gifted to those who are below-average (not for lack of intelligence, I might add)--and they have had no shortage of problems with public school. The gifted find themselves bored in class and almost being punished for being extra-intelligent. One of my friends ended up leaving his elementary school in favor of home-schooling because the elementary school refused to let him skip a grade he was obviously far above. He was the sort of person who read Hemingway while the rest of us were reading Captain Underpants, and the school refused to acknowledge this. On the other hand, people who perform below average end up miserable because the system automatically infers that they are stupid when this is rarely true. One of my friends is brilliant, but she simply lacks the ability or inclination to sit down and do her homework. This is in part due to ADHD (which, by the way, she was diagnosed with before she entered school), and in part due to parents who never really took a lot of interest in her education. As a result, her grades were very poor, though she often managed to ace tests, and often, she would be the one helping me with my subjects, even though I was receiving "A"s and she was failing. No one ever addressed this problem. My friend languished away in regular classes when she was knowledgeable enough to take advanced ones because she could not fit into the system of doing assignments. If I was in either situation--being especially above the average or especially below it--I think I would be very frustrated with school. As it is, I was a little above average, but never so above as to cause anyone, especially myself, inconvenience.

I don't think school inadvertently creates disorders. I think it's more likely that it labels them. For something to be considered a disorder, it has to interfere with what is deemed a normal pattern of behavior. The school system defines normal as being able to sit in a classroom for long periods of time, study subjects quietly, obey and respect authority, and basically get along with peers. If you have trouble doing any one of these things, you are considered different, and in some cases are said to have a disorder: ADD, naturally, leaps readily to mind. A person has things he is naturally good at and things he is not naturally good at, and in every person there is variation. It's only a matter of degree and definition that separates someone who is fidgety from someone who has ADD, and that degree is often related to the ability to function within the classroom. However, I think people are naturally fidgety and naturally hyperactive. School is simply the entity that deems the latter inappropriate while reluctantly tolerating the former.

So basically, I think that school does not stifle learning if you are in the norm, but it is fairly bad at catering to those who do not fit their neat little bell curve. It does not necessarily create disorders, but instead tends to define them by isolating already-present traits and declaring them "abnormal" and thus "pathological."