Kids do real work at a new kind of school.

3 million kids (mostly boys) are given medication that's supposed to make them sit still and focus.

But what if schools, not kids, are the problem?

One former public school student, Cade Summers, tells John Stossel that he hated the effect of the drugs--that it was like he had been "lobotomized."

Cade's parents took him off the "attention deficit" drugs and sent him to other schools. But Cade hated them all. "I would come home and I would sometimes just cry," Cade tells Stossel.

Then he heard of a new type of school in Austin, Texas. It promised to let kids discuss ideas, and to do real-world work.

But the school, the Academy of Thought and Industry, is a private school that charges tuition.

So Cade started getting up at 3 a.m. to work in a coffee shop to help pay the tuition.

What kind of school could possibly be worth that to a kid?

The school's founder, Michael Strong, says kids learn best when they are given actual responsibility, real life work. "Teens need responsibility...Ben Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, started their careers at the age of 12 or 13," he points out.

Nowadays people consider that abusive child labor, Stossel notes.

"I worked as a teen," Strong replies. "I loved it. Teens very often want to work."

Strong's schools do many things differently. Students get Fridays off to work on their own projects. School starts at 10 a.m. There are no lectures--instead students read, and then discuss what they read.

That's different from schools Strong once attended--and hated.