if you bother to get a diagnosis for something for your kid, the presumption is that it's affecting his life significantly – that's actually a necessary diagnostic criterion for most psychological disorders, in fact – and therefore that you want to do something about it. If they didn't actually want medication, your parents were really wasting everyone's time by bringing it up in the first place.
More likely, a caregiver ordered it done. I had that happen to me in 2nd grade - the teacher told my parents that I'd be expelled if I didn't get a Ritalin prescription. The shrink told them there was no basis for one, and prescribed an absurdly low dose that I didn't really need to take.
Again, drugs shouldn't be the first resort to fix behavior problems. It speaks more to the lack of the teachers ability to deal with it than the kid.
From my own experience, I will say that drugs should be the first resort for ADD (provided you're confident its ADD). The thing about ADD is you can have the best lifestyle choices and organization of anyone in the world, but you won't be able to hold to it without drugs. Every kid in my school was given a planner to write down homework in. All the adults in my life pushed really hard for me to use this thing, to the point where they were being vaguely mean about it, and I never would. Flash forward to me getting medicated and suddenly I buy a planner and start planning every single thing, even things most people wouldn't need to plan.
IIRC therapy is also considered mostly useless for treating all forms of ADD. Although depression and anxiety disorders are highly co-morbid with ADD so you could treat that I guess.
That being said, since kids are bad at describing their problems (and susceptible oft-unintentional pressure from adults), some light occupational therapy or life coaching might better to start out with. Its unlikely to help ADD (or at least whichever type of ADD I have), but if the kid's problem was never ADD to begin with it could make their school problems go away.
I could write a wall of text about why I think ADD treatment is messed up. I disagree with its primary categorization as a learning disability. There are a lot of people out there undiagnosed either because poor school performance is expected (minority kids, "bad apples"), or because they're out of school.* Poor school performance is the most obvious symptom, but it wasn't the worst thing about my ADD. The best way I can describe it is you can see clearly what you want to do and what you need to do but you can't do it. Its like fighting your own brain and consistently losing. Its a different feeling than depression, but its like depression in that it touches every aspect of your life.
*most western European healthcare systems not only have a smaller variety of ADD meds, but they further restrict the type of meds you can test once you're an adult. This is very bad, because not all meds work on all people.