57. Hector Of The Feeble-Mind: The Underground HIstory of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Hector
Of The Feeble-Mind
See thirteen-year-old Hector
Rodriguez 1 as I first saw him: slightly built, olive-skinned, short, with huge black eyes, his body
twisting acrobatically as he tried to slip under the gated defenses of the skating rink on the northern
end of
Central Park one cold November
day. Up to that time I had known Hector for several months but had never
really seen him, nor would I have seen him then but for
the startling puzzle he presented by
gatecrashing with a fully paid admission ticket in his pocket. Was he
nuts?
This particular
skating rink sits in a valley requiring patrons to descend several flights
of concrete steps to reach the
ice. When I counted bodies at the foot of the stairs, Hector was missing. I went back up the stairs to
find Hector wedged in the bars of the revolving security gate. "You little imbecile," I screamed.
"Why are you sneaking in? You have a
ticket!" No answer, but his expression told me his answer. It said,
"Why shout? I know what I'm
doing, I have principles to uphold." He actually looked offended by my
lack of understanding.
Hector was solving a
problem. Could the interlocking bars of the automatic turnstile be defeated? What safer way to probe than
with a paid ticket in hand in case he got caught. Later as I searched school records for clues to understand
this boy, I discovered in his
short transit on earth he had already left a long outlaw trail behind
him. And yet, although none of his
crimes would have earned more than a good spanking a hundred years
earlier, now they helped support a
social service empire. By substituting an excessive response for an appropriate (minimal) reaction,
behavior we sought to discourage has doubled and redoubled. It is implicit in the structure of institutional
logic that this happens. What's
bad for real people is the very guarantee of institutional
amorality.
At the time of this incident, Hector
attended one of the fifty- five public schools with the lowest academic ratings in New York
State, part of a select group threatened with takeover by state custodians. Seven of the nine rapists of
the Central Park jogger — a case
that made national headlines some years back — were graduates of the
school. Of the thirteen classes in
Hector's grade, a full nine were of higher rank than the one he was in. Hector might be seen at twelve as an
exhausted salmon swimming upstream in a raging current trying to sweep away his dignity. We had
deliberately unleashed such a flood by
assigning about eleven hundred kids in all, to five strictly graduated
categories:
First
Class was called "Gifted and Talented Honors." Second Class was called
"Gifted and Talented."
Third Class was called "Special Progress." Fourth Class was called
"Mainstream."
Fifth Class was called "Special Ed." These last kids had a
cash value to the school three
times higher than the others, a genuine incentive to find fatal defects
where none existed.
Hector was a specimen from the doomed
category called Mainstream, itself further divided into alphabetized subcategories — A, B, C, or D.
Worst of the worst above Special
Ed would be Mainstream D where he reported. Since Special Ed was a life
sentence of ostracism and
humiliation at the hands of the balance of the student body, we might even call Hector "lucky" to be
Mainstream, though as Mainstream D, he was suspended in that thin layer of mercy just above the
truly doomed. Hector's standardized test scores placed him about three years behind the middle
of the rat-pack. This, and his status as an absolute cipher (where school activities, sports, volunteer
work, and good behavior were
concerned) would have made
it difficult enough for anyone prone to be his advocate, but in Hector's case, he wasn't just behind
an eight-ball, he was six feet under one.
Shortly after I found
him breaking and entering (the skating rink), Hector was arrested in a nearby elementary school with a gun.
It was a fake gun but it looked pretty real to the school secretaries and principal. I found out about this at
my school faculty Christmas party
when the principal came bug-eyed over to the potato salad where I camped,
crying, GATTO, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE
TO ME? His exact words. Hector had been
dismissed for holiday only that morning; he then hightailed it immediately
to his old elementary school,
still in session, to turn the younger children loose, to free the pint- sized slaves like a modern Spartacus.
Come forward now one year in time: Hector in high school, second report card. He failed every subject, and was
absent enough to be cited for
truancy. But you could have guessed that before I told you because you
read the same sociology books I
do.
Can you see the
Hector trapped inside these implacable school records? Poor, small for his age, part of a minority, not
accounted much by people who matter, dumb, in a super- dumb class, a bizarre gatecrasher, a
gunslinger, a total failure in high school? Can you see Hector? Certainly you think you do. How
could you not? The system makes it so easy to classify him and predict his future.
What is society to do with its Hectors?
This is the boy, multiplied by millions, that school people have been agonizing about in every decade of the
twentieth century. This is the boy
who destroyed the academic mission of American public schooling, turning it
into a warehouse operation, a
clinic for behavioral training and attitude adjustment. Hector's principal said to the Christian Science
Monitor when it made a documentary film about my class and Hector's, "Sure the system stinks, but
John [Gatto] has nothing to replace it.
And as bad as the system is, it's better than chaos."
But is the only alternative to a
stifling system really chaos? '
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