128 On Punishment: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

128 On Punishment: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

On Punishment

There was a time when hamburger pretty much described Alpha and Omega in my

limited food sensibility. My grandparents didn't much care, and in the realm of

monitored eating, Bootie was a pushover, but not

the new girl on Second Street, Bud's

wife, brought home from Cincinnati after WWII. Well, I remember the evening Helen

prepared Chinese food, hardly a daring thing anywhere now, but in those long gone days

around Pittsburgh, radical cuisine. I shut my nine-year-old mouth and flatly refused to eat

it.

"You will eat it," said Helen, "if you have to sit there all night." She was right. At

midnight I did eat it. By then it tasted awful. But soon after the indignity, I discovered

that miraculously I had developed a universal palate. I could eat and enjoy anything.

When I was ten and eleven years old, I still made occasional assaults on my sister's

sexual dignity. She was older, bigger, and stronger than me so there was little chance my

vague tropisms could have caused any harm, but even that slight chance ended one

afternoon, when on hearing one of these overtures, Pappy grabbed me abruptly behind

the neck and back of a shoulder and proceeded to kick me like a football, painful step by

painful step, up the staircase to our apartment.

On theft: having discovered where the printing office stock of petty cash was kept, I

acquired a dollar without asking. How Pap knew it was me I never found out, but when

he burst through the apartment calling my name in an angry bellow, I knew I had been

nailed and fled to the bathroom, the only door inside the apartment with a lock. Ignoring

his demands to come out, with the greatest relief I heard his footsteps grow faint and the

front door slam. But no sooner had I relaxed than he was back, this time with a house-

wrecking bar. He pried the bathroom door off, hinge by hinge. I still remember the

ripping sound it made. But nothing else.

Almost every classroom in my junior high school and my high school had a wooden

paddle hung prominently over the classroom door, nor were these merely decorative. I

was personally struck about a dozen times in my school career; it always hurt. But it's

also fair to say that unlike the assaults on my spirit I endured from time to time for

bearing an Italian name at Cornell, none of these physical assaults caused any resentment

to linger — in each instance, I deserved some sort of retribution for one malicious

barbarism or another. I forgot the blows soon after they were administered. On the other

hand, I harbor a significant amount of ill feeling for those teachers who humiliated me

verbally; those I have no difficulty recalling.

It might seem from examples I've given that I believe some simple relation between pain

and self-improvement exists. But it isn't simple — with the single exception of a teenage

boy whose pleasure came from terrifying girls, I never struck a single kid in three

decades in the classroom. What I'm really trying to call your attention to is that simplistic

codebook of rules passed down to us from academic psychology and enshrined as sacred

text. Punishment played an important and positive role in shaping me. It has in the

shaping of everyone I've known as a friend. Punishment has also ruined its share of

victims, I know. The difference may reside in whether it arises from legitimate human

grievances or from the bloodless discipline of a bureaucracy. It's a question nobody

should regard as closed.

Separations