I was sitting outside on the “patio” listening to my wife. She’d run into a friend of ours, an artist, who once spent I-forget-how-long teaching art to high school dropouts. “She said it was just terrible! We got into that after I mentioned accompanying the middle school chorus…”
“Were there dropouts when you were in high school?” I asked.
“NO!” she shouted, suddenly energized. “There wasn’t a one!”
That would be Roosevelt High School in Des Moines. I was skeptical at first, but reconsidered that she might be right.
I thought about my own past. I’d gone to three diffferent high schools in three states: Cooper Jr.-Sr. High School in Abilene, Texas; Chestertown High School in Chestertown, Maryland (just six weeks here); and Massapequa High School in Massapequa, L.I., New York. To my honest recollection, I couldn’t say that kids dropping out was anything I’d heard a lot about when I was in those places.
“I know it’s not realistic to say so — I mean, there must have been a few — but I can’t remember any, either. It’s like it just wasn’t done, or people wouldn’t let you.”
“That’s right. There were a few who got sent off to military academies because they were bad, but that was it.”
When I was about eight years old, we lived in Blacksburg, Virginia. My father was an officeer in the Air Force, teaching R.O.T.C. at what was then Virginia Polytechnic Institute (V.P.I.). The year was 1953.
There were small school buses that brought kids in from the hills and hollers. I remember one boy — barefoot, shirtless, wearing overalls, twice as tall as the rest of us second-graders — who showed up one day with a big grin on his face. We gathered around him in the cloakroom:
“Know what I got? I got me a baby polecat, right here in my pants!” he proudly declared. “You wanna see?”
Something bulged a little underneath, where he was supporting it with his hand. I leaned forward and peeked inside his overalls: sure enough, a baby skunk, all right. (Not that I’d ever seen one before, but when you do see one, you’re gonna know.)
I don’t remember that there were any accidents, but they did take him to the principal’s office. In my time, there was no more fearsome thing. “To the principal’s office” carries an almost nostalgic menace to this very day. To think that once a sense of overwhelming guilt was generally sufficient to maintain a genteel sense of order seems amazing. No way I would ever have ended up in the principal’s office. Why, what if you failed a grade and they “kept you back”?
The kid with the polecat may be there still.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
So this bright, alive, enthusiastic kid has something really neat to share with the class. Whack! Don’t you EVER bring something neat in here again. Sit down. Shut up. See spot run.
You know who the drop-outs are? They’re the kids with the polecats. The bright, alive kids who a had real trouble trading their zest for life for mush of the classroom. The ones who fought valiantly to keep that spark alive. And lost. Got the living beat right out of them.
Schooling in this country is not about education. It’s not about developing the minds potential. It’s about training docile worker bees. Workers bees who show up on time, do as they’re told, repeat until retirement do us part.
Who taught the memorable lessons in class that day?
John
I have to agree with John. There were kids in my high school (myself included) who excelled in art class and woodworking, etc. but sucked wind in Algebra and Biology. Unfortunately, art and woodworking were “electives” that didn’t even count towards the final grade. I graduated by the skin of my teeth, but never did grasp that x = y type shit. Kids who attempt to “break out of the mold” are in turn “broken”. Thank Christ it only took me another 26 years to break the puppeteers strings.
You guys got it right. I was lucky as hell to be as smart as I was, which kept me out of trouble, but I paid another price. The classroom WAS mush. One day in 8th grade, Mrs. Price in Abilene took me aside and told me to stop raising my hand! “I know you know the answer, but we need to give the other students a chance.”
I’ve always felt that Dylan’s “Desolation Row” perfectly expresses the way the collective enforces its norms by marginalizing dissenters. I’m thinking of one of the last verses in particuar, the one about strapping on the “heart attack machines.” As for breaking the strings, I’m still tearing them off. That’s what the last GRACK! is all about.
“As for breaking the strings, I’m still tearing them off.”
Yeah, by the time it was obvious hope wasn’t gonna cut it those freaking strings were stuck so tight it’s sucked the blood right out of some prime years just to soften the glue.
John