1968
February, 2005
Hey, turn up the stereo!
Ev’rywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging
feet, boy
’cause summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy
But what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock ’n’ roll band
’cause in sleepy London town
There’s just no place for a street fighting man
No
Hey! think the time is right for a palace revolution
But where I live the game to play is compromise solution
Well, then what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock ’n’ roll band
’cause in sleepy London town
There’s no place for a street fighting man
No
Hey! said my name is called disturbance
I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the king, I’ll rail at all his servants
Well, what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock ’n’ roll band
’cause in sleepy London town
There’s no place for a street fighting man
No
[Rolling
Stones. Beggars
Banquet]
Scene 1. Classroom in a basement in the
sociology department at a midwestern university.
“Look at me.”… “Good boy, Justin!”
35 kids with autism. Five classrooms.
Grad students, a few undergrads (Susie, Ira, Peggy), and a few certified
teachers---working on eye contact, small motor play skills, motor and verbal
imitation, functional speech, and classroom skills (group lessons, games,
reading--“Oh, no, not REAding?”).
The program--begun with four kids--is now a
real school. Observers watch every “individual session” and “class” through
one-way mirrors, taking data on a dozen variables describing teacher-kid
interaction so we can figure out which methods work best. Reinforce kids for
good tries, or only when they get it exactly right? If it took upwards of 500
tries for a kid to get his first word, how many to get the next and the next
and the next? Which is best: work on motor imitation and then verbal imitation,
or both at the same time?
Parents bring their kids each day. Some
drive 90 miles from small farm towns. We teach the parents to teach their own
kids. Mothers and fathers wear headphones and we (behind the one-way mirror)
coach them. “Ask again…What color?…Red… Now. Reinforce him NOW!”
[Professor
Plum drove the 90 miles back and forth every Sunday for a year and a half to
help a family handle and teach their boy at home. 1953
Some kids were “self-destructive” and we had
to hold them to keep them from banging their brains out on the table. We would
reinforce them for longer intervals of not head banging. Other kids would bite.
Michael used to nail me on the forearm with his big front teeth. He was
deadly accurate even when I wore a long-sleeve shirt. After a good solid chomp
he would look up at me, grin, and make a goofy noise---Duuuuhhhheeeee.
“Michael, if you weren’t so nuts I’d wop you
upside your melon head.”
“Duuuuhhheeee.”
“Right. Duuuuhhheeee. Pretty much sums it up. Chew on my left arm awhile,
will ya?”
We was
a nut but I liked him--chomps and all. How can you not like a kid who says Duuuuhhhheeee and grins!
After the first week observing and trying
different things with kids, we would place them in either one-to-one sessions;
two-child classes so they could imitate each other; or intermediate and
advanced (preparing for regular school) groups. We experimented with different reinforcers. Some kids were so detached that praise, hugs,
rides on a “Big Wheel” and toys meant nothing--didn’t exit. We used food reinforcers with these kids--at first. Later,
tokens. Later still, they earned activities they now enjoyed. Whatever they liked most. Michael was a mustard freak. I
would give him the tiniest taste, right out of the jar, when he talked or took
turns playing. Luke was into breakfast food. I fed him bits of bacon and cold
fried eggs. He would look up at me, grin real big, and clap his hands. He tried
to feed ME the eggs. I would graciously accept a few chunks to be polite. I
also drove to his house every week. He drove his parents crazy. One of his
favorite activities was waiting until no one was looking and then loading the
toilet with shoes. Very funny. Duuuuhhheeee. Me and his Mom were a great team. We taught him to talk and
play. Neat kid.
We were one of the first schools using
applied behavior analysis--a few years behind the master--Ivar
Lovaas. We conceptualized education a bit
differently--we were teaching the kids to participate in social interaction
organized as exchanges. Your turn/my turn.
No physical punishment. At most, we put a
kid in a time out room for a few minutes for hitting another kid or for
throwing a tantrum.
About one-fourth of the kids finally went to
regular school. A few were so impaired that we could do nothing. One little
girl would just stand there drooling, rocking, and doing some weird thing with
her hands. It was as if she heard, saw, and understood nothing. I’d put a bite
of oatmeal in her mouth and it would sit there digesting.
Scene 2. Upstairs in the soc department our radical
leftist peers were making demands.
“We don’t want to take written doctoral
exams here. We want to take them at home.”
“Okie
dokie.”
“Well, then, we don’t want to take them
cold. We want the questions ahead of time.”
“Okay.”
“Uh, now that you're being reasonable, we
don’t want to learn a foreign language. It’s not relevant.”
“Okay. No foreign language.”
“And drop the requirement that we give a
professional paper to the whole department.”
“Consider it gone.”
“Cowards.”
“Indeed.”
I remember my mentor, Robert L. “Doc”
Hamblin. One of the few faculty who still had his
nuts. [Oooops!] He ran the
school for the autistic kids. He was also the chair of the department. One day
in a meeting (the grad students demanded “representation”), Doc showed how he
felt. He said, “This room is crowded.” He picked up a chair and threw it out the
second floor window. You could hear it splinter on the ground below. “There.
That’s better.” He wasn’t chair for long after that.
I bet he’s pretty old now, Doc. He would
take us grad students to the indoor handball court at the gym. [Which was a good place for it.] A real
gamester. He’d serve the ball from the front and then stand in the
middle of the court, daring us to hit the ball and risk hitting him. We decided
to teach him a lesson. We would return his serve, aiming at the back of his
head. I think it was Craig who finally landed one right above the fringe on
Doc’s bald head. The ball shot ceilingward. I didn’t
know Mormons used that kind of language. Doc dropped that scheme.
Scene 3. Out
on the quadrangle, more of our radical left collitch
peers were taking time out from their back-breaking labors to protest the war
in
Oh, and did they ever hate us! Even soc professors who, I thought, liked me.
“You are controlling those children.” [As we saw it, we were merely arranging an
environment that would enable the kids to learn desirable behaviors so they
could have a life.]
“Desirable behavior! Who decides what’s desirable? You are a ruling elite and the kids are the proletariat!” [Are these kids in any shape to make choices
for themselves? How does Duuuuhhheeee constitute
“voice”? Since these kids can’t talk and if left unattended would kill themselves, the question is whether we are making choices
that are good for THEM.”]
“You are exploiting them for YOUR
advancement.” [We’re
keeping them out of the back wards of mental hospitals.]
“Pure oppression, the way you withhold food
until they do what YOU want. Who gives YOU the right?” [We already know what happens if you DON’T
arrange their environment like this. They get more impaired and more violent
until they are put away, have all their teeth pulled, and are kept on major
doses of Thorazine.]
We heard that stuff every
day in class.
And at parties.
"Fascists."
"Oligarchs."
"Hey, whyn't
YOU come down to the basement and show us how to do it, huh?"
No takers. Not one in three
years. I guess they were too busy what with burning the ROTC building and
harassing the chancellor.
Now my grad student peers are older and they
are collitch perfessers and
they teach in schools of ed and other departments that
allow and even honor asininity.
Yes, they may share some of the social
criticisms found in Romanticism, as E.D. Hirsh, Jr. argues in “The roots of the education wars.”
And they may be partial to Dewey and Piaget
as John Stone shows in “Developmentalism:
An obscure but pervasive restriction on educational improvement.”
But I think these are pedagogical choices
that are the consequences of pre-existing attitudes--if that’s the right word. Romantic ideas
are merely a way of giving voice to older sentiments. They don’t cause the
sentiments. What attitudes? What sentiments?
The species of ed progressive who hotly
embraces multi-culturalism and fancies himself a
champion of social justice, who is wildly anti-direct and anti-systematic
instruction by a teacher rather than guide on the side, who pushes for learning
styles and multiple intelligences, who insists on open classrooms and learning
centers with kids roaming hither, thither, and yon--is a petulant
arrogant duplicitous spoiled pinch-faced sanctimonious intellectual and moral
cipher who is still fighting The Man because he has not matured one day
since he was five years old and is terrified of anything that represents
The Man--hard data, logic, scientific reasoning, teaching protocols,
the concepts of Right, Wrong, Truth, Falsehood, receiving consequences for
screwing up.
Maybe
The Man is really dear old Dad who was hard to please, or a
religion that demands a level of self-control that the aging egoist can’t meet.
Or a country, America, that is so big he can’t make it dance to his tune, and
is filled with people who don’t listen to the whiney little boil and couldn’t
care less what he wants.
As for the knee-jerk progressives, on the
other hand, they’re just imbeciles whose glandular secretions are set off by
words like "discover" (Ooooo,
discover), "Vygotsky" (Ooooo,
exotic), "construct" (Duuuhheeeee,
construct), "child-centered" (gah gah).