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
Plymouth. Built like a Patton tank. Wish I still had it.]


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
Viet Nam or racism or capitalism or poverty or bureaucracy or The Man or banks or corporations or imperialism. They were so busy with these enemies that I guess they had no time to protest “enemies of the People” getting their lips sewn shut in Cuba or Che Guevara shooting bound prisoners in the head or millions dying in the soviet gulags or East Germans shot in the back trying to escape or a billion Chinese starving under “scientific socialism.”


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).

 



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