Sans Fig Leaf
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"For your own good"
10 May, 2007
My junior high science teacher kicked me out of the library "for my own good."
I'd been spending my lunches in the library reading for some months. See, I didn't get along with most of my classmates. Part of that was because all of grade school had been spent moving from one teeny town to another has my dad's work transferred him from place to place. He'd finally been promoted to a management position and given some choice in location, so we had just recently moved back to the town in which I had been born. Because this town had been where my dad grew up (and mom attended high school), I did know some of the kids, and we had other connections (this science teacher had been one of my mom's teachers in high school, for example)--but most of them didn't know me.
At this school the lunch hour, once the food had been consumed, consisted of all the kids standing around outside on this enormous lawn with absolutely nothing to do. Rules forbade us to leave the school grounds, but there was nothing to do and no adult supervision to speak of. If the weather was really bad, they let us stay in the gym/cafeteria -- with nothing to do. Many kids at that age with nothing else to do take to teasing and bullying to entertain themselves.
I had taken to finding a corner somewhere out of sight to sit and read whichever book I was in the middle of at the time. And one day the librarian had seen me sitting outside and asked if I'd rather sit in the library to read. The next day, she did the same thing, and soon that's how I spent the second part of every lunch hour -- sitting in a quiet library reading.
Until the science teacher decided that it wasn't healthy for me. Rather than come talk to me about it, or my parents, she had gone to the school counsellor, the principal, and I'm not sure who else. One day she shows up at the library and tells me that no student is allowed in the library during lunch hour any more. "This is for your own good," she said. "Get out there in the sun and make friends. Stop wasting your life alone with a book."
I learned later (from the school secretary, who was a close family friend) that the science teacher had actually tried to get some sort of rule that I wouldn't be allowed to read during lunch hour, even if I was outside. The powers that were thought that was going a bit far.
It didn't matter. Because when I tried to sit in an out-of-the-way place outside to read, she tracked me down and lectured me about being anti-social. Funny thing was, each time she did that, the actual sociopaths in the student body would then, after she'd left again, decide that I was the perfect teasing target (not that they hadn't gone after me plenty of times before).
When the second or third of my books was damaged during the subsequent round of harassment from the bullies, I stopped trying to read during lunch. The bullies were far more effective than any rule.
The truly irritating thing at the time was that I had friends. A couple of them had started joining me in the library. We occassionally talked to each other, but mostly we just read quietly (because the librarian insisted if we were going to talk we could do that outside). It wasn't that I didn't know how to make friends. And it wasn't that I wasn't physically active. We rode our bikes everywhere--through miles of fields and backroads around the town. I participated in several team sports--I wasn't very good, but I was competing in the games and at the meets.
I'm sure there are people who think that the teacher had the right idea. But I still have trouble seeing how being forced to sit around with absolutely nothing to do other than being bullied and harrassed was "for my own good." Particularly in an environment where bullying was virtually endorsed. For example: when some guys dragged me around the lawn by grabbing hold of the cast on my broken leg, then held me up by said cast, dangling above the ground while they kicked me and so on, we all got detention together--where more teasing took place while I was literally locked up with the guys who had bullied me.
Hardly a punishment for guys who enjoy picking on others, you know?
It could be argued that being turned out of the library forced us to learn how to endure bullies and eventually how to deal with them. But plenty of teasing and bullying happened in the halls, before and after school, and at places far away from school grounds. I practically had a Ph.D. in enduring bullies before the librarian let me start spending lunch inside.
There were other conversations with this teacher over the next two years. Whenever a particularly egregious bullying incident befell one of us, she'd find a chance to suggest that the problem was us--we were bringing to on ourselves. "You need to learn to be more like other boys your age," was a line I remember hearing from her several times.
All of this was brought to mind recently while I was listening to a call-in show on the radio where the topic was a proposal to ban the cell phones, iPods, and other devices on school grounds during student free time. That's right--in the times between class, during lunch, and so forth. I wan't very surprised at how many people people all used language similar to that teacher years ago: it's for their own good, they need to make friends, they need to stop wasting time.
But I was totally shocked by one of the people who called in; when asked to explain how listening to music was worse than reading, if that's what the kid wanted to do, said, "Homework should be done at home. At school they either need to be listening to teachers in class, or learning how to be social with their peers." He laughed when the host suggested that some people like to read for fun, not just homework. Then said, "Too many parents only care about whether their kids are happy, not whether what they're listening to or looking at is appropriate."
There's a big nugget of truth in there, I'll admit, but there's a whole lot more wrong with his underlying assumptions and reasoning. Among those assumptions is one shared by my old science teacher: that there is one, and only one, appropriate way to learn. That only certain things are appropriate to be interested in.
But one size doesn't fit all. That's true whether we're talking about learning, or cultural interests, or relationships.
Back in junior high the real problem wasn't that we were kicked out of the library. The real problems were the attitudes toward bullying, coupled with the really bad decisions that adolescents didn't need adult supervision for a part of each day, but also couldn't be trusted to decide where to go during that time.
Sadly, we still haven't gotten very good at striking this balance between protecting people and letting them learn from experience.
--Judge Learned Hand
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