Today, thirty-one states have banned corporal punishment. Texas is among nineteen states where it remains legal, leaving it up to individual school districts to determine whether students may be struck. In August 2003, under increasing pressure from its community after information regarding several injuries students sustained from corporal punishment, the Dallas Independent School District revised its corporal punishment policy, stopping short of prohibiting paddling. School authorities may still paddle, but they must have a written request from the parents that this method of discipline be used.
I met again with Gray’s principal and requested that he not paddle Gray. I continued to sit in on his classroom a few times a month, with increasing despair. Even though Mrs. Snyder was a more seasoned teacher, little meaningful one-on-one interaction occurred with students. The classroom was too big for any kind of learning except rote. Students were rushed from one subject to another; never was there a sense of completion or interconnectedness. It was incredibly tedious, and I could see how bright students might come to see school as a boring, essentially meaningless activity. Surely it was not the same at a private school, I began to think, but when Gray’s father and I investigated the private schools in Dallas, our hearts sank. There was no way we could afford them.
I remembered my mother wringing her hands in despair at my brother’s funeral, crazed with grief, saying over and over, “His kindergarten class was too large, the teacher had a nervous breakdown, he needed more attention ….” She believed then, and still believes to this day, that my brother’s subsequent problems, and his eventual tragic death, could be traced back to that kindergarten class, which had been too large. Psychologists would consider her analysis of the situation utterly simplistic, and yet—if the child’s first experience with formal education, which will take up such a large portion of his or her formative years, is unrelentingly negative, it will surely take a tremendous effort on the part of overworked teachers and harried and often untrained parents to change that impression.
When I think of a tiny five-year-old—Gray was always the smallest child in his class, and even now, at twenty-nine, is only five foot six—going up against a heavy-set authoritarian principal with a paddle, an instrument Gray had never seen, I am cut to the core.
Gray must have been shamed by the sessions with the principal, else he would have told me about them earlier. What choices did he have, as a child, in response to these beatings? Accept and acquiesce, or defy and be beaten. He chose the latter as a five-year-old, and it was a choice he would make continually for the next fifteen years in repeated conflicts with authority figures. In my most painful confrontations with Gray in his teen years, however, when I caught his eyes, I always saw the eyes of a spunky five-year-old. They were the eyes of a five-year-old confronting a hulking principal with a paddle, a five-year-old confronting an adult who wants to beat fear into him, a five-year-old confronting a version of his nightmare-witch with the magic diamond that makes kids look ugly.
We managed to squeeze Gray through kindergarten without Ritalin, but promised the school we would consider trying it before he started first grade. Gray’s pediatrician also thought it worth trying. “You can always stop it if you don’t like what it does to him, Sheryl. It really does help a lot of kids,” he said. By this time, Gray was seeing a counselor who also believed in the value of Ritalin.
It was hard to continue to fight the school, the doctors, and Gray’s dad, who was beginning to lean on me. The principal had threatened to go back to the paddling if Gray’s behavior didn’t improve, hinting that, legally, he did not need my permission to paddle him.
Gray continued to have problems in school, and needed a lot of support from the teachers, his father, and me to complete school projects. Yet his grades were good. In Pre-reading, Writing, Mathematics, Science, and Art he got straight E’s throughout the year. Under “Personal and Social Development,” however, he got an X (the equivalent of an F) in “follows directions,” “completes assigned tasks,” “works well with others,” and “exhibits self-control.” He got an X in “makes good use of time.”
Eventually, I caved. I caved to the pressure from the school, the doctors, and Gray’s father, and I agreed to put Gray on Ritalin when he turned seven.
As far as I know, the principal never beat him again.
Gray would remain on Ritalin or some substitute—in later years it was Adderall—for at least twelve years, during which period he continued to have problems with friendships, his grades deteriorated, and he developed more strongly defiant behavior at school. In high school, he was suspended several times for his insolence toward the teachers, and he was arrested a few times for minor offenses. Eventually, he stopped going to classes and had to go to court on several occasions for truancy. He dropped out of high school at sixteen, still taking psycho-stimulants. Although he managed to get a GED and make it through half a semester of college with Adderall, he began to abuse that drug, as many do, and I wound up having to commit him for drug abuse when he was nineteen. In later years, he would convince doctors to give him other versions of stimulants such as Concerta, Focalin, and Vyvanse. He would graduate to meth and even heroin. At this writing, he has just completed thirty days of rehab.
I don’t know how much effect the years of taking stimulants will ultimately have on Gray’s life. It was moderately useful in the early years, ineffective in the teen years, and overall, does not appear to have had the promised positive effects. I sometimes fear that his natural impulsivity, creativity, and spontaneity were squelched during those years he was on stimulants, and maybe those years of squelching contributed to the strong feelings in him that are sometimes manifested as anger. It’s as if the drug managed to hold back those waters for a time, but now all the floodgates are open, and all hell has burst loose.
All the things the principal and ADD literature claimed would be the consequences of not putting Gray on Ritalin—school failure such that he would eventually drop out, depression, conduct disorder, failed relationships, under-achievement in the workplace, and substance abuse—have occurred anyway, despite the use of stimulants. I asked him recently about his use of drugs and alcohol to control his moods, and he said that he learned as a child that the way the culture wanted him to control his moods was with a pill, so he never learned to develop the life skills he needed to manage his emotions.
Gray still struggles with the same issues he struggled with in kindergarten. And yet. My son is one of the smartest persons I have ever known. He has more natural intelligence than many of my PhD-educated colleagues. He is a talented musician, poet, and social critic. He is witty and has a great sense of humor. But he is a failure in the eyes of American society.
Life is messy. I’ve focused exclusively on one thread of that mess here: the negative effects of a broken school system. Of course, other crucial strands, both environmental and cultural, affected Gray’s life. Kids like Gray often have behavior problems that have little to do with those behavior clusters psychologists label as ADD. Genes and culture figure into the mix, parenting styles as well as the style of authority and learning in the schools.
Perhaps most importantly, though, schools have failed to understand how radically different this generation is from those that preceded it, and how the popular American culture that bred and nurtured Gray’s generation had a tremendous influence on their ability to attend as well as their capacity for defiance.
Gray’s generation, often called Millennials, was the first generation to be inundated with a fast-moving popular culture—including video games, MTV, and web surfing—that created and then nurtured a kind of aesthetics of movement. Popular media breastfed these kids on montage, breakneck speed images, and fractured