Number of words: 517

What went wrong? In the old days–six years ago- the kids got along with the system. (Would they now, since we have legislated against safety valves?) The kids are different now. Upon reflection, they too come up with the word deprived. If more kids can’t or won’t go along with us, it is because we have more deprived kids. If virtually all the kids from “lower-income” and “minority” groups are in our own low-ability groups, we turn to the counselors, the social workers, the clinics. Them is deprived kids, goes the cry, and someone ought to do something about it.

Deprived of what? Of intelligence? Do we claim that lower-class kids are just naturally dumber than middleclass kids, and that’s why they all in that dumb class? Naturally not. We have a list. They are deprived of ego strength, of realistic goal-orientation, of family stability, of secure peer relationships; they lack the serene middle-class faith in the future. Because of all that, they also lack self-control, cannot risk failure, won’t accept criticism, can’t take two steps back to go one forward, have no study habits, no basic skills, don’t respect school property, and didn’t read “Cow-boy Small.”

You can add to this list, or you can find another. But what such a list adds up to is something simple: some kids can’t take it as well as others.

Some kids can’t stand there calmly while they talk to the flag in Spanish. Or they can in kindergarten, like Jay, but can’t keep it up in the fourth or seventh grade. If the kids went along with us in the old days, it was for two reasons: first, there were fewer of them and we were able to allow them enough leeway to live; and second, they were white, middle-class kids in America. Not that the system in general was right for them–only that they had a richer life-diet outside of school, and so were tough enough to take it.

All right. Some can take it, and some can’t. Those who cannot expose the point–it’s not any good for anyone. My wife’s father was once bitten by a cotton- mouth, and survived. Another man from the same community was bitten and died. No one argued that the experience was good for either one of them. Sitting in a classroom or a home pretending to “study” a badly written text full of false information, adding up twenty sums when they’re all the same and one would do, being bottled up for seven hours a day in a place where you decide nothing, having your success or failure depend, a hundred times a day, on the plan, invention and whim of someone else, being put in a position where most of your real desires are not only ignored but actively penalized, undertaking nothing for its own sake but only for that illusory carrot of the future–maybe you can do it, and maybe you can’t, but either way, it’s probably done you some harm. 

Excerpted from pages 196-197 of ‘The way it spozed to be’ by James Herndon