He had the foulest mouth I’ve ever heard. The harangue of sexual propositions
he spat at me was staggering in both its breadth and creativity. I’d banned
him from my property some time ago, but if I lingered too long outside, he’d
be back, following me around, asking questions that made me blush, and muttering
about some bitch or other that needed slapping.
He was only five years old. He appeared to belong to the house next door to
the one I was renovating. It was the worst neighborhood I’d ever worked in,
and I never wandered too far from my front porch alone.
Not him. He traversed the place with impunity. He never wore a coat and crossed the street without looking both ways. Playtime was all the time, day, night, whenever. The fact that he’d lived long enough to see his fifth birthday was a feat, considering.
So there we were that day, me on the porch, sweeping, with him lingering somewhere in the background, running his mouth as usual. When I felt the hard shove from behind, I knew exactly what had happened. It was one of those instantaneous headfirst descents during which you somehow have time to wonder whether you’ll ever get up again once you land. I cracked my head on the handrail and broke my fall with hands bloodied from skidding across the sidewalk. The wind was knocked out of me, and as I lay there, gasping for air, I could hear him laughing at the top of the steps.
When I could breathe again, I grabbed him by the collar, threw him across my lap and beat his rear end with everything I had in me. I’ve never raised my hand like that to another human being before or since. Maybe I walloped him 10 times. Maybe it was 20. All I know is that I hit him until I couldn’t hit him anymore.
I’d like to say I did this to hold him responsible for his actions or to keep him from hurting someone else, but that would be a lie. It was blind rage.
“I’m going to tell my auntie,” he screamed at me through his tears as he stumbled home. But the auntie never materialized. He wouldn’t be back for a while, I figured. But the next day, he was.
“I love you,” he told me. “Please take me home with you. Can I come live with you?” The frightening thing was that he actually meant it. The few times I saw him after that it was always like that, and it took me a long time to figure it out.
Two house renovations and dozens of poor, neglected kids later, I finally get it. It’s impossible to discipline a child without taking genuine interest in him and his actions for long enough to mete out a punishment. It is impossible to impose the structure some kids desperately need without taking a genuine interest in those within its confines.
It’s because I know these kids inside and out that I’m so passionate about discipline in our schools. To me, those who can’t bring themselves to target these kids “because they already have so many problems,” “because they’re poor,” or “because we don’t want to stigmatize them” are no different than the “auntie” who never bothered to stick her head out the door to check if my little friend was dead or alive. They are passive abusers. Unfortunately, people with that attitude are running our school system.
Ten-year-old children of average intelligence who are coddled by this system to the point that they can’t read the word “Joy” carved into a pumpkin are virtually guaranteed to never experience the meaning of the word. The school system can’t love these kids, but it can give them some semblance of the stability they crave rather than looking the other way as they terrorize teachers and other children.
Low-income kids have it the worst because even the edu-crats with the best of intentions tend to lump them together. Some are good kids with good parents who are genuinely trying. Some, miraculously, are good kids despite having bad parents. And some, it’s sad to say, are simply beyond saving. Throw them all together in a classroom and if you don’t remove those like my friend — not for brief three-days vacations, but permanently — the benign neglect that bent his little soul will spread to the other kids like a disease their parents can’t escape because their zip code traps their children in with the others. I know because I’ve watched it spread for years.
I’m not suggesting we warehouse these kids. Far from it. I’m suggesting that we have the courage to create the alternative schools we need to manage them and run them like we actually care. Six weeks of boot camp is good. A year is much better. And if it costs another $100 million, so what? It will be money well spent. But first, we’ve got to change the mindset that structure and punishment are abuse. They’re what these children need the most.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com.
This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2005.
