End Discrimination and Increase Productivity
Lessand, Suzannah
End Discrimination and Increase Productivity BY SUZANNAH LESSARD The attainment of justice for all is not the only reason we, as a society, should continue to reform ourselves in the area of gay...
...Not very much in one sense...
...Whatever road we took, his prospects seemed something quite far short of joyful...
...Everybody has imperfections," the headmaster said when I mentioned my son's learning disability...
...They don't have an ideal "type" around which the school is structured...
...children were defined by their strengths (you could be in sixth grade math and eleventh grade history and no one would care), and yet the academic standards were as high, if not higher, than those of the other schools we had considered...
...Yet that life was so at odds with her nature that in it she ground to a halt in all areas of her life, including work...
...It seemed like pushing a square peg into a round hole...
...When my friend feels the lightness of her experience, she does not feel like the right type...
...And, furthermore, those differences, fundamentally, are lodged in individuals rather than in groups...
...End Discrimination and Increase Productivity BY SUZANNAH LESSARD The attainment of justice for all is not the only reason we, as a society, should continue to reform ourselves in the area of gay rights, and women's rights, or the rights of any group...
...Which track serves the interests of society...
...But the fact was that I didn't feel right about shoe-horning my son into one of the "good" schools, either...
...she feels like herself...
...This school sends plenty of kids to the Ivy League, but in this new universe the consideration of this college versus that college seems silly...
...What has all this to do with women's and gay rights...
...The real substance of this point is that society needs the differences...
...The basic conflict was: Should he go to an academically excellent school where he would be defined by his weaknesses, or should he go to a school with supports for those weaknesses where he would not be able to fully develop his strengths...
...She has reported to me that she can go through a day in which the bombardment of heterosexual images from all sides can make her feel so fundamentally wrong that soon she feels the course she has chosen is literally insane and that she must immediately run back to a heterosexual life...
...This pro-tile has a name now: He has a "learning disability," recently renamed a "learning difference...
...And what do I know about that future...
...It is an irony that in the course of rights reform stereotypes almost of necessity get put in place: We fight hard for the right of women to succeed in high-powered careers, for example, and somehow in the process the high-powered career becomes the "feminist" road, and there we are stuck with a "type" again, a type that like all types is going to amount to the "wrong school" for a lot of people...
...However, for reasons too complicated to explain here—but having to do with my son's unusual proSuzannah Lessard, an editor of The Washington Monthly from 1970 to 1973, is a staff writer for The New Yorker...
...In any event, up to the eighth grade this boy has done very well in the New York City public schools...
...That's what we want...
...they would say, and I could see their point...
...But even in euphemistic form, they define him by a weakness...
...It was as if we had left a meager universe for an abundant one...
...She says that it is impossible to reconcile these two experiences, that she's either on one track or the other...
...It is that an affirmative situation releases megawatts of energy...
...It's no surprise, therefore, that on a day when she becomes scared about her lifestyle, she also becomes drained and slow-moving as tasks become more and more disheartening and difficult to accomplish...
...Having been in many environments that were wrong for him, we were now experiencing what it was like to be in the right environment: one that valued him for his strengths...
...In these schools, it felt as if both he and his parents would be constantly struggling in order to make the fit work...
...Then I stumbled on a school that seemed to be designed for him: The requirement for admission was IQ alone...
...My son is an unusual boy in that he is exceptionally intelligent in verbal areas and abysmal in other areas such as mathematics...
...The prospect of paying thousands upon thousands of dollars in order to struggle in this depressing way was equally unappealing...
...For everyone...
...Here the boy could flower as he was meant to flower, and no other issue matters next to that...
...They do not reflect his strengths, which are surely as important, and they do not capture the other unusual aspects of his personality: the quirkiness, the imagination, the somewhat unruly intellectuality...
...Certainly not that he is going to Harvard: To my extreme relief I found out that I didn't care a fig about Harvard...
...What good will it do him if he gets a great education but feels like a piece of garbage...
...Without quite realizing it, I began to feel that there was something wrong with my son...
...Discrimination is draining for everyone...
...But I also found I didn't want to pay the kind of money private schools charge for anything short of excellence...
...Even fatigue, in a way, is an experience of fulfillment...
...People of a therapeutic turn of mind told me that because of his deficiencies, my son would develop bad self-esteem in environments where the academic standards were very high...
...On a day like that, whatever it is that she is doing seems to feed her rather than drain her...
...Last fall I spent a great deal of time looking at schools for my 13-year-old son, an experience that has cast light on this very point from a perspective that has nothing to do with rights...
...On another day on which she is simply in her life as it is rather than sensing it as an abstraction, she feels so right, so whole, that it takes a tremendous effort to remind herself that her living situation is controversial—that, for example, her children might prefer that she not reveal it at the PTA...
...I do not mean to mock these terms...
...During our tour of this school my son became excited about learning (not characteristic behavior), dancing lightly, talking about the projects he would embark on there...
...It may be necessary for people to form groups in order to get political power, but in fact what is at issue is individual empowerment...
...But when we started searching for a school, everywhere we looked seemed wrong...
...When society learns to accept any group as it is and strives to create an environment in which that group can thrive, there is a direct material benefit for society, which is that that group, with its unique gifts, can then begin to contribute at peak capacity...
...file—it became clear this year that it would probably be best for him to switch to a private school if his parents could possibly manage it...
...They don't have an agenda of sending as many children as possible to Harvard...
...We have been saying this for some time in The Washington Monthly, and it is my favorite Monthly reform...
...I have a friend who, after many years of marriage, found in her forties that it was her nature to be with a woman...
...The result of these sad choices was a growing feeling of heaviness and grimness, a sense of life as an uphill grind with meager results...
...I felt a great bursting sense of my son as the brilliant, surprising boy that he is and great joy in his future...
...there were no grades...
...They seek to equally serve all children as they are, and in this perhaps they provide my son a more hospitable environment than a private school would...
...They have helped me understand my son and get him the help he needs...
...The public schools were quick off the mark identifying the L.D.—a lot quicker than some very good private schools have been with the children of my friends—but public schools are also by nature inclusive...
...I began to wonder if I harbored secret anxieties about status, if my real goal was that I wanted my son to go to Harvard regardless of whether that was where he belonged...
...Besides, the tuition is terrific...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 3
