to be a good school district, but now I was confused. Had I done the right thing? Why hadn’t I told the principal never to touch my son again? What kind of wimp was I? Was I so unsure of my own methods? I had to conclude that I was. What did I know about raising kids? Gray was my only child.
I remembered the beatings my father used to give us. His belt always hung on the back of his easy chair, and if we did anything wrong, we would “get the belt.” I remember being whipped so hard my thighs blistered. I don’t remember it ever changing anything, but I do remember it making me mad, then humiliated, and then I’d cry and my father would eventually stop. He was usually measured when he meted out punishment to the girls, but my brothers really got it, especially Jay, who was always in trouble, and who wound up dropping out of school, going to prison, and dying in his early twenties of a drug overdose. He got a lot of beatings, and my father would sometimes go into a rage when he beat him. Sometimes he was drunk, my father, and the beatings would last longer, though they’d be sloppier. Jay and Gray shared enough traits—asthma, defiance, trouble with authority, problems attending and organizing—that I was already beginning to worry that Gray might share Jay’s fate. Jay would surely have been diagnosed with ADD had he been born a generation later. Would Ritalin have saved him? Repeated beatings surely had not.
I imagined the principal beating Gray. I imagined what Gray must have been feeling. Rivers rising in him, flooding, unchecked, something in him drowning. The principal saying he needs to learn fear. My father beating and beating my brother, throwing him up, down, against the door. For each demerit a beating, my brother not giving in, not hitting back, not crying in front of anyone. Like my son, maybe, the welts rising in his heart, his guts twisting and weeping.
Over the next weeks, I spent several nights sleepless, the principal’s words and his twangy Texas accent infecting every conscious moment: You have to understand that if you refuse to have Gray tested for ADD, we have to take other measures. So, were these my options? Drug him or beat him? Suddenly, Ritalin didn’t seem like such a bad choice.
Corporal punishment is a time-honored and traditional method of discipline in American schools. Historically, it was seen as a method of literally “beating the devil” out of misbehaving children. Learning theorists, however, argue that punishment as a means of behavior control is complex, and that it can accelerate or retard performance of some behavior. A child can habituate to punishment and, if beaten enough, become a psychopath. Every study I could find on corporal punishment suggested it led to violence and aggression rather than self-discipline. It made tragic sense to me that Texas, the state with the worst record for the death penalty, would also be the leading practitioner of corporal punishment in the schools.
In 1999, almost 74,000 of Texas’s 3.9 million students were paddled. About eighty-three percent were boys, according to a U.S. Department of Education survey. (Unsurprisingly, the percentage of boys versus girls diagnosed with ADD is around the same.) In 1989, the year Gray started kindergarten, Texas was one of very few states that had no procedural requirements for corporal punishment. Teachers needn’t have approval of the principal; the punishment did not have to take place in the presence of another adult, or without undue anger. It did not have to be reasonable, nor did the punishers have to have approval from the parents. School officials could strike on the head and face, and there was no restriction against deadly force. It could even take place in presence of other students.
Most researchers agree that corporal punishment often appears to result in the temporary reduction of undesirable behavior, and in this it is not unlike Ritalin. To be effective in the long run, however, the punishment must be extremely harsh and repeated—and even then, the results are inconclusive. In an essay about the link between corporal punishment and delinquency, Ralph Welsh writes that no recidivist male delinquent existed who had never been exposed to corporal punishment, be it a belt, a board, an extension cord, or a fist.
As late as 1994, almost all the southern states still allowed corporal punishment in their schools. When George W. Bush ran for president, he won electoral college votes from nineteen of the twenty-two states that allow corporal punishment, a figure so stark, some extremists were moved to call him “the president with the child-beating mandate.” Although, to my knowledge, former President Bush has not spoken out in favor of corporal punishment, his education bill included the Teacher Protection Act, a provision to protect principals and other school officials from lawsuits by parents of beaten children. (This provision was removed from the bill by members of his own party.) As governor of Texas during Gray’s childhood, Governor Bush also signed more death warrants than any other living government official.
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
