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Prologue
〈 Bianca, You Animal, Shut Up!
〈 I Quit, I Think
〈 The New Individualism
〈 School As Religion
〈 He Was Square Inside And Brown
〈 The New Dumbness
〈 Putting Pedagogy To The Question
〈 Author's Note
Bianca, You Animal, Shut Up!
Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a
human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who
came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU
ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her body
continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her.
Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every
day in schools all over. I've seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I'd admit to doing it many times.
Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That's why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn't
your own little Janey or mine.
Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychic violence to be
inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place. It's called
"social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl
Jane, having left fortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the
passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door.
I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn't go to school for a month after her
little friends took to whispering,