Glenda SimmsTHE LETTER of the Day, written by Sonia Christie and published in the June 8, 2005 edition of The Gleaner, was in response to Minister Peart's prescription to deal with the 'dunce pickney' in our basic schools.
Like Ms. Christie, my immediate reaction to the labelling of any child as a 'dunce' was one of
disbelief. My academic credentials are in the field of educational psychology, and I can recall the efforts of the University of Alberta's developmental and clinical psychology scholars to encourage all their graduate
students to see every child as a unique and vital human being. We all were educated not to label any child and to ensure that we do not erode the self-concept in our effort to decide who is 'bright' or who is 'dumb'.
Against this world view, I took a keen interest in testing and measurement and quickly earned the reputation of someone who could effectively administer and interpret the Wechsler Intelligence Scale (WISC-R) which was designed to measure a person's intelligence quotient (IQ).
'INDIANS' AND 'COWBOYS'
While teaching at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, I was contracted to be a testing psychologist by the Browning School Division in Montana. The town of Browning was, and probably still is, a rough, tough and violent frontier town of 'Indians' and 'Cowboys'.
I recall vividly the occasion on which I was administering the IQ test to a little brown-eyed youngster of Cree origin. I posed the following prescribed question to him: "If a boy, much younger than you, wants to fight with you, what should you do?" The child stared directly in my eyes and asked, "What does he have in his hand?"
Those of us who have been trained to administer these standardised tests know that this child will end up as a 'dunce bat'with a low IQ score, if he continues to apply such intelligent assessment of the scenarios posed in the questions.
Mr. Wechsler and his cronies expect an 'intelligent' child to respond to such a question with a standard normed answer "I would walk away from him."
I knew then and I know now that the majority of children who are labelled as 'dunces' are wiser than many teachers, parents, psychologists and others who purport to understand the meaning of the word 'intelligence'.
IRRELEVANT AND
ABSTRACT TOPICS
When I attended the one-room St. Alban's elementary school which is still nestled in the district of Stanmore in the Santa Cruz Mountains of St. Elizabeth, far too many of the children were called 'dunce pickneys'.
As I look back, I do remember that there were a few 'dunce girls', but the majority of those labelled 'dunce bats' were boys. I can remember the struggles of these rural boys as they tried to write 'compositions' on rarefied, irrelevant and abstract topics such as 'Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown', 'Honesty is the Best Policy', and 'She Sits Like Patience on a Monument Smiling at Grief'.
Of course, the 'bright girls' were able to 'regurgitate the pablum' of such topics and in so doing, they cleverly escaped the headmaster's leather strap nicknamed 'Bold Adventure'. Every boy in my class felt the wrath of the strap across his back on a weekly basis. A few outstanding 'dunces' were whipped daily.
My favourite 'puss-eye' boy-pal Randy Rastello learned his lesson the hard way. He had not only copied the content of the letter I had written to the Editor of The Gleaner, he signed my name to his letter. When he proudly presented his written accomplishment, he received the worst strapping that I had ever witnessed. In my childhood world I also felt the whip. Randy never returned to school.
My schoolmates said Randy deserved his licks because he was 'too dunce'. In fact, one of the 'bright girls' said that if Randy Rastello saw his name written on a bammy "he would nyam it" and think it was 'saltfish'.
It was traumatic experiences such as these that motivated me to become a teacher and study child psychology at a later point in my development. In fact, I am still haunted by the memories of the negative labelling of the poor rural young boys and girls who were never given the chance to translate their deep understanding of the world in which they lived, into the formal arena of the school. Instead, they were asked to leave all their unique cultural baggage at the school gate and enter into a confused zoo of monkeys, alligators, harbour sharks and cows that jumped over the moon.
I can imagine how dynamic our school experience could have been if the curriculum of that period reflected our indigenous knowledge, and used this as the base on which to make the transition into the formal system of standard English and timetables.
Every 'dunce bat' who went to my school would have benefited cognitively, socially, spiritually and emotionally, if the teachers and school inspectors understood that all of the Stanmore children knew more about tombstones, coffins, graves and other burial rites than most other children. That is because we all lived in close proximity to the historical Anglican cemetery.
At nights, we saw the stars that shone "in the heavens" while they lit up the shiny marble headstones on the tombs of rich folks. And when the fireflies fluttered and switched on their lights, we were sure that we could see the outlines of the unmarked tombs which housed the remains of our slave ancestors.
All the children who attended our one-room school also knew that one should never point one's fingers at a tomb. If this was accidentally done then the appropriate remedy was to bite the offending finger to prevent it from falling off your hand. We all knew that the spirit of the dead which roamed the earth as duppies were quite clever. They were no 'dunce bats'. In fact, all the boys knew that when a funeral procession was making its way to the cemetery, the ghost on the coffin could be seen by anyone who was courageous enough to bend over and put his head between his legs. The key to successful duppy-watching was to take your head from between your legs before the duppy got a glimpse of you in that position. In this worst case scenario, the 'duppy- watcher' would not be able to straighten up for the rest of his life.
The boys in my district were smart. None of them ended up walking around with their heads between their legs.
If these pre-school boys could out-smart duppies, how did they become 'dunce bats' when they entered the formal school system?
It is obvious that it is the parents, the teachers, the parsons and the formal educational institutions that should be labelled 'dunce bats'. Such labelling would reflect the origins of 'the dunce'. According to encyclopaedia.com, a dunce is a slow or stupid person, one incapable of learning".
Of course it is interesting to note that the abusive term was rooted in the struggle between two academic views. One was that which was espoused by the great schoolman John Duns Scotts, whose works on logic theology and philosophy were accepted test-books in universities from the 14th century. The other was the new humanist and reformist learnings of the 16th century.
Those who considered themselves more enlightened, classified the Scottists as 'dull blockheads' - the forerunners of the modern dunces.
On June 13, 2005, United Press International reprinted an article in which it was reported that Professor Yoshihiro Tsurumi has labelled President Bush as 'dunce'
Pontificating from a comfortable position ensured by his academic stint at the prestigious Harvard Business School, Mr. Tsurumi told the Harvard Crimson Newspaper that President Bush "only scored in the bottom 10 per cent of student in his class.
Perhaps the esteemed professor's insights would be more useful if he tried to enlighten the world on the personal qualities, strengths, political savvy and social skills that transformed his defined 'dunce' to become the President of the most powerful nation in the world.
Such a discussion would go a far way in de-constructing academic elitism and give all students the knowledge they need and not limit their potential, just because the formal educational system has been designed to define them within the rigid slots of the 'bell curve'.
Perhaps the time has come for the 'non-dunce' people of Jamaica to consider setting up a factory to meet the needs of the "dunce" sector of the population. In such a factory, we could produce attractive and fashionable 'dunce caps': green and orange ones for the next general election, black ones for ghetto funerals, white ones for religious ceremonies and weddings, dark-blue ones for macho men, pink ones for battered women who refuse to charge their violent spouses, and red ones for women over 60 who don't give a damn.
