Education

(Part two of two)

So-called “gifted and talented” programs have lately come under fire for their inherent racism and classism. No matter what criteria are used to determine eligibility, they tend to underrepresent (or exclude entirely) children of color and children who don’t receive educational support at home. Not surprisingly, the More Able Learners (MAL) cohort of which I was a member was 100 percent white and middle class. (Of course, this was in the 1960s, when “diversity, equity, and inclusion” was not a phrase that was yet in anyone’s vocabulary.)

When we look critically at exclusionary groups like the MAL program, we tend to concentrate (rightly) on the harm done to those who are excluded. But it’s also worth noting the negative effects on the people who are included. Spending our school days, year after year, with the same small group of students meant that we never developed relationships with the others who attended our school — not only those of other races and classes, but even those whose backgrounds were similar to ours, but who had not been given the same rich and intense educational experience that we had. We were set apart, ignored by most students and resented by others.

To be honest, I spent my first few years unaware that this was a problem. I had always been different, even within my own family, so social isolation was the norm for me. But within our class there was a mounting sense of discomfort. Spending our formative years in an unchanging social environment was taking a toll on our emotional development. We were getting on each other’s nerves. Some of us were exhibiting behavioral problems, or were paying less attention to our schoolwork. By the time we were in sixth grade, a school psychologist was visiting our class twice a week to talk with us, leading hour-long sessions that can only be described as group therapy. It began to dawn on me that being special was not all it was cracked up to be.

Our isolation was eased a bit when we got to junior high school (which, in our district, comprised seventh, eighth, and ninth grades). Outside of core subjects such as English, math, and science (in which MAL students were still a year ahead of our peers), we began to take classes with students from outside our program. We were, however, still geographically segregated — confined to a single school, which, in this case, was the less popular and less “cool” of our district’s two junior high schools. A couple of students actually dropped out of the MAL program so that they could be transferred to that other school. By all reports, they remained regret-free about their decision.

Our participation in this grand educational experiment ended when we entered tenth grade. At that time, students from both junior high schools were funneled into our district’s single high school, and the MAL designation was lifted entirely. We were suddenly normal, HR-level students, randomly mixed with other classmates from the school’s 3,000-student population.

For me, that initial encounter felt like what I imagined an anthropologist might experience when exploring an unknown culture. The conventionally-educated students seemed happy and well adjusted, with a thriving social network. They all seemed to know each other. So far as I could tell, they were as smart, capable, and imaginative as any of us in the MAL program. They still could do a geometric proof or dissect a fetal pig, even if they’d done those things a year later than I had. Not having read the Great Books, studied Impressionist art, or seen Marilyn Horne perform at the Metropolitan Opera didn’t seem to have damaged them at all.

I was in the familiar position of being on the outside looking in, but what I was looking at now was an alternate-universe vision of myself — the person I possibly could have been.

I don’t know whether the problem was with the MAL program itself, or whether it just interacted badly with my particular cohort. My sister, three years behind me, was herself admitted to MAL, and she didn’t seem to suffer any ill effects. (Unknown to me, she copied a term paper that I’d written in eighth grade, turned it in to the same teacher, and got a better grade on it than I had.) A few years later, the program was quietly dropped, although I have no idea whether it was for educational, social, or budgetary reasons.

Ever since then, however, I’ve strongly believed that what you learn is not nearly as important as the circumstances in which you learn it. Students who have been made to feel comfortable with who they are, who develop within a social environment based on mutual respect and the belief that everyone has a role to play in their community, are better prepared to make use of whatever education they receive.

(Part one of two)

One morning when I was in the second grade, I was unexpectedly excused from class and introduced to a school psychologist, who asked me to walk with him to his office. I still have a vivid memory of that walk, during which the psychologist first made some small talk (to the extent that one can make small talk with a seven-year-old) and finally brought up the reason for our meeting.

“Who do you think is the smartest person in your class?” he asked.

“Me!” I said. (Modesty was a concept to which I’d not yet been introduced.)

The psychologist seemed to agree. He told me that there existed a special program for the school district’s most gifted students, and his task that day was to decide whether I would be placed in that program beginning in third grade. In his office, he interviewed me and administered an IQ test, which I breezed through. (I was always a good taker of standardized tests.) I was then returned to my second-grade classroom, where I resumed my role as an ordinary student while inwardly picturing myself as a ruler of the world.

The special program was called “More Able Learners,” usually referred to as MAL (pronounced as the initials M–A–L, not as the acronym “Mal,” although its association with words such as “maladjustment” and “malpractice” should have been warning signs). It was still in an experimental stage, having been launched, if I remember correctly, just a couple of years before.

The Farmingdale, Long Island school district already had a tracking system — an arrangement that’s increasingly controversial today, but was standard educational practice when I entered school in the 1960s. Students were placed in separate tracks, with different curriculums and often different teachers, according to their assessed level of academic potential. I don’t know how these tracks were identified in elementary schools, but by the time a New York student reached high school, we knew our assigned track by the label HR (for “Honor Regents),” R (for just plain “Regents,”) or G (for “General Education”). Under that conventional system, I presumably would have been placed in the HR track.

The new MAL program — to which I was admitted shortly after my session with the psychologist — was different. Unlike the traditional system, in which students followed a track within their neighborhood school, all MAL students in a given grade were gathered into a single classroom in one designated school, regardless of where they lived. This same group of 20-odd students would remain together for the rest of our public-school careers, being taught advanced subjects by specially trained teachers, progressing from grade to grade in our own protected bubble.

From the time I met my MAL classmates at the start of third grade, we were continually reminded that we were special. Not only would we move through conventional academic subjects at an accelerated pace — for example, beginning foreign-language classes in third grade, algebra in sixth, biology in seventh — but we would also be exposed to subjects that other students were not, such as an intensive study of the “Great Books.” We were considered to be ideal guinea pigs for emerging instructional techniques such as programmed learning, in which specially devised workbooks (with the answers included) allowed individual students to master a subject at their own pace. Our teachers had an unusual degree of autonomy, and exercised a good deal of creativity, in determining how to use our time in the classroom.

MAL classes were the perfect environment for a curious and inventive student like me. Within the first two years, I contributed editorial cartoons to a class-produced newspaper, built and performed with a ventriloquist’s dummy whose head was made from a shoebox, wrote an award-winning civics essay, and composed a short piece of music that our music teacher later played on the piano. Taking full advantage of our proximity to New York City, our teachers took us on field trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History, to a swanky French restaurant (where we, of course, ordered our lunch in French), and on a Circle Line boat tour around Manhattan. We discussed world events such as the move of Brazil’s capital to the custom-built city of Brasilia, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and the war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.

But the academic and intellectual benefits of MAL came at a price. Because each of us was being bused to a school in another part of the district, we lost our connection with the other kids in our own neighborhoods, and we spent our weekdays in a building whose other occupants were strangers to us. In those situations when we had to mix with non-MAL students — in phys ed classes, at lunch, or at recess — relations were icy. A few socially adept classmates managed to make friends, but the rest of us lived as misfits. We were thought to be stuck up, weak, nerdy — in other words, different, which among young students constitutes a social death sentence. The joke among the normally-tracked students was that the initials M–A–L stood for “monkeys, apes, and lunatics.”

(To be continued in part 2)