As Dumb As A Sack Of Hammers - The Vanity Of Inclusivity And Ignoring What Is As Plain As The Nose On Your Face

 'As dumb as a sack of hammers...a few bricks shy of a load...not playing with a full deck'.  These and other epithets have been used for centuries to describe the 'otherly abled' or in common parlance, dumbbells. 

Senator John Kennedy (LA), referring to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has added another to the lexicon, 'the reason why instructions are put on shampoo bottles'. Unkind perhaps, but true.  

There is a bell curve for intelligence just as there is for everything else.  Most people fit under the apogee of the curve while a small minority cluster at both ends - geniuses at one asymptote, dumb at the other. 

Facts of life, one would have thought; but in the name of inclusivity - a big top welcoming all without regard to ability - those left on God's curb are considered everyone's equal.  Words like 'stupid' and 'dumb' have been decommissioned, relegated to 19th century novels and minor pre-Freudian psychological journals. 

There is no such thing, insist progressives; and to cover for the obvious, to dress the emperor in a new, more becoming suit of clothes, they have invented ADHD - Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Learning Disability. 

Now, neither of these pathological syndromes existed only a few decades ago when reality posed no particular problems, and when one was brought up to deal with adversity, to try one's best, and to accept the rest. 

Schools, like parents and the community at large, categorized ability.  There were reading sections for fast learners, others for the slow; math sections for abstract thinkers, others for those still struggling with numbers.  

No parents complained, and most students felt well looked after. Those in the top groups were not held back and their ability rewarded; and those at the bottom never felt the frustration of having to stare blankly at the blackboard.

Now, the theory of 'multiple intelligences' allows for those befuddled by 2+2 to color and draw; those who can't make sense of 'See Dick and Jane run' to sing. The fact that the outside world is made up of complex numbers and texts is irrelevant - self-esteem is prime, and encouraging a child to think highly of himself will stand him in good stead after graduation. 

Nonsense, of course. Thousands of students move up through the grades without having learned a thing, and feel quite content about it. They graduate from elementary school with no fundamental skills, no practical sense of educational possibility, and unable to function in society; but on they go to middle school and high school under the same protective mantel of 'self-esteem'. 

Johnnie Dunbar was one of these students who couldn't make heads nor tails of anything, a boy nestled at the far end of the bell curve so stupid that he didn't even know it.  A feature of the modestly intelligent is that they know they will never amount to much and set their sights realistically on hairdressing or supermarket checkout; but those less endowed see the opaque, indistinct, incomprehensible world around them as an indecipherable fluctuating puzzle.  

Now, Johnnie Dunbar was not retarded - that is a psycho-genetic medical category reserved for those dealt a bad hand at birth - too few synapses in the brain to be able to make sense, too little gray matter to figure out and decipher. They are not on the bell curve. They are unfortunate accidents of nature and must be justly and fairly treated well.  No playgroups, educational toys, challenging games are going to help them, stuck as they are in a DNA-determined limbo. 

Johnnie was stupid but not mentally retarded.  He was just one of the clueless, aimless millions born without the necessary equipment to make his way up the ladder. If schools chose to recognize limited ability, call it that, and configure programs to fit this paradigm, Johnnie could have maximized what few brain cells he had. 

Instead, he spent hours coloring bunny rabbits, singing in off-key choruses, and showing off his tumbling skills. 'How wonderful, Johnnie', his teachers would say as he turned in his work, looking less like rabbits than grey smudges, and then pinned on the bulletin board under the bright, red letters of his name. 

The likes of Johnnie Dunbar are not detritus - they can and do have a useful purpose in life, just not that of the majority.  They might not be able to square corners of drywall, but certainly they can heft it up three flights of stairs. Aligning shingles on a roof might be beyond them, but hauling the piles of old, discarded shingles is not.  

Adjustment to reality, facing facts, accepting the natural division of ability, the bell curve. Why is that so difficult?  Ignoring it, pretending that intellectual ability is equal across the board is not a consignment to some dark place, but an assignment to place that fits. 

Mr. and Mrs. Dunbar had swallowed the inclusivity thing hook, line, and sinker and were happy when their son's report card came back all A's, were delighted when told at parent-teacher meetings that their son was a truly remarkable child, and were cheering, devoted parents at every school pageant which showed their son off to the community. 

Johnnie's father, not the sharpest knife in the drawer by any means, was farther up on the bell curve and quite serviceable at his job.  He had always hoped for something better for his son and did his best to encourage him.  They played cards together, father teaching son the strategy of gin rummy, but the boy simply drew and threw down cards with no clue as to why.  They did puzzles together, but the boy simply stared at the pieces on the table, paralyzed by uncertainty.  They all looked the same to him, so how was he to pick?

He enrolled Johnnie in a variety of after-school classes, but the boy was only discouraged by the effort.  He couldn't understand basketball strategy any more than he could long division.  Both father and son were equally disheartened. 

It would be hard for any father to accept the fact that an offspring was incapable of the simplest calculation, dumbfounded at the easiest puzzle, blindsided by the most obvious circumstances; and harder, given the noxious and insidious ethos of inclusivity, to help the boy adjust and fit in where he belonged.  

Mr. Dunbar knew that coloring within the lines wasn't going to get Johnnie anywhere, that his poems were word scrambles at best, and that poring over the two-times tables suggested a problem, but he was alone in his discouragement. Schoolteachers and administrators kept telling him what a superiorly endowed boy he had. 

And so it was that Johnnie Dunbar had to make his own way after 'graduating' from high school, or better, thrown to the wolves. Thinking he was great stuff, he found himself amidst a prepared, ambitious, able cohort group headed off to college or veterinary school, while he stood on the curb squinting and trying to decide how to step off.

The army wouldn't take him, not even in for the lowest slop position. Either you were army material or you weren’t, there were no bathroom-only positions in the service. He was left behind in the grass cutting and leaf blowing jamboree, edged out by ambitious Latinos, but found work breaking rock in a quarry. However, even in his limited consciousness  Johnnie knew that this was the very bottom of the barrel. 

 

He stuck with it, made it up to rock-hauler then to the triage assembly line - he could tell one rock from another and rarely made a mistake in classification - and then decided that the job wasn't so bad at all.  'At the quarry' was the only answer he needed when asked where he worked, a satisfactory, all-purpose reply for employment in a well-known local enterprise. 

Now, had he been judged dumb from the beginning, and if he had been given the education, discipline, and respect required to help him meet his potential regardless of its limitations, he would have done far better than the quarry - not a whole lot better, but at least something commensurate with his ability. 

Commensurateness - that was the operative word within the emerging consensus of reality-based educators. Classes divided by ability, insistence on strict cognitive learning, rejection of 'multiple intelligence' theory and a final dismissal of inclusivity.  Individualism - individual enterprise, ambition, challenge - is the only inclusivity there is.  

Johnnie Dunbar was given short shrift and left to founder because of the ill-conceived notions of inclusivity.  Dumb he certainly was, but deserving of far more than he got.  People are dumb, ugly, uncoordinated, clueless, spacey, gawky, and vacant.  Everyone spots them on sight, and it is just political vanity to pretend that they are all Hollywood-ready starlets, Einsteins in the making, and future captains of industry.  

Thank God this penitential period is ending.  Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity (DEI) is over and done with, tossed aside, political detritus, trash.  There should be no more discarded Johnnie Dunbars, but true belief is harder to scour and remove than nasty stains in a kitchen sink.