Learning Not to Learn

Daniel was repeating first grade in a run-down Chicago school — big, dingy, half-lit rooms and old-fashioned screw-down desks. I was the fourth teacher he had had that fall, and before the year was over he would have many more. According to the school records he couldn’t read or write and lacked `verbal ability.” Yet how could one explain the above composition? During the reading of the primer available to that class (and 20 of these basal readers were the only books in that particular room of about 35 children) he would, it is true, stare blankly at every other word as though he had never before encountered it.

Daniel was a student in my first all-Negro class. He produced this story in the first week of my monthR...