All right, I overstate. But there was a time when people generally understood that all 6-year-olds are sexual harassers, not to mention opposite-gender bashers, taunts, teases, unpredictable huggers and kissers, sexual chauvinists, softies, thugs, incorrigible lawbreakers, the nicest people in the world and–oh, did I forget?–little kids. The count against young Johnathan Prevette for kissing a little girl on the cheek told you where we have come to in the culture of counterintuitive and bloodless, not to say pointless, rulemaking in our civic life today. By its very nature this creation of one-size-fits-all rulings and prohibitions manages not only to create preposterous incidents of this kind, but also to free responsible authorities from dealing, in the normal, human, community way, with the odd kid who is truly disturbed and needs to be singled out for attention. The process is therefore the bureaucrat shirker’s dream and salvation, having put the whole thing on automatic and absolved him or her of all responsibility, let alone of any duty to think. On the other hand, it can be the individual citizen’s nightmare, as countless Americans have already found out.
As evidence that life wasn’t always like this, let me offer what may be my favorite anecdote from an assortment of recollections put together in a little volume not long ago to celebrate the history of a public school in my old neighborhood. The recollector of this incident, Mary Ann (Mac) Clausen, wrote: ““In the fall of 1937 we all started third grade with Miss Grace Whitwell … Most of us have fond memories of her. One incident I remember from that year was that I sat behind Curtis … and one day I tapped him on the shoulder and showed him a piece of paper on which I had written “I love you’.’’ (You will notice that Mac has already violated the no-touching rule, and probably the antiharassment rule, at least by the ““Disclosure,’’ female-advances-on-innocent-male test.) Curtis reacted: ““He read my message,’’ Mac recounts, ““and then socked me!’’ Well. By ’90s standards this thing is now almost ready for Alan Dershowitz, but wait, there is more. ““So I went up and reported this to Miss Whitwell,’’ Mac continues, ““and she told me to take Curtis out on the porch and hit him back. Which I did, feeling very foolish.’’ End of case.
To the affrighted 1990s sensibility (and in embarrassing candor I must say that I actually harbor some of it on some days of the week), I would say that on the whole everybody’s performance in this episode sounds pretty much all right to me. It would have been understood in 1937 that an 8-year-old male’s honor and self-respect required him to sock the aggressor in such a gushy, humiliating event. We did a lot of socking back then, I am bound to say. But of course it was not officially forgiven. Note that Miss Whitwell, even though Mac had a fairly weak case, authorized a sock back. Note also that there was no need for a female assertiveness-training course for either Mac or Miss Whitwell. Take him out and belt him, said the teacher to the girl. Note also that Curtis went. He could not assume his parents would get a court order against Miss Whitwell for brutality and Mac (probably) for harassment or some other kind of over-the-line behavior. He would have known only that Miss Whitwell had authority and that if you didn’t do what she told you to, you would likely be in deep tapioca.
Today, of course, Miss Whitwell might well have been temporarily relieved of duties while authorities pondered her recourse to vicarious violence and awaited the outcome of the multiple lawsuits some four years hence or whenever the courts got around to them. Curtis and Mac would have been sent to counseling. The classroom would have had a special session on fairness and respecting one another. Don’t get me wrong. I am all for both of those and every other good thing you can wish for in connection with law and order among the young. But I kind of figure they got all those things in the little disturbance in Miss Whitwell’s 1937 third-grade classroom that began with an indiscreet, unabashed and (I know Mac and thus suspect) somewhat mischievous declaration of love, and ended with a single well-administered clop. I don’t think it pointed either of them toward a life of violence and crime or the idea that disagreement must be settled by force. To them it probably looked like justice.
What is so different today is not just that we have a different conception of psychological reality or that everyone is afraid of expensive lawsuits or that we have come to be more attentive to the circumstances of females or that our sensitivity to insult has been fine-tuned. What is different about the Johnathan Prevette matter is that you feel he could have been just any kid; he was being judged by an unforgiving rule that would be of much more political and professional and legal use to those administering it than those on the receiving end; he was just a little blond-headed male generality.
Miss Whitwell’s prisoners, on the other hand, were very well known to her. She knew precisely what it would take to bring the situation in hand. She also knew her charges were just kids. What I worry about in the Johnathan Prevette affair is not that particular child’s fate, as he will probably do all right. It is that the whole thing, in a short while, won’t seem as utterly preposterous to me as it does now.
