gat

pauses to politely denounce black schoolteacher Marva Collins’ fantastic claim that ghetto black
children had real enthusiasm for difficult intellectual work. Oddly enough that was exactly my
own experience as a white schoolteacher with black thirteen-year-olds from Harlem. I was curious
why Dr. Murray or Dr. Herrnstein, or both, became so exercised, since Marva Collins otherwise
doesn’t figure in the book. So certain were the authors that Collins couldn’t be telling the truth,
that they dismissed her data while admitting they hadn’t examined the situation firsthand. That is
contempt of a very high order, however decorously phrased.
The anomaly struck me even as I lay in the idyllic setting of a beach on the northern coast of
Oahu, watched over by sea turtles, where I had gone to do research for this book in America’s
most far-flung corporate colony, Hawaii. Bell-curve theory has been around since Methuselah
under different names, just as theories of multiple intelligence have; why get out of sorts because a
woman of color argued from her practice a dissent? Finally the light went on: bell-curve mudsill
theory loses its credibility if Marva Collins is telling the truth. Trillions of dollars and the whole
social order are at stake. Marva Collins has to be lying.
Is Marva telling the truth? Thirty years of public school teaching whisper to me that she is.
George Meegan
George Meegan was twenty-five years old and an elementary school dropout, a British merchant
seaman when he decided to take the longest walk in human history, without any special
equipment, foundation bankroll, or backing of any kind. Leaving his ship in South America he
made his way to Tierra del Fuego alone and just began to walk. Seven years later after crossing
the Andes, making his way through the trackless Darien Gap, and after taking a long detour on
foot to see Washington, D.C., he arrived at the Arctic Ocean with a wife he met and married
along the way, and their two children. In that instant, part of the high academic story of human
migrations received its death blow from a dropout. His book was published in 1982.
Necking In The Guardhouse
About an hour out of Philadelphia there was once (and may still be) a large U.S. Air Force base
from which officers being sent overseas to Germany, Crete, and elsewhere, were transshipped like
California cabbages. During the early 1980s I drove a relative there, a freshly minted lieutenant,
late on the night before she flew to Europe for her first assignment and the first real job of her life.
She was young, tense, bursting with Air Force protocols. Who could blame her for taking the
rulebook as the final authority?
By happenstance I took a civilian highway outside the eastern perimeter of the base when her
billet was on the western side. Irritated, I checked a map and discovered to my disgust that the
only public connection to the right road on the far side of the base (where the motel sat) was miles
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