The Child Buyer by John Hersey Read Free Book Online Page B

intelligence scales—that, stressing verbal skills, they are loaded in favor of children from upper-class social and economic backgrounds, where books and word facility have tenaciously hung on from nineteenth-century mores. The Game, consisting entirely of problems developed by cartoons in comicbook style, and drawing heavily for content on the child's world of television, sports, toys, and gadgets, is culture-free and without social bias. It's fun, too.
    Mr. BROADBENT. And you—
    Mr. CI.EARY. I pointed out to Dr. Gozar that we are living in the Space Age, and—and just then the first bell rang.
    Mr. BROADBENT. What happened?
    Mr. CLEARY. We went toward the main entrance, where we encountered Miss Charity Perrin. She addressed me in a quite unfriendly and critical fashion.
    Mr. BROADBENT. She is Barry Rudd's teacher, right? Is she a good teacher?
    Mr. CLEARY. Her pedagogical methodology is unorthodox. Her techniques of encouraging wholesome motivation for mastery of critical skills, habits, understandings, knowledges, and attitudes, and of achieving dynamic personality adjustment of the whole child to both the learning situation and the life situation are, though soundly rooted in the developmental tradition, rather eccentric, and indeed they defy exact categorization.
    Senator MANSFIELD. But can she teach, Mr. deary?
    Mr. CLEARY. We don't know. The children won't tell us.
    Mr. BROADBENT. You said she criticized you. What for?
    Mr. CLEARY. She said my talent search was a phony because teacher's pet, Barry Rudd, wasn't on it—not for intellectual gifts, anyway. He is on it in another category.
    Mr. BROADBENT. But I thought he was the brightest child in the history of the Pequot system.
    Mr. CLEARY. He was only in the sixty-fourth percentile in the Olmstead-Diff endorff Game.
    Senator SKYPACK. Why won't the children tell you? About that teacher, I mean.
    Mr. CLEARY. I have a theory, and it runs this way: Miss Perrin manifests a curious combination of maternal and infantile drives, so that the children love her on two levels, as if she were both a mother figure and a peer. Loving and being loved— that's all she lives for. You see, she's one of your kind that believes everyone is nice. She loves the world. 'People can sec something good in people if people look for it in people.' She gives more than lip service to bromides like that; she lives them —and the result is that admiration and pity are often synonymous for her, and when she feels repugnance for another person she turns it against herself. Evidence that people are not invariably nice, of which there seems to be plenty in Pcqnot, she uses as occasion for forgiveness, and this gives her a comforting feeling that she's nice. We psychologists have a term for her difficulties: she suffers from the Nice Mouse Syndrome.
    Senator VOYOLKO. Jeest, Mr. Broadback, the minute you get talking about the boy you have to go off on a long tackle about some old maid.
    Senator MANSFIELD. I agree, Mr. Broadbent. Let's hew—
    Mr. BROADBENT. And after you talked with Miss Perrin, sir?
    Mr. CLEARY. I entered the school and walked quickly across the dark front hall, which reverberated with children's shouts and struck my nostrils, as it always does, with the smells of floor oil, chalk, hanging clothes, and the queer, pungent dust that seems to lurk wherever knowledge is. Do you know what I mean?
    Mr. BROADBENT. Please carry on.
    Mr. CLEARY. You're interested in the Rudd boy, so I'll tell you that I saw him in the hall as I passed. I don't mind telling
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    THE CHILD BUYER
    you I have a negative reaction to that boy. lie stood woodenly, his legs slightly parted, arms stiff at his sides, and he gave a whole effect of having been pampered by his mother. His clothes, and the boy himself, seemed to have just come out of the washing machine. Out from the starched tubes of the shirt sleeves came soft, reddish, round, clean arms, with tiny veins mottling the surface; his flesh looked like a