Orwellian Gulags In An Inclusive Culture -Teaching Children To Ignore What Is For What Should Be

Annette Bingham was a big girl, already into the plus sizes at Marshalls'. There was no end to her appetite, no end to her reach into the pantry for gobs of peanut butter, no limit to the shmears of mayo on her midnight ham sandwiches, no less than three-scoop peanut brittle ice cream, and banana splits with extra whipped cream. 

Annette was a genetic anomaly - a fat girl in family of neurasthenics, who never once walked when she could ride, never refused an extra helping, and tucked into English breakfasts of eggs, sausage, bacon, and mash; tea with scones and clotted cream; lunches of triple-pate and limburger sandwiches; and midafternoon cupcakes and elephant ears.

By the time she was ten, she had rolls of fat where her waist should have been, two double chins, thick ham hock thighs, a rear shelf like a Nigerian, and disappearing eyes in a full, pneumatic face. 

Now, ordinarily she would have been the butt of ridicule at school.  When she waddled up the stairs, squeezed into classroom chairs, and took up two places on the bleachers, she would have been shunned and teased until, under the barrage of taunts and ridicule, she lost weight. 

Bullying has always had a reconstructive purpose.  Adolescents with no sense of the civil decency hammered into adults, are little Tonton Macoute enforcers of the established norm. No diversion, no aberration, no emergence of alternate behavior is allowed.  The outrageous difference of girls like Annette would have been  punished without mercy. 

'Let's welcome beautiful Annette', said Mrs. Thomas, the third grade teacher of her new school in Shaker Heights; and Annette made her way up the stairs to the auditorium stage, grappling her way, holding tightly to the railings, having trouble making it up because she could not see past her stomach to the narrowly-pitched stair, until finally taking her place beside Mrs. Thomas. 

'Welcome, Annette', said the 100 third-graders.  'We love you', and with that they stood up and clapped, smiled and blew kisses her way. 

Now this would never have happened a generation or two ago.  Teachers, parents, and most of all the cawing, hectoring, flesh-eating students would never have even come close to such inclusive welcoming.  There would have been snickers, elbowing, chuckles, and outright laughter from the back of the room.  

Fatness disturbed the settled norm, upset the pretty pinafores, cute pumps and patent leathers, braids and flips. A fat girl could not have been ignored.  Her presence was upsetting, noxious, and disruptive. 

The bullying would have continued until the fat girl lost weight or dropped out of school, a good thing since svelte is healthy, beauty has a high commercial, social, and sexual value, and adherence to a common norm keeps society functioning without dissension. 

'Annette is a lovely dancer, has a sweet voice, and a preciously generous nature', Mrs. Thomas told the children who kept their smiles in place as they fidgeted in their seats.  Those who knew Annette as the ungainly, uncoordinated, tone deaf girl from Akron, tried to keep their counsel - anything less than universal acceptance of Annette as she was would be punished severely. 

So the Freer Allen Elementary School received kudos and praise from the School Board, Administrators, and federal watchdogs.  It was a model of the new educational algorithm of Inclusivity, Respect, Consideration, and Love.  Not one incidence of bullying, taunting, playground incivility, or misguided remarks had been reported. 

Of course once school let out for the day, the entire, sewn-shut, Orwellian, stifling, gulag was dismissed as well.  Students had their licks, and went after Annette and any other misfits foisted on them as beautiful, normal, exceptional, and desirable.

 

Like everywhere else, out of repression comes insurrection.  A lid on natural born little Darwinian trooper sentiments can only remain tightly shut up for so long, and then whoosh bang out comes all the stifled things artificially bottled, corked, and denied. 

Certain words were forbidden, suggestive references scotched, characteristics ignored.  Students were badgered and intimidated until Annette's fat rolls disappeared - disappeared in theory, in a corrective, idealistic fantasy - as she was turned into a svelte, pretty, desirable girl in imagination only; but of course none of this worked.  Fat was the operative term out of class, gone were the euphemisms, happy-speak word cloaks, and idealistic metaphors.  No matter how teachers and sensitized parents tried, children would not be robotized. 

And so it was for every other undesirable, out-of-norm character to be so singled out in a primitive ritual of elimination and removal.  Children were taught not to be themselves, sort out ability, beauty, status, and preference on their own; but to be measured, tailored, and fit within prescribed silhouettes. 

Annette, for all her gourmandize was not a stupid girl and got the picture despite every attempt to keep it under wraps by the inclusivity- trained teachers.  As she headed for adolescence, the pariah of the class, tormented by the girls, shunned and laughed at by the boys, there was no way that she, coddled and pampered by solicitous, over-sensitive parents, would remain a fat girl,  roly-poly caricature, a social discard; and so she went to work, shedding pounds, and shaping up.  

Beneath all that flubber was a very attractive girl, and once you could see beyond the dewlaps, paunches, and billowing rolls, you had to be impressed.  Before long she was out of the plus sizes and downsized to normal, and finally to the svelte and sexy. 

Will power.  It was a matter of calories in, calories out after all, and her self-imposed regimen of diet and exercise trimmed every last bit of blubbery waste from her naturally trim body. 

It would be too much of a stretch to say she was a Cinderella, turned into a princess overnight, the belle of the ball, the queen of all; but she came close. 

 

The teachers at Freer Allen Elementary assumed that somehow their potion of kindness, inclusiveness, and collaborative learning had done the trick.  Through consideration, compassion, and kindly tutoring, Annette emerged from her fat, engorged pupa to a lovely butterfly. 

Of course they missed the point entirely. It was through good old evolutionary pressure - the dunning, marginalization, and exclusion that has helped improve the human race over the millennia - and more that did the trick. Bullying, Darwin knew, works wonders.