I Saw a Rural Teacher Throw a Student Down the Stairs
Pro-authoritarian conditioning starts early in small town America
The government is going to try to kill me, so thanks for your support!
I didn’t like Axle, but he didn’t deserve to lifted up, desk and all, and carried out into the hallway. He didn’t deserve to be screamed at and thrown down the stairwell, head bouncing off the walls like his life didn’t matter.
He didn’t deserve that, but that’s what happened to him.
Our fourth grade teacher was very conservative. This meant he spent a lot of time screaming and yelling about respect. When he didn’t receive the respect he felt he was entitled to, he flew into a rage.
“Entitlement!”
“Traditional values!”
“Respect!”
The rest of us hunched down and tried to weather the storm. Except there was no shelter. We dropped our heads and lowered our shoulders to our desks to make ourselves seem smaller as our conservative teacher who deserved “respect” crashed against us in wave after spittle-spewing wave.
“This generation is a disgrace!”
“You’re godless! You’re worthless! You’re stupid!”
He knew there would be no repercussions for hurting Axle. Axle with his alcoholic mother and his absent father didn’t have anyone to advocate for him. The teachers knew this. You could tell by their shift in body language whenever Axle entered the room.
I got the sense that they talked about him in private. Maybe they’d decided that he was the kid that could be used as an example?
There were four other teachers in the horrible building where I went to fourth grade. There were four classrooms. When my teacher pulled Axle into the hallway and flung him and his desk down the stairs, it made a horrendous crash. When my teacher returned to the classroom, he slammed the door so hard that it broke the glass.
We all knew no help was coming, so we hunkered down and tried to deflect attention. We’d already learned the power of eye contact. It’s weird how if you don’t look at an abusive person, they are less likely to come over and start beating on you.
I’m not saying it never happens. I’m saying averting eye contact makes the attack slightly less likely.
Your only chance was to sit quietly and hope that some other troublemaker would start a commotion that the sadistic teacher couldn’t ignore.
We all knew no help was coming. But only recently did I stop and wonder what the other teachers thought when Axle got thrown down the stairs. They must have heard it. Did any of them go out and see Axle’s motionless body entangled with the desk at the bottom and think, “Oh my god, he’s killed him!”
Or did they not care? Did they just shut the door and go back to their lessons and hum to themselves and act like everything was fine?
“It’s simply not happening. We live in the greatest place ever. You kids are so lucky to have what you have here. Other kids in other places have it so much worse! Don’t be ungrateful!”
That’s often the way rural people deal with conflict.
Let’s call the teacher Mr. Narwhal. I imagine him as the kind of creature that would come across men drowning at sea and delight in running them through with his terrible horn.
I picture him swimming through a cloud of blood in a dark ocean as all around him dying men slowly sink into the impenetrable depths.
But even in fourth grade, when I was ten, I recognized that Mr. Narwhal was pathetic. He was bigger than us, but he was not a big man. He was slender with a mustache that made him look foolish. He probably constantly lost his temper with children because he wasn’t allowed to lose his temper with adults.
“Yes sir! Right away sir!” Snivel, snivel.
Somebody was probably just trying to get rid of pathetic and irritating Mr. Narwhal when they locked him in a room with a bunch of fourth graders to torment.
How did they think that was an appropriate solution for a man who was clearly mentally ill?
Why was there no oversight?
What the heck…
We were actually fortunate to have Axle there to draw attention away from the rest of us. Axle simply wasn’t equipped to handle a pitiful little man-coward like Mr. Narwhal. Axle talked in a shrill voice that sounded like nails on a chalkboard. He was the kind of kid who always defiantly looked you in the eye in a way that felt like an intrusion.
Everything Axle did was an irritation. I disliked Axle. A few years earlier, Axle punched me in the mouth. That was the only time in my life that I’ve been punched in the mouth. I was terrified when I saw the punch coming. “He’s going to break my teeth!” I thought.
But he didn’t break my teeth. In fact, the only lingering consequence was a slight numbness in my lip and the faint taste of blood. Axle crawled off me and went away. It was one of those times you just lay there and wait for it to be over.
When I tried to tell on him, I got in trouble.
“He’s lying! He’s a liar! This is a disgrace! This is a witch hunt! I never did that!”
Irritated and indifferent eyes turned in my direction, “Are you lying?”
Why did they give so much weight to the second accusation?
It’s because denial gave them an excuse to do nothing. It’s always easier to pretend nothing happened.
Instantly, it’s like you’re forced to lay there again and wait for it to be over again. How do the people responsible for every awful act always manage to scurry out of accountability?
The world is structured to accommodate those who will crawl on you and punch you in the face, or worse. That’s the kind of behavior people in authority are willing to tolerate. Demanding justice comes a little too close to being a criticism of authority.
The authority figure is perfect. Our society is perfect. These are the lessons. Therefore if you have a complaint, the problem must be with you.
Quit making trouble.
How dare you offer a criticism! Show some respect!
Even though he hit me, Axle didn’t deserve to be picked up in his desk and thrown down the stairs.
The immediate aftermath was a touchy thing, but Mr. Narwhal had expended himself. He went and sat in his desk and panted and we bowed our heads and got to work. All the remaining kids knew that we should remain silent.
The only kid who would have talked was Axle with his shrill voice and his complete lack of situational awareness. “Mr. Narwhal?”
“What!”
“I don’t get it!”
“What don’t you get? Tell me! What don’t you get?”
“I don’t know, I just don’t get it.”
“Maybe if you’d been listening rather than messing around you wouldn’t be wasting my time!”
“I was listening, you just didn’t do a good job of explaining!”
I didn’t even think to go and tell anyone about what Mr. Narwhal had done. It was just another day. It didn’t come up at family dinner. I didn’t say, “Today, a teacher tried to kill one of my classmates.”
What was the point?
When you’re growing up in a conservative, rural community, the ultimate rule is that authority is always right. At home, my father was the authority. He didn’t want to hear about how Mr. Narwhal might be a psychopath.
He’d have probably laughed about it.
“Oh, he picked him up in his desk and threw him down the stairs, ha! That’s pretty funny! That kid must be a jerk. He probably got what he deserved! I bet he learned his lesson!”
“But he could have been killed!”
“Don’t you backsass me! I have better things to do than go around solving all your problems. It’s bad enough that our country is in debt because of all the free stuff you kids get. Free milk programs at public schools... I never had that when I was growing up. We had to earn our milk! We didn’t go around asking for hand-outs! Kids these days are so lazy and entitled and disrespectful!”
Reagan slashed various school lunch budgets in 1981. Maybe that’s why Axle got so emaciated that even a pathetic weakling like Mr. Narwhal could pick him up in his desk and throw him down the stairs.
By fourth grade I’d already been taught well that authority was always right. My perception gravitated to finding fault with Axle. He should have stayed quiet. He shouldn’t have protested. He should have done what he was told. If you don’t do those things, whatever happens to you is your own fault.
We didn’t learn about human dignity in our rural public school.
Our school was built on Ojibwe land. The only time the Ojibwe were mentioned was when the school organized protests against spearfishing.
“Why should they have rights that we don’t have!” chanted the teachers.
A consistent lesson during my years in a rural public school, was that hysterical violence was the best way to solve any problem.
If a kid “lips off,” throw him down the stairs.
If you don’t like the result of an election, attack the Capitol.
An authority figure can always bash a weaker person on the head, and then rely on his office to insist everyone else should look away. Authority is never held accountable.
Authority is God.
We are sheep.
We do what authority says, and then we thank authority for doing such a good job at protecting us. Otherwise we’re “entitled” and “ungrateful.”
These are the irrefutable laws of nature. They’re more important than anything you’ll ever find in some “elite liberal” textbook.
A few weeks ago, I took a trip up north. After hours of driving, I passed the building where I went to fourth grade.
I stopped to take a picture.
It’s no longer a school, now it’s some sort of a garage. There’s a Gadsden flag flying on the pole in front of the building. I looked at that and thought, “Of course there is.”
Things don’t ever change in rural areas.
Seeing that building reminded me of Axle. With a start, I realized the day he got thrown down the stairs is my last memory of him. He didn’t return to class. He didn’t graduate with us.
Mr. Narwhal taught there for many more years. In fourth grade, I kept my head down and tried to avoid his attention. I survived.
There was no inquiry.
Nobody ever came in and asked us what happened. Nobody ever interviewed us. None of the other teachers ever mentioned Axle. They all pretended he never existed and they moved on. They all moved on. That’s their solution.
Authority is right.
It’s useless to try to change anything.
Things aren’t as bad as you pretend they are.
Try to focus on the good times.
Yesterday, I looked Axle up on social media and was surprised to discover he’s still alive. His profile is covered in Gadsden and Confederate flags.
“Let’s Go Brandon!”
“Build the wall!”
I scanned through his posts. They contained the kind of normalized calls for violence against immigrants that, in recent years, have emboldened people to harass my wife and kids.
He disputes the outcome of the 2020 election.
I guess, in the end, Axle learned the one lesson rural public schools are most interested in teaching.
Respect authority. Authority is right. You’re a foot soldier. Do what you’re told. You live in a great society. We can’t change anything. Anyone who wants to change anything is less than human.
Axle understands what rural areas expect him to believe. Maybe he’s such a loud champion of those beliefs because he doesn’t want to get thrown down the stairs again.
Despite what he is today, despite that his posts signal his commitment to enabling violence against the innocent, I still don’t think he deserved what happened to him when he was a child.
Human beings deserve dignity. Children shouldn’t be thrown down stairwells.
Imagine if we taught that as a fundamental value in place of reverence for authority and violence.
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I am so grateful you survived that hellhole. The principal of my elementary school liked to take the paddle (a thick piece of wood with small holes in it to inflict more pain) into the lunch room during lunch where you could eat and should have been able to talk. Pound it on a table and yell QUIET NOW! Heaven help the child he thought was still talking, ripped from their seat and told to face the wall. The paddle came later.
In 6th grade I worked in the school kitchen, the 6th grade students put food on the kids food trays. The days we had mashed potatoes the principal was at the beginning of the line dishing out those potatoes at warp speed. I dreaded those days, Heaven help you if the line of trays got behind.
His temperament would have been better suited in the military are in prison, not with elementary students.
An actor specializing in playing psychopaths would have a field day playing this guy in a movie. He reminds me a lot of Wackford Squeers from Charles Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby" (imagine your teacher but with a bullwhip and running his own private school).