Returning from the Margins

Imagine discovering at the age of 15 that everyone else your age had been going to school for more than ten years while you were kept at home, unknowingly and unknowing. Seems difficult to imagine, right? How is it possible that in this day and age, someone could just not go to school-for 15 years?

Yet the New York Times this past Friday reported just such a story. A woman in Chicago called up the special truancy hot line and admitted over the course of a number of days that her 15-year-old daughter had not returned to school after the first few days of kindergarten. In fact, besides occasional trips to the neighborhood grocery store, her daughter rarely left the house.

The young woman, whose identity has remained anonymous for obvious reasons, knows her ABC's and can recognize and name different colors. She memorized the days of the week after looking at a calendar. And that's about all.

The girl re-entered school and attended classes again for the first time this past week. Although she will need intensive remedial tutoring that no standard class could satisfy, the girl sat in with a junior high class so that she could begin to acclimate to people her age.

Not surprisingly, chief of investigations for the Board of Education, Maribeth Vander Weele, described the girl as "a very shy child, very isolated." The girl does not suffer from any serious physical or mental disabilities (although, in an ironic twist, officials reported that she does need glasses). And she seems not to have been the victim of physical abuse. The investigators reported that her home was clean and the girl looked well fed and clothed.

What makes this case even more fantastical is that the girl's younger sister and older brother both are enrolled in educational institutions. Her brother, who attended public school, is now taking college classes; her younger sister is in second grade. Yet neither of them reported to any authorities that their sister was just sitting at home, and no authorities found out.

The whole incident seems like such an anomaly that one could easily dismiss it from serious analysis. After all, as the chief executive officer of the Chicago public schools, Paul Vallas, expressed: "It's amazing that in this day and age you can have a child who has gone 15 years without ever having enrolled in school." However, often times it is circumstances and people on society's margins that tell us some of the most profound truths about ourselves and our culture.

So while this incident does indeed smack of the absurd, it also reveals an important insight into our educational system and into our public service systems, in general. This nameless 15-year-old girl has shown us, in a most unusual and simple way, just how big the cracks in our bureaucracy are, and how people can fall through without anyone knowing that they have been lost. Vander Weele, the chief of investigations, understood this and commented, not on the abnormalities of the situation, but on the broader awareness that it has fostered: "There are a lot of forgotten children out there."

There are a lot of forgotten people here at Harvard, too. It is very easy, even in the cloistered and rather self-contained environment that Harvard cultivates, to get lost between the cracks. This is not to compare any of us to that 15-year-old who lost out on 10 years of interaction, learning and growth-there is no doubt that our cracks are much narrower. But the cracks exist here all the same.

All of us know of days when we don't see our roommates, miss meals in the dining hall, rush from library to class to meeting or practice, and fall into bed late at night exhausted and out of sync.

For all the projects that are accomplished here, all the ideas generated, Harvard can be, and sometimes is, a very isolating place. The strange story about a 15-year-old going to school for the first time can remind us, too, about how easy it is to get lost and how a simple telephone call can find someone again.