Microsoft Word - Williamson Part 2 corrected proof 2.docx


 

 

Corresponding Author:  
W. John Williamson, PhD 
Email: John.Williamson@cssd.ab.ca 

Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 
February 22, 2016 
©The Author(s) 2016 
 

 
 
The Case of the Disappearing/Appearing Slow Learner:  
An Interpretive Mystery  
 
Part Two: Cells of Categorical Confinement 
 
 
 
 
 
 
W. John Williamson 
 
 
Abstract 
 
This follows the events described in Part One of this narrative. Max Hunter, a West Coast private 
detective, still conducting an investigation to find the educational category of slow learners at the 
behest of his client John Williamson, meets his client to discuss the next steps in the investiga-
tion. Max engages in some incognito detective work in educational settings and then encounters 
an injurious interruption to his casework. He then resumes his work, now as a wounded operative, 
by investigating the history of disability categorization with the help of two prominent critical 
theorists. 
 
 
Keywords 
 
Hermeneutics, education, slow learners, psychology, diploma exams, disability history  
 
 

for Jacob 

V 
 
The sun threw little daggers at me through the gaps in the dirty curtains. I rolled over and looked 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    2 

at the clock. It was quarter to eight. My head hurt and I had a kink in my neck, either from all the 
abuse I took the prior day or from sleeping in one corpse-like position all night. I sat up. I felt 
sick but not as sick as I ought to, not as sick as I would feel if I had a salaried job.1 I tripped over 
to the window on legs as stiff as stilts. As I looked through the dirty glass with its breathtaking 
view of a trash bin and narrow industrial road leading out to the ugly main drag, I realized I 
couldn’t take any more of this on an empty stomach. I spied the adjacent neon sign of a breakfast 
joint, its glow dulled by the winter sun. I called Williamson on his mobile phone and told him I 
had some questions and asked if we could meet for breakfast.  
 
“I’m glad you called,” he said. “I’m going to a district in-service for people who work in the 
same position as me later this morning and I want you to come along. If you like, we could meet 
first for your breakfast.”  
 
The last sentence came out with a bit of a clip to it, implying maybe he was an earlier riser, and 
maybe more determined in this way, than the heroic Hunter he’d hired to look for slow learners. 
Some payback for yesterday’s wisecracks, maybe. It was a worthless consideration in my trade. 
It’s not how early in the day you look that catches the worm; it’s knowing where to look. I let 
him keep that one anyways. I had a more important question. “What the hell is an in-service?” I 
demanded. 
  
“It’s a gathering of teachers for professional development,” Williamson replied. 
 
I allowed my silence to speak to how satisfied I was with his answer. 
 
“An in-service is when a school district gets teachers together to learn more about things like 
resources for courses they are teaching, teaching strategies, or in my case, how best to work with 
certain kinds of students. I was surprised to see that today’s was about slow learners, so I made 
sure I signed up and thought you should come along too. Maybe we can pretend you’re my 
student teacher.”   
  
I had a pretty good idea what a student teacher was so I didn’t need to ask about this, but I still 
wasn’t sure if I needed to go. “Are there going to be any slow learning students there?” I asked. 
  
“Well if you heard some of the questions people ask …” Williamson began the joke before he 
could catch himself, making the same lapse in correctness by using “slow learner” as an insult 
that he’d scolded me for yesterday. From what I could observe from talking to him, I figured 
other teachers probably thought he was the slow learner at such events. Then he started over, 
pretending he’d said nothing. “No students. But it will be a good chance to learn more about the 
category, and that might help you.” 
 
“I already learned about the category, at the library, remember?” 
 

                                                
1 See Chandler (1940, p. 44). This line is borrowed from Chandler.  



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    3 

“Educational psychology is an evolving field.” He was about to launch into an explanation but 
doubled back. “I just think it would be helpful if you came along, unless you had somewhere else 
to investigate right away this morning that can’t wait.” 
 
I didn’t want to admit this, but in truth I hadn’t figured out where to begin the day’s work yet. I 
realized talking some more about the case with Williamson might give me some idea. “I was 
going to look into some leads, but I can probably put them off for a bit,” I offered. My stomach 
growled. “Let’s figure the rest out over breakfast.” I gave him the address of the joint across 
from my window.  
 
I must have been pretty close to Williamson’s school because he told me he’d see me in fifteen 
minutes. That meant I needed to put some haste on getting ready. I had a quick shower and shave, 
and changed into the only other suit I’d brought along. I exited the hotel through the main lobby. 
I got out the almost maxed-out credit card, and with fingers already numbing, scraped out a 
sightline the size of my head on the windshield of the Buick. I started it up and drove fifty feet to 
the restaurant.  In the short time all this took, I caught a lyric from a down-tempo song that I 
couldn’t tell if it was a modern hip hop song or an old blues number. A husky voice growled 
suggestively, “Fast ain’t always better than slow, you know,”2 and I briefly wondered if I was 
hearing things before shutting off the ignition and entering the restaurant. I was already chilled 
and welcomed the heat. 
 
The cook, the waitress and I made three, a crowd. I sat down, and the waitress rambled over with 
a menu. I ordered black coffee, bacon, toast and a four-egg omelet with extra peppers to kill 
anything untoward that might be lurking in the grease. I snatched an abandoned section of a 
newspaper from the table next to me. I read: 
 
“Alberta’s Minister of Education refers to self as slow learner.”3  
 
Apparently while being grilled in the legislature by opposition member Harry Chase about the 
use of the multiple choice format for provincial standardized exams, in the ironic form of a 
multiple choice question, the minister had referred to himself as a “slow learner.” I guess he was 
using some sarcasm of his own to suggest his opponent’s questions were obscure. That was 
interesting. Williamson had said “slow learner” was hidden. In this case, it seemed right out in 
the open, more available, in fact than other things he might have called himself to make the same 
point. I’m not the most politically correct guy around, but even I realized that, for a variety of 
reasons, no sensible politician would have chosen to call himself “retarded” even if it was to 
insult his opponent.  
 
Williamson showed up looking disheveled already. The bit of alertness I caught on the phone 
now seemed of the frazzled sort. A lock of his hair was sticking straight up and he’d gotten off 
track buttoning his shirt. He was off by one and the unsettled fabric stuck out like a fat finger in 
the middle of his chest. I made a point of telling him he looked awful. He said he’d been up late 
                                                
2 Buck 65 (2003, track 10) 
3 News item was actually found in Alberta Teachers’ Association (2009) 

  
 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    4 

again looking for slow learners in his computer. He ordered some sort of fruit cocktail and toast, 
the cheapest thing on the menu.  
 
I had planned to tell Williamson about my interview with Colleen Birdseye and my subsequent 
discovery that I was still being followed, but I hadn’t found anything I could put into words yet 
to describe what these experiences had taught me about where the slow learners were. And do-
gooder that he was, I was worried if he got a sense I was in too much danger, he’d simply 
terminate the case. As I was looking for a less sensational aspect of the case to discuss with him 
a question came to me then, not about what Colleen Birdseye had told me, or about my experi-
ences during and after the interview, but about the informant herself. She had said she was 
labeled, or maybe mislabeled, as a slow learner, but as an adult she seemed pretty unencumbered 
by any of this classification business. How many students had he met that had transcended the 
label as adults? I asked Williamson if he knew. 
 
Instead of answering my question, he starting griping, again about the Certificate of Achieve-
ment some of his slow learners end up graduating with instead of the high school diploma, 
saying how unfair it was that his kids worked so hard but only got a token sort of high school 
completion credential, one that wouldn’t get them very far after high school. How it placed them 
at a disadvantage even after school was over.   
 
I’d heard this tune already and I challenged him, “So, what if some of your K & E students, slow 
learners … whatever … graduate with a different credential, get credits in different sorts of 
courses, what’s the big deal? If they can’t handle the normal program isn’t that what should 
happen? Besides, I thought you told me if they did well at this level they could always move 
back up to the regular program?” I wanted to needle him a bit and hear how he’d react. 
 
Williamson looked to be mustering his forces for another of his moralizing salvos, but possibly 
remembering how I’d reacted last time he tried this, he regrouped and asked a question instead. 
“You remember how I told you I used to do a lot of work with the high school registered appren-
ticeship programs?” 
    
I nodded. Where was he going with this?  
  
“Well, one time I was at the Apprenticeship and Industry Training Office. I needed some more 
apprenticeship applications for my students and with the office being so close to my school I 
found it easier to go there rather than ordering them to be mailed out. There was a kid in front of 
me in line with his mom, a young man I mean. Not a young man like a kid, a young man, like 
eighteen or nineteen.”   
 
I loved it when Williamson lost control of his labels. He took a breath and continued.  
 
 “Anyhow, I’d overheard as I was waiting behind them that the … son had just graduated from 
high school, one of the vocational schools where they have K & E, the lower tier only of regular 
education classes and shop classes.” 
 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    5 

I realized from this description that was probably what Colleen Birdseye meant by “K & E 
school” when she said it. I had figured out what bothered me when she said it was that it hadn’t 
made sense to me that a set of classes with such low enrolment would necessitate a whole 
separate school. But if it got combined with classes from the next level up as well as a lot of shop 
classes….  
 
Williamson continued. “During high school, this student had been indentured as an apprentice 
mechanic and worked a thousand hours in the trade. He was registering for his first eight weeks 
of technical or college training, to complete the first year of his apprenticeship.  I could hear 
from the conversation that he started in K & E classes, but that he had upgraded during high 
school, and by the time he’d left high school he’d completed the regular high school diploma. 
His transcript showed he’d enrolled in and passed the right level of math to be automatically 
accepted, providing that he had been apprenticed, into the college part of his trades training.” 
 
“So what was the problem?” I asked, still stymied as to the relevance of any of this. 
 
“Well the guy at the desk said with K & E courses on his transcript and considering where he 
went to school he should really write the entrance exam. You know the exam that apprentices 
who don’t have the pre-requisite courses have to write.” 
 
“What? Hadn’t he already passed the pre-requisite math course?” I was confused.  
 
“This was the same question the … apprentice asked. Yeah, but the guy at the counter said K & 
Es have a tough time with mechanics training and before wasting a bunch of time and money in 
the program he should just write the exam to see.” 
 
“To see what?” 
 
 “To see if he could handle the coursework for the program he was enrolling in, I guess.” 
     
“So, what happened?” 
 
“The apprentice and his mom kept asking if he really had to write the exam or if he could just 
register in the courses. After listening for a while, I poked my nose in and, as quietly as I could 
because I still needed my forms, told the apprentice and his mom that I was sure he had all the 
prerequisites based on what I’d heard, and that they should insist on going ahead and enrolling in 
the college program, without writing the entrance exam.” 
  
“Did the guy at the counter give in?” 
 
“Apparently it was getting close to his break time or something, and this other worker told the 
guy she’d take over and processed the application. He kind of shrugged and went on break. After 
they were done, she handled my request too, and when I couldn’t help but comment on the 
strangeness of the situation that just played out in front of me she told me that her co-worker 
wasn’t wrong. Students from K & E, in their experience, do have a rough time she said.” 
 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    6 

“Is that true?”  
 
“It could be. I’ve heard trade school is much harder than people tend to think. Lots of people 
probably flunk out. Maybe this one would have had trouble too, but he had the pre-requisite.” 
 
“Would you have done more if the guy at the counter dug his heels in?” 
 
“I don’t know. I needed the help of the Apprenticeship Board for a lot of things at the time and it 
was important to me to have a healthy relationship with them. I had a lot of students in the 
apprenticeship program.”  
 
The waitress came by to refill our coffee. Williamson held out his fruit bowl instead of his cup. 
He really was a mess. He mentioned a few more things I should consider about the case but 
nothing seemed to me to connect that well with what I’d experienced so far. He then glanced at 
his watch and saw it was time to leave for the in-service. Williamson picked up the tab, and I 
followed him in the Buick to the site where the in-service was being held. It was a short drive. I 
felt the first shot of warm air from the heater enter the frigid interior of the Buick just as I was 
turning the ignition off in the parking lot of our destination.  
 

VI 
 

I felt the welcome pain of the heat thawing my already frozen face and hands as we entered. The 
sessions were being held at an old elementary school that had been renovated into a center for 
consultants, psychologists, supervisors, and clerical staff. Peering in the rooms on the way in, I 
noticed all the little desks had been replaced by adult-sized tables suitable for the new occupants 
of the building, but when I stopped by the washroom I observed the toilets were still at a height 
meant for five-to-nine year olds. Various professionals milled about. Williamson and I made our 
way to the room the session was being held in. Williamson introduced me as his student teacher 
to the facilitator, a smiling blond wearing a dark skirt and light blue blazer. She glanced at me 
quizzically for a moment, I wondered if she thought I looked a little too old for that role or if 
something else was at work, but then she welcomed me in. I introduced myself as D.B. Hoffa, 
my mind suddenly unable to retrieve first or last names that didn’t belong to missing persons.  
There was a table of refreshments in the room and even though I just ate I was already hungry 
again. I blamed it on the cold and the beatings. I grabbed a Danish which was good and a cup of 
coffee which wasn’t. Williamson bypassed the table altogether and we both sat down. I felt 
overdressed amidst this clique of business casual professionals, but hoped that they would 
consider my suit, which wasn’t in great shape, but was the only suit in the room, evidence only 
of an overly eager student teacher. 
 
The speaker who had greeted us now introduced herself to the larger group as a school psycholo-
gist and, after a few opening remarks, turned on a Power Point slide show presentation. She 
pleasantly went through the same sorts of information about slow learners and students with 
learning disabilities that I had been reading about the day before. I was reminded how learning 
disabled students were considered to have average to above average intelligence, with discrete 
impairments in areas unrelated to reasoning, and slow learners were thought to be globally low 
average in their intelligence. I was told that intelligence scores tended not to fluctuate much over 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    7 

time and that learning disabilities, though not diagnosed through physical exams or blood tests, 
were genetic, neurobiological deficits. Williamson whispered to me. “I’ve taught two students 
whose IQs, when they were tested in elementary school, came out low average go on to take 
Advanced Placement physics in high school and do fine in the course. I have another student 
whose IQ was borderline when they tested her. She’s just finished writing a fantasy novel.” I 
considered this.   
 
A teacher on the other side of the room, cozily dressed in a sweater that bore his school’s logo, 
asked the speaker to elaborate on how large the gaps between the specific areas of weakness and 
global intelligence had to be to diagnose learning disability. She replied there was some leeway 
for professional judgment, but the general guideline for diagnosing a student with a learning 
disability was that the standardized measure of academic achievement in a skill such as math or 
reading should be at least two standard deviations from where their overall IQ was.4   
 
The speaker then surprised us by admitting that slow learners might sometimes demonstrate 
higher scores than learning disabled students on parts of an IQ test. They might score, average or 
even higher than average in areas including processing speed and word reading but never, by 
definition, in reasoning. That was interesting. If I understood the concept of ‘processing speed’ 
correctly, that meant one could literally ‘think fast’ but still be a slow learner. I wondered how it 
got decided that some of the tasks on IQ tests were considered to be tests of reasoning while 
others were not. My mind drifted off to something I’d learned about a long time ago, the cult of 
reason ceremonies during the French Revolution during which reason itself was venerated in 
quasi-religious ritual, as a Supreme Being.5 That seemed to come out of nowhere, so when I 
heard myself think it I bit my tongue to make myself focus on the speaker. 
 
The psychologist then shifted gears from explaining these categorical definitions to describing 
how she encountered them in diagnostic practice. She admitted that she was always relieved to 
be able to diagnose a learning disability rather than a slow learner profile in a student, because 
the former label was less demeaning and resulted in more funded services for the student.  
 
Williamson was listening attentively and I could tell from his eyes he was formulating a question. 
He finally blurted out, not to me but to the speaker, “When a student tests as a slow learner, how 
do you communicate this data in a way that doesn’t suggest they are of lesser value than other 
students, like less valued than so-called ‘normal’ students or students with learning disabilities 
but average intelligence?” 
 
The speaker was confused. “Communicate … to whom. To parents?” 
 
Williamson said, “To everyone.” Then he went on. “How do you prevent the statistical measure 
of IQ from becoming interpreted as a global statement about somebody’s worth as a learner?” 
 
The speaker still looked confused. I couldn’t blame her. I wasn’t sure I got it either. But she 
attempted an answer. “The IQ, it is what it is. I just try to communicate the scores as tactfully as 
I can. But if the parents you work with are upset by these reports, or if you or other teachers 
                                                
4 American Psychological Association (2000, p. 51) 
5 Doyle, (2002, p. 238) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    8 

don’t know how to interpret them, you can always call us to try to explain them again.” William-
son looked less than satisfied with that answer and leaned forward a bit in his chair, about to 
reply, but then thought better of it. 
 
The speaker went on to explain strategies for supporting slow learners. These involved: giving 
concise, one-task-at-a-time instructions, trying to avoid passive learning activities such as 
copying notes from the board in favor of more active things like games and puzzles, trying to 
find ways that the subject areas of learning converged with the students’ personal interests, 
finding what the students were good at and drawing on these competencies, and using a lot of 
repetition when teaching difficult concepts. I saw Williamson nodding along. I asked if he tried 
to use these strategies, and he said he tried to, not just with students who were supposed to be 
slow learners but with most of students he worked with. While this speaker had given an unsatis-
fying answer to his previous question, she was identifying many of the same strategies he said he 
used with these students.  
 
While the speaker was answering another question, I glanced over a handout we’d been given 
entitled ‘How to Support a Slow Learner.’6  Most of the strategies addressed what were thought 
to be gaps in slow learners’ reasoning abilities, how to keep content as concrete as possible and, 
when abstraction was necessary, to make sure they were prepared and well-supported. This 
advice followed logically enough from the label but when I came to a section on reading, I was 
surprised to see in stark print the admission that many of the strategies that worked for students 
with reading disabilities would also work for slow learners. I briefly skimmed over these and 
then I elbowed Williamson in the chest, maybe a little too forcefully as he looked up with a 
pained expression. But then I showed him this passage and he glanced over it too and nodded his 
agreement again. “If so many of the strategies for working with struggling learners are so similar, 
at least for reading,” I whispered, “why make such a big deal over the categorical differences?”7 
A young, but stern looking teacher to our left shot us an angry glance, fed up with our talking 
during the presentation. 
 
The speaker then went on to describe a few more assessment strategies. She said slow learners 
tended to do better with assessments that allowed them to affirm what they knew instead of 
assessments that ‘tricked’ them into exposing their deficiencies in knowledge. She said that they 
tended to struggle, for example, with math problems with irrelevant information, or “red her-
rings,” I thought, packed into the questions. She said they tended to struggle with multiple choice 
testing when the distractors, or incorrect answers, were too close to the correct answer. She said 
that teachers always had to emphasize their strengths, to find the things they were actually good 
at, and to build on these things. She said that slow learners lacked confidence and were often 
embarrassed to ask for help. She then concluded by saying that due to long careers of school 
failure that slow learners are often highly discouraged, highly at-risk of dropping out8 and that 
they required care and attention despite the lack of resources the system made available to 
support them.    

                                                
6 See Shaw (2010, pp. 12-16). This is the actual source for most of the advice in the fictional handout. 
7 See Burgess (1990, p. 53) and Klassen, Neufeld, & Munro (2005). Both of these sources articulate the 
perspective Max has just come around to.     
8 Shaw (2006, pp. 12-14) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    9 

 
The remainder of the session involved questions for the speaker and some sharing, between the 
various participants, of further strategies to support slow learners. I tried to listen, but found my 
mind wondering where this speaker’s ideas fit in to this investigation, and where else I might 
look for slow learners that day. A little later, the speaker announced she was finished, and that 
there would be a fifteen-minute break, after which the topic for the session would change to 
something called Assistive Technology.  There were murmurs of thanks and light applause. As 
the other attendees began to shuffle out towards the restrooms or over to the refreshments, I told 
Williamson that I thought he’d exaggerated his claims about the indifference slow learners faced 
in the province’s educational system. There were a lot of concerned teachers at this session, I 
pointed out.  
 
“There’s over a hundred schools in this district,” Williamson answered back, “and there are only 
sixteen teachers here today.” I glanced at the large pile of still undistributed handouts in front of 
the speaker and at all the uneaten refreshments on the table. I took another Danish. 
 
“Still,” I asserted, “the speaker seemed to know a lot about this educational category and the 
supports these students need. Everyone who did show up seemed concerned about slow learners.”  
 
Williamson conceded this point with a shrug. “But did you hear her say anything about ways of 
actually changing things systemically to make things fairer for slow learners? Did you hear her 
response to my concern that the way the data is communicated sets the students up to be less 
valued?” 
 
“The strategies that she was talking about do sound like efforts to make school fairer for slow 
learners. You said you use some of the same ones she described,” I insisted. “Don’t you think 
more slow learners would get through school if everyone knew more about the category and the 
supports these students need to be successful?” 
 
“That’s not good enough,” Williamson insisted. “Something about the label still puts these kids 
at risk. Something about the interventions that flow from the label, even if some of them work, is 
contaminated. You heard her say she’d rather diagnose a learning disability than determine a 
student is a slow learner.”  
 
“What if slow learner was a disability label?” I asked. “You said that would lead to more ser-
vices?” 
 
“I said it might make it easier to access services,” Williamson replied, “but I didn’t think it was a 
good idea overall. Do you think these kids would really be that well served by a disability label 
that sets them even further apart, based on measured intelligence, from normal kids? The stigma 
of being quasi labelled is bad enough.” 
 
“Is it really that bad?” I asked. The room was beginning to quiet down again as the coffee break 
drew to a close. Another speaker had filed into the room and was plugging her laptop computer 
into the projector the previous speaker had used.  
 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    10 

“Back when the slow learner program was called IOP or the Integrated Occupational Program, 
other kids and even some teachers used to sneer at it calling it ‘Idiots on Patrol’, or ‘On Parade’. 
And how often have you heard the words ‘retard’ or ‘retarded’ used as an insults?” Williamson 
asked tersely. I didn’t answer, but I reflected I heard this all the time and had even used those 
words in this way on occasion myself.  
 
“Just asking,” I said, holding up my hands in a placating manner. Most of the attendees had 
returned to their seats by now and people were staring at us again. 
 
“The argument is only academic anyway,” Williamson replied in a calmer, quieter voice. “The 
way I understand it, the overall IQ is one category too close to average for any new sort of 
intellectual disability label to apply. On the other hand, there is no way another category of 
learning disability could be opened up for slow learners as learning disabilities all depend on big 
discrepancies, and once the overall IQ starts to get a little lower it’s harder to find that big of a 
discrepancy.” 
 
I remembered reading something about this categorical impossibility in the library, and hearing 
Williamson explain it to me now, with uncharacteristic clarity, seemed to exhaust the topic for 
the time being. I couldn’t think of anything else to talk to my client about, at least nothing worth 
continuing to disrupt the in-service over. While there was still a chance to make a getaway, I 
asked Williamson if he thought there would be much for me to detect in the session that was 
about to start. He shook his head. I whispered that I was going to check on some more leads and 
would call him that evening.  He reminded me to be careful. 
  

VII 
 

Back in the Buick, I sat shivering in a frozen vinyl seat and considered the next steps to my 
investigation. I wasn’t exactly lying when I told Williamson I had leads to follow up; I just didn’t 
know what they were yet. He had told me about a couple of other K & E teachers he respected at 
a different school in the district, though he said he didn’t know them as well as he knew Colleen 
Birdseye. He’d talked to them for a while at a convention one time and didn’t even remember 
their names, only the school they came from. Still, he thought maybe I should talk to them. 
Colleen Birdseye had been an open, forthcoming informant from the first words we spoke. I 
think I struck her as a straight shooter which I can be when a case doesn’t require deception, but 
I doubted this level of trust would be typical of every informant. I needed to talk to these teach-
ers as an insider. 
    
I made a plan to pose as a substitute at a school other than Williamson’s, and try to engage some 
teachers in a conversation about K & E. I considered the looks I got at the in-service and thought 
maybe I needed some help to blend in better. To get in character I stopped at a department store 
and picked up some beige corduroy pants. I grabbed a pre-packaged frozen stir-fry dinner too. 
Consulting a city map, I realized the teachers Williamson had suggested I speak to worked at a 
school on the other side of town from his. It took a while to drive there. I had never worn cordu-
roy in my life and between the car’s heater finally warming the interior and the texture of my 
pants, I felt like my legs were being squashed by a Panini press. I parked in a ‘visitor’ stall and 
made my way into the school. A bell schedule posted in the hall told me that, having skipped the 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    11 

next session at the in-service, I was still on-time for the school’s lunch break. Trying to affect the 
purposeful walk of a hungry substitute teacher, I made my way to the staff room. Glancing about 
as I walked, I noticed this school was newer than Williamson’s and had a sort of open design. 
Through windows and open doors, I noticed the classrooms looked more like small conference 
rooms with students sitting together at tables, not desks. Most of the rooms I walked by had 
Smart Boards. I reached the staffroom and quickly went over to the mailboxes. I observed that 
“Mr. Bostwick’s” box had accumulated several items over the past few days, including an as yet 
unmarked Social Studies test on ultranationalism during World War 2. I always liked history. I 
figured I would be Mr. Bostwick’s sub for the day.   
            
I started to microwave my stir-fry, made a trip to the staff restroom on the other side of the room 
and through a door, and returned to retrieve my heated meal. I also purchased a coffee for a 
dollar from a vending machine in the staff room. I listened to the conversations in the central part 
of the room as my coffee poured. Some of the groups of teachers at different tables were talking 
shop while other discourses involved familiar themes of sports, politics, and gossip. I couldn’t 
hear anything about IOP, K & E or slow learners.  
 
Along the back far corner of the room, I saw three teachers who had been too far away to eaves-
drop on. One of them was a hipster dude I figured to be in his thirties. He was sporting horn-
rimmed glasses, an impressive set of sideburns, khaki-colored skinny jeans and a retro golf shirt. 
He had a binder of resources that bore the handwritten label Social Studies 10-4. I remembered 
Colleen Birdseye using a similar course number when talking about teaching K & E, and I 
guessed that this man and his companions were likely the teachers Williamson had suggested I 
interview. I asked if I could join them at their table. They seemed surprised, but not unpleasantly, 
to have been noticed. One looked up and smiled, a young, tall dame with dark wavy hair and a 
pink blazer. She took a break from punching the buttons of her Smart Phone and gestured toward 
one of the cushioned chairs. The third teacher, an older fellow with a proud, senatorial head of 
silver hair, the formal effect toned down by a plaid woodsman’s shirt and faded blue corduroys, 
asked who I was in for and I replied “Bostwick.” They digested this news pretty easily. The 
hipster commented that he’d been out a couple of days and had a different sub yesterday and 
then things fell into a casual silence for a minute.  
 
Pointing to the binder, I asked if they were all K & E teachers. The older guy said they all taught 
some K & E classes, but only part time. They each had only one or two K & E classes in their 
teaching schedules, the hipster clarified. The older guy offered that he and the hipster had taught 
K & E full time before being moved over to this school due to closure of their prior school, so it 
looked like two of the three of them used to work with slow learners on more like a full-time 
basis. The hipster said that the group of teachers assigned to K & E classes liked to hang out 
together once or twice a week and exchange stories about the students they had in common and 
help each other out with strategies. I said I’d been doing a lot of subbing for K & E teachers 
throughout the system lately. 
 
 “I hadn’t heard good things about K & E,” I said, between the small bites of the bland, over-
sweetened stir-fry I was pretending to be enjoying, “but the students I’ve been working with 
have been pretty nice.” 
 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    12 

“If you treat them fairly and actually try to teach them it’s fine,” offered the teacher in the pink 
blazer. 
 
“It’s too bad about the Certificate of Achievement,” I opined. “If these classes were more 
popular, I’m sure a lot more kids could benefit from them, but no one seems to want the Certifi-
cate as a completion credential.”  
 
“Yeah, I used to work in Ontario,” offered the hipster. “It’s different there, more flexible. Being 
weaker in academic skills doesn’t cut you off of the diploma. In Ontario, students who require a 
lot of differentiation can get a diploma with only locally developed courses geared towards 
helping them. It’s not just the K & E kids who suffer in the province really, Alberta is focused on 
such a high standard. It’s great if your kid is in the elite, but it’s a shameful place to be for the 
mainstream population. Only a third of students go to university; what does Alberta education 
really do for the other two thirds?” 
      
“Do you think we could ever get as flexible here as you say it was in Ontario?” I asked. 
     
“Not as long as there are diploma exams,” asserted Silver Hair. “These kinds of kids aren’t pen 
and paper learners. The diploma exams only test their weaknesses, not their strengths.”  
 
I didn’t know what diploma exams were but couldn’t admit to it. “It’s so unfair for the K & E 
students,” I echoed, hoping to learn more.  
 
Silver Hair nodded in agreement and said, “Even if they manage to succeed in Math and Science 
where the next tier up from K & E has no diploma exam either, they can’t get out of high school 
with a diploma without having to sit for three hours through two English exams and two Social 
exams worth half their marks in these classes.”9 
 
From the context I took these exams to be some sort of highly weighted high stakes exit / com-
pletion exams for the province’s high school students.   
 
“Three hours of assessment Hell,” I remarked, hoping this was apt enough to solicit further 
commentary.   
 
“I don’t know what’s worse,” the hipster said, taking the bait. “The reading challenges, not to 
mention the stamina challenges, posed by the multiple choice components, or having to perform 
multiple written responses, with no real chance to collaborate or revise.”10  

                                                
9 See Alberta Education (2015, p. 2). In a policy change implemented Sep. 1, 2015, after the completion 
of this novelization, Alberta Education lowered the weighting of diploma exams to 30% of student’s final 
grades in their courses. This change seems likely to benefit students labelled as slow learners, so I am 
mentioning it in the interest of fairness. To maintain the integrity of the narrative and the phenomena it 
describes, however, I have not incorporated this or any changes of policy made after the initial release of 
this work, at the end of April, 2015, in the main story.  
10 See Alberta Education (2013, pp. 1-8). To elaborate on what Max has pieced together, for Alberta’s 
grade 12 students on the high school diploma track there are mandatory diploma examinations weighted 
(at the time this was written) at 50% of a student’s course grade in the following Grade 12 courses: 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    13 

 
“Whether or not we recommend K & E often hinges on if we think the student will eventually be 
able to handle a diploma exam,” added the girl in the pink blazer. “And a lot of the K & E 
students don’t even qualify for accommodations on them.” 
     
Even though I thought I’d already heard the answer from Colleen Birdseye, for the sake of 
verification I asked her why many K & E students didn’t qualify for accommodations. Her 
explanation echoed what I’d heard from the psychologist earlier that day; it sounded like a 
reasonable explanation of another unreasonable policy regarding slow learners. I still found this 
concept of accommodation weird. I’d always associated the word with shelter. Like the dingy 
hotels, including the present, that I occupied while out on cases. It sounded like slow learners 
were being denied shelter in a way.  
    
“Doing better on a test with an audio CD or a scribe should be seen as a learning modality, not a 
disability,” asserted the hipster.11   
    
“I don’t know about that,” I responded, playing devil’s advocate. “If we just start letting every-
one do tests and assignments by talking and listening wouldn’t that undermine reading and 
writing. We’re supposed to be all about literacy, aren’t we?” 
    
“Yeah, reading and writing is important. We obviously need to teach those skills,” acknowledged 
Pink Blazer, “but they are also ubiquitous. They shouldn’t be imposed so exclusively that a K & 
E kid feels like … he’s burning under a thousand hot suns every time he walks into the school,” 
she concluded poetically. 
 
“Back when schools were more concerned about K & E students I was asked do an in-service for 
the staff on the needs of this population of students,” Silver Hair said. There was that ‘in-service 
word’ again. I silently reflected that this profession must have a lot of screwed up individuals in 
it if they all needed constant retraining, as he continued with his story. “At the in-service, I asked 
                                                                                                                                                       
Biology 30, Chemistry 30, English Language Arts 30–1, English Language Arts 30–2, Français 30–1, 
French Language Arts 30–1, Mathematics 30–1, Mathematics 30–2, Physics 30, Science 30, Social 
Studies 30–1, and Social Studies 30–2. While there are tiers of Math and Science on the high school 
diploma track that do not require completion of diploma exams, to receive a high school diploma students 
are required to write diploma exams in either English Language Arts 30–1 or English Language Arts 30–2 
and either Social Studies 30–1 or Social Studies 30–2. The English and Social Studies examinations are 
both divided into multiple choice and written response parts.  
11 See Alberta Education (2013). Unlike this informant, Alberta Education takes a very cautious approach 
to providing accommodation on standardized testing, seeing their potential over-use as a threat to the 
validity of the assessments. “The goal of accommodation is not to optimize performance but to level the 
playing field by removing obstacles to performance that are inequitable. Consequently, accommodations 
are neither intended nor permitted to: alter the nature of the construct being assessed by an exam, provide 
unfair advantage to students with disabilities or medical conditions over students taking examinations 
under regular standardized conditions, or compensate for knowledge or skill that the student has not 
attained” (p. 12). 
 
 
  



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    14 

everyone to write down what their weakest commonly used skill in life was. You know how staff 
are at these things.” 
 
I didn’t but rolled my eyes in feigned solidarity. 
 
“Teachers are often the least cooperative students,” he continued, “but I didn’t go on until I saw 
everyone had actually done it. Then I told them to imagine for the next eighty-five minutes 
everything we did would involve that skill. It was only hypothetical of course, but you could 
have cut the tension in the room with a knife.”    
 
We all chewed on that, and our lunches for a while. Finally, I broke the silence. “I’ve only been 
doing some subbing in K & E,” I asserted, “I’m not really a K & E teacher, but do you really 
think it’s that bad? Every high school I’ve worked at has these amazing shop classes. Seems like 
there’s a lot of hands-on learning.” 
 
“Yes and no,” Pink Blazer said. “In our CTS classes in mechanics, as an example, students are 
asked to complete three thick booklets and a written safety test before they even get to touch 
anything on the car.12 For many K & E students, this turns them off, they lose all motivation. 
This is all backwards. They should get the hands-on learning first and if they really need to do 
some of the written theory at least do it only after they’ve actually had the hands-on experience. 
You know, to help them make sense of it.”  
     
“So,” I thought, “even the classes these overly concrete learners are supposed to be able to excel 
at are often inaccessible for them.” I tried, instead to fish out more optimistic sentiment in the 
conversation. “At least you have your actual K & E core classes to give them some practical 
chances for concrete learning in these areas.” 
     
“We had more chances when it was IOP,” the older gentlemen informed me. “The curricula for 
English, Math, Social and Science were all geared towards giving the kids a more practical 
experience. They were shorter than the classes that were the next level up too. The -4 K & E 
classes are now the same length of time as the next level up and in terms of content are pretty 
much a watered down version of the -2 classes, which are themselves a watered down version of 
the -1 classes.” 
 
“Why did it change?”  I asked. 
  
A lot of schools were saying IOP was too different to offer at their facilities. So the curriculum 
writers were trying to align it better with the so-called regular program, and make it easier for 
schools to timetable it and for students to schedule it along with their non IOP classes, but they 
ended up nearly killing it.” He sighed as he uttered this last statement. 
 
“I don’t get,” I pressed. “How did aligning the classes better with the diploma route nearly kill K 
& E?” Here was another mystery to solve. 
                                                
12 See Alberta Education (2010). This acronym stands for Career and Technology studies classes which 
include “shop” or industrial arts classes in welding, carpentry, mechanics, cooking and cosmetology, as 
well as classes in legal studies, management and marketing, accounting, and computing.  



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    15 

      
Silver Hair began to explain, “Well, even if not all schools were embracing IOP, some of the 
schools that did were using the emphasis of the classes and format of the program to do some 
really innovative things. I heard about one school program at the time that routinely engaged its 
IOP students in building houses, as a part of their IOP classes.” 
  
That sounded pretty exciting. I made a note to try to follow up on it. Silver Hair continued, 
“Before I started working in this high school, I was at a vocational school. We weren’t quite as 
ambitious as the house-building school, but things went pretty well. In the core area we had IOP 
classes and the lower academic tier of classes; sometimes we combined the two levels in the 
same classroom. It had great labs, and shop teachers who really focused on hands-on learning.” 
His face transformed into a wistful expression as he explained this last bit.  
     
The hipster jumped in with his own story, “Where I used to teach we just had a large IOP popu-
lation in a regular school. We often relied on off-campus education - work experience place-
ments with community employers - to get the kids through the vocational requirements for their 
IOP certificates. By the time most of our kids reached grade twelve, they’d worked at several 
school-arranged jobs and they’d learned how to communicate with employers, how to conduct 
themselves in a place of business, how to work hard, and so on. One of the non-IOP teachers in 
the school said he could always tell who my kids were, not because their skills were weak but 
because they were so much more polite than the other students. At least they graduated ready to 
function on a job; now they leave knowing no more about this than any of the other students do. 
They gutted the program.” 
 
“Isn’t this all a bit nostalgic?” I challenged. “Things couldn’t have been going that well or they 
wouldn’t have changed the program. Besides, isn’t education supposed to be getting more 
inclusive?” 
 
“Inclusion into what?”13 The hipster spoke up. “If all inclusion means is putting K & E students 
back into some of the same rigid classrooms they’ve struggled in throughout, without offering 
additional support, they’d be better off in separate classes that are at least designed to meet their 
needs.” 
         
“Inclusion has meant taking things away for K & E kids, not putting things in,” Silver Hair 
agreed. “Our district’s interpretation of inclusion has meant shutting down the vocational settings 
where K & E was being offered. Inclusion was seen as you don’t need discrete schools. Maybe 
there were problems with the previous model but no one in this district has proposed a meaning-
ful alternative, schools were just given another teacher or two and a bunch of K & E kids and 
told to figure it out. Once again, the actual K & E students were the afterthought, or afterbirth.” 
 
I found this to be a rather harsh metaphor and expected his companions to shudder or appear 
offended in some way, but they all calmly accepted the truth of the statement. This was all rather 
depressing. I could see why no one else was sitting with these three. Then, once I got over the 

                                                
13 Allan (2008, p. 48) 
 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    16 

shock of the metaphor, the reality he described set in and I blurted out, “But how? How can a 
district be so careless with such a vulnerable category of students?” 
        
They all looked at me quizzically and I thought I’d blown my cover with such a naïve question. 
     
“You haven’t worked in special programs much, have you? I mean before the subbing gigs in K 
& E?” asked the teacher in the pink blazer. I don’t think she had any idea how completely she 
was rescuing me with that remark. I was so grateful I considered proposing marriage. 
 
“No, I’m just starting to learn my way around that corner of education.” I thought I might as well 
admit to this, but tried to follow up with some kind of observation to show I wasn’t completely 
out to lunch. “But from what I’ve seen in the little experience I have with it, I mean from the 
classes I’ve been in, it seems that schools don’t always follow the criteria for K & E real closely 
either. I’ve heard that K & E is supposed to be for slow learners, you know, behind in school, 
low average IQ and so on. It seems more like it’s often used for anyone who doesn’t fit into the 
regular program.” 
  
“It’s not a big surprise schools have to look for alternatives for a variety of students. The regular 
program can be pretty brutal, curricularly. It leaves a lot of complex learners out in the cold. 
Diploma exams loom large over the classroom experience, governing not only what is taught but 
how it’s taught,” she explained.  
 
“Why is it a bad thing that classroom teachers model most of their assessments on diploma 
exams?” I asked, now embracing a naïve persona.  
 
“They don’t test a whole range of skills, or knowledge,” she asserted. “Take English Language 
Arts. The program of studies indicates students should be taught and assessed on their ability to 
do process-oriented writing, produce multiple drafts, restructure first draft writing, and shape 
texts according to audience and purpose.” 
     
“Uh-huh,” I replied. I felt like she was lecturing us, but thought I’d bear with her to see where it 
went.  
      
“Well, where is the opportunity to do these things on a diploma exam, or on a time-limited in-
class essay that is modeled after the diploma exam? These skills from the program of studies are 
basically bypassed while skills like writing under pressure, coming up with ideas quickly, and 
producing a polished first draft, that aren’t even on the program of studies get added as the major 
skills being assessed.”14 
       
“Sounds like a game show,” I remarked. “Some kind of beat the clock thing.” 
       
“Yeah, a sick, high stakes game show, with mandatory participation.” Pink Blazer agreed. “Kind 
of like in that movie The Hunger Games.15 Teaching to the test sometimes is bad enough, but this 

                                                
14 See Slomp (2008) 
15 Williamson & Paul (2012, p. 6) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    17 

literally turns teaching into the test. The course becomes a one hundred twenty-five hour diploma 
exam.” 
 
“More like three hundred and seventy-five,” Silver Hair suggested. “The grade ten and eleven 
courses pretty much work this way too, even though the diploma exam isn’t until grade twelve. 
You know, just to keep it consistent, they say.”   
 
 “Isn’t that overstating things a bit,” I asked, winning a shrug of concession from the teacher in 
the pink blazer. “Besides,” I added, hoping I had a line of argument I’d picked up from in the 
news in my own country right, “don’t these tests also hold schools accountable for teaching 
students the curriculum,16 for giving students reasonable marks, and so on. Don’t they help it all 
from becoming a big free-for-all?” 
      
“You’re not expressing a very high opinion of the work we do if you think that’s what would 
happen without these tests,” scolded Silver Hair.  
 
Chastened, I changed the topic, reframing the statistic I’d read about low provincial enrolement 
in K & E as a personal observation and follow-up question. “K & E numbers are pretty low at the 
schools I’ve been working at. Are they low here too?” 
 
“I only have five students in my K & E social class next period,” Pink Blazer confirmed. “I can’t 
see any administrator putting up with numbers that low for very long. They’ll probably just 
dump the K & Es in with the lowest tier of the high school diploma level class, the -2s, next year 
and have me teach that, just to make everyone else’s numbers a little lower.” 
 
“Oh? Will that make things even worse for slow learners?” I asked. 
      
“I don’t know,” she admitted, “Maybe.” I was about to ask her to elaborate when I saw, out of 
the corner of my eye, a tall, broad-shouldered, bearded man, legs so thick his brown corduroys 
rubbed together as he walked, enter the staff room. He went over to the mailbox labeled 
Bostwick, retrieved the contents, sat at an empty table in the far corner from where the K & E 
teachers and I were sitting, and began to go through them. My lunch companions were not 
positioned as well as I was for viewing the entrance to the staff room and, luckily, did not notice 
him. Still, I thought I was pressing my luck remaining in the room any longer. I thanked my 
‘colleagues’ for the company and made my way out of the staff room.  
  

VIII 
 
I returned to the foyer, where I observed an intramural floor hockey game through the window of 
the gymnasium doors. I wondered if any slow learners were playing. The stands were filled with 
students watching the game. A team dressed in long socks, half shirts and shorts in ironic hom-
age to 1980s fitness wear opposed a team in coveralls with the team name ‘The Mechanics’ 
written on their backs in felt pen. Though the uniforms were light hearted, the game was contest-
ed with a scrappy intensity that made me tired just watching. One of ‘The Mechanics’ caught my 
eye as he waltzed with liquid grace through three hacking and slashing opponents and popped 
                                                
16 Stewart (2004, p. 185) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    18 

the ball into the upper left corner of the net before the goal tender could even move. His game 
made everyone else look slow; I reflected if I was playing on the other team, I’d try to inflict a 
well-placed elbow to slow him down. 
 
This game ended in favor of ‘The Mechanics’, and the 1980s fitness stars left the court to be 
replaced by a group of students dressed as superheroes. As they warmed up, I realized at least a 
couple had Down Syndrome and it dawned on me that this whole team might be made up of 
students with moderate intellectual disabilities, maybe from one of the school’s programs. The 
game began. ‘The Superheroes’ definitely knew how to play but were not the floor hockey 
equals of most of ‘The Mechanics’, least of all the graceful forward I had noticed earlier. Where-
as the game before was hotly contested – anyone who had the ball could count on only a split 
second before his opponents would be all over him – in this game. ‘The Superheroes’ were given 
a little more space, a little more room to play. Just enough to keep it a playable game. With all 
the aggressive sorting of students I’d been reading about it was nice to see a game that included 
everyone. Still I was left wondering if ‘The Superheroes’ would still have ended up on the same 
team if they weren’t all in the same special education program? Or, would many have found their 
ways on to other teams, having been invited by their friends from their various classes?     
 
Looking back to the foyer traffic I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the teacher in the pink blazer 
walking towards me and it occurred to me that, even though it was risky, that this might be a 
good opportunity to find some actual slow learners. She had said she had a K & E social class 
scheduled for next period. I told her that Bostwick (who I prayed she had not noticed in the 
staffroom) had a spare and the office had not been able to find any other classes for me to assist 
with yet. I offered to teach her class. She considered for a moment and then gratefully accepted. 
She told me she had her class working on an ultranationalism assignment, but not to worry if we 
didn’t get very far as they often spent a long time just talking about the content, and sometimes 
things only vaguely related, instead of doing written work.  She told me if I had any background 
knowledge or experiences with the lesson to feel free to talk about them – her kids loved stories.  
 
Weaving in and out of the traffic of a couple thousand students en route to class, I followed her 
down the hall and up some stairs to the classroom. We entered a large room with new tables and 
chairs and old motivational posters featuring Charlie Brown, Garfield, photographs of 
orangutans, and trite advice. Apologizing for the room’s lack of personality, she told me that due 
to her varied schedule in the school she taught in different classrooms most of the day she wasn’t 
allowed to change the class decorations. A pair of students entered the room, then another 
student, and then the last student. The last one deposited a pungent, grease-stained paper bag 
bearing the label Burgeropolis on it in the classroom trash can on the way in. Every student said 
hello to us as they entered, the first three rather confidently, the last student quite shyly.  
  
Their teacher quickly ran through the names for me. She said all but one of the students were 
present. She explained that I would be substitute teaching the class for her and told them to keep 
working on the ultranationalism assignment. After she left, I told the students that before they 
continued with the assignment I, as a new substitute, would appreciate a chance to discuss K & E 
with them. I told them that this would help me in my career as a substitute. Wanting to begin on 
a positive note, I asked “So what do you like about being in K & E classes?” 
 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    19 

A girl with long black hair and a Hello Kitty shirt, introduced to me as Hope, was the first to 
respond. “Just, all the nice teachers, and how they help you all.” I looked behind myself to see if 
her regular teacher had come back in the room and she was saying that for her benefit, but no - it 
was a genuine statement. I chided myself for my own cynicism.  
          
Another student, the bearer of the Burgeropolis bag, jumped in. He was a thin, sandy haired boy 
by the name of David who looked young for grade eleven. He more or less repeated what the girl 
had said.  
          
I acknowledged these observations and moved on to asking how many K & E students attended 
their school, but none of them had any idea. Observing that this current class was pretty small, I 
asked if all of their K & E classes were like this or, remembering what their teacher had said 
about blended classes if there were some of those running too. I figured maybe some classes in 
other disciplines had already been blended. A couple of the students, at the same time, indicated 
they were in a blended science class. It combined students from the less academic tier of high 
school diploma level science with a handful of students taking science at the K & E level. I asked 
how many students were in that class and they indicated that it was around twenty-five.     
        
“What is that like?” I inquired, thinking someone might note that it was harder to get help in the 
larger class. 
     
“It was okay. Like, everybody did what they were supposed to do. Everybody worked. We could 
all work together,” replied Arturo, a young man with brown eyes, a round face, and an accent 
that I thought I recognized as Mexican.  
      
“I liked the pace in the blended class,” David noted. “In this social class it took us two months of 
lessons just to be ready for the first chapter of the text book. In science there was usually a 
chapter a week with a test after every single week.” 
 
I considered this for a minute and then asked, “Seeing as how you are in a class that has two 
different levels of science, have you had the chance to notice how often you are given different 
tasks or assignments than the other students?”  
 
“They don’t really do anything different,” she asserted. “They treat you, like, the same as every-
body else, and that’s kinda what I liked about it. No one knew I was in ES1, and that’s, like, um 
… they asked me, and they were like… there was this one kid, and she asked me if I was in ES1 
… and I was like, ‘yeah’, and she goes, ‘I never actually knew you were, you were keeping up so 
well’.” 
 
She had mentioned ES1, not K & E. I made a mental note to double check what ES1 meant, but I 
had a line of questioning to keep pursuing first. “Wow. That’s great,” I remarked, “but, I mean 
the work in the science class would be too hard at the higher level for some of you, right? Or 
you’d be getting higher level credits, not K & E level credits. How come you’re not getting 
higher level credits instead of K & E credits then?” I didn’t like to hear myself using the words 
‘higher’ and ‘lower’ with these kids but I couldn’t remember all the damn numbers in the se-
quence and I needed some handle to get my point across. 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    20 

 
“Because we would be doing …” she began, but then ran out of steam. “That’s actually a really 
good question, and I’m really not sure about that one. You’d have to maybe ask our teacher.” 
 
“Why are we getting K & E and not high school diploma level Science?” Arturo interjected, 
looking to clarify my question. At least he knew what to call the two different levels. 
 
“Yeah, yeah!” I could barely contain my excitement. 
     
“Because,” he explained, “K & E is for, like … is the level where it’s … they give you easier 
work, and in the high school diploma stream, you get to do what everybody else is doing, while 
in the K & E stream, you just … just do the half of the work that the other people are doing.” 
 
“I never noticed that, like … I would work with David all the time,” Hope said. “Me and David 
would have the same work. So I never really thought about it, it could have been true, but I never 
thought about it.” 
 
“Maybe,” I speculated, “your teacher was just so smooth doing it that you never really felt that 
different. You were getting handed something different, but you just didn’t notice?” 
 
“That’s probably it,” she said and then instead of being disturbed by this possibility she smiled, 
“It’s just … you do the work and they see how you do, and then see what credits you get. Then 
they kinda know, and then they judge about not having you answer certain questions, and how 
neat is that?”  
   
I wasn’t sure if it was neat or not so I was glad her question sounded rhetorical. I observed that, 
by and large, what I was experiencing so far was a group of positive, optimistic students who 
seemed appreciative of the programming they were receiving. This did not square with William-
son’s statements that slow learners were in danger, or Colleen Birdseye’s concerns, or those of 
the three teachers from this very school I’d been talking to minutes ago in the staffroom. Why? 
Remembering Colleen Birdseye’s story of being shunted so haphazardly all over the educational 
chessboard during her school career, I thought I could get a better sense of the dangers these 
students had traversed, and maybe were still experiencing, if I asked a little about their back-
grounds. I thought I’d begin with the student who’d said nothing so far. He was a tall and gangly 
red-haired student. “Uhh, I’m so bad with names,” I lied looking to open him up with a simple 
question before I asked him for his story, “and there’s only four of you I should know this by 
now … what’s your name again?” 
 
“Jonah,” he replied.  
 
“Jonah. How did you end up in K & E Social Studies?” 
      
“I … have really no idea,” he answered. I could see he was going to be a tough nut to crack.  
 
“No?” I pressed. “Well, at some point somebody must have told you what was going on with the 
level of classes you were going to take and maybe even asked you how you felt about it?” 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    21 

      
“It’s all pretty, uh …” Jonah began before shifting to a more summative statement. “I feel pretty 
uncomfortable with this class.” 
      
“You’re uncomfortable with being placed in K & E Social?” I tried to clarify.  
      
“Yeah …” he agreed. 
      
“Okay. Why’s that?” I asked.  
      
“Just because there’s not a lot of people and it’s just not as, uh, fun as the other classes I’ve 
taken,” Jonah answered vaguely.  
       
Understanding that this student was in grade eleven, I tried to clarify what other classes he might 
be referring to by going back to his earlier educational experiences. To get a better sense of this, 
I asked, “When you were in grade nine, were you just in regular ed. or were you already in K & 
E?” 
     
“Neither,” he replied. “I was in a special class, ES1.” 
        
It dawned on me that this ES1 was probably a class that was seen as academically lower than K 
& E, maybe a class for students with intellectual disabilities. Three out of four of these students 
described coming from ES1. No wonder some of these kids like being in K & E, I thought, they 
see it as moving up in the educational world.  
       
Just as I was thinking this, however, Arturo began a lengthy story indicating that he was not 
happy to have been placed in either ES1 or K & E.    
      
“I used to live in Mexico,” he began, “and I did kindergarten and grade one down there. But then 
they put me down to kindergarten here, and because I didn’t know the classes, I didn’t know the 
language, uh … the teachers didn’t want to struggle with me in teaching me the language and 
they just put me in ES1 for the ES1 teachers to struggle with me. And I guess that was unfair, 
because it, like … from grade three to six, I was, like, per se…”  
 
I was struck by his use of a Latin expression I associated more with contracts and lawsuits than 
high school students but thought maybe he’d heard it one day and it tickled his fancy, maybe 
even became a sort or earworm for him. Arturo continued.  
 
“I was put back from all the students, and then, at the end of grade six, I write this really, really 
strong letter to the school saying that I didn’t … that I strongly disagreed for me being in this 
program, because I … I knew I could do better, and I could succeed in the normal stream, and 
then they changed me. But then, the next year, when I arrived to normal grade seven, I don’t 
know anything because when I left grade six, in the ES1 classroom I was doing grade four 
material. And the next three years they pushed me up to grade seven, eight and nine, and I didn’t 
know where I was going or what I was doing, because I didn’t have grade five and six. And then 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    22 

in high school, because I can’t take the -1 level courses, I will not be able to go to university 
because of this.” 
    
I felt myself questioning the accuracy of some of his perceptions. From what I could tell from 
my conversations there was ES1, which was probably a level of special education for students 
with mild intellectual disabilities, then K & E above that for slower learners, then a more general 
high school diploma stream for kids who could achieve at normal levels but were not particularly 
strong in those subjects, and lastly a more academic, university-bound stream. It seemed some-
what outrageous for this student who had been placed in ES1 to be saying that he’d been unfairly 
kept out of the highest level of courses due to these experiences in early schooling. Then I 
remembered Colleen Birdseye’s story. Maybe I didn’t have any business questioning any of this. 
“So, it sounds,” I summarized, “like you think that some of that was unfair, like you’re not happy 
with how you were treated in some of those earlier grades, right?” 
    
“Yeah,” Arturo agreed, “because I knew I … that I can do more, and I have more energy, and I 
have more effort and I can do extra stuff that just … when I was in the ES1 program, we used to 
repeat the same material. They were just stalling in the same material. And, I guess I didn’t feel 
like we were … per se … advancing in the program, and I was just stalled. And now I’m stuck in 
K & E 20-4, when I could have been in 20-1 and been able to have the courses for university. 
But now, because of this, I’ll have to go to college because of these certain train of events.” 
 
From what I could tell from my investigation so far, Arturo had overestimated the value of the K 
& E Certificate as a school leaving credential and was actually in even worse shape than he 
thought. He would qualify for very few post-secondary pathways, college or university, unless he 
was able to move above K & E, but I didn’t say this.  Just then I heard Mr. Bostwick being paged 
to the office. I wondered if any of the people I’d spoken to, including the teacher whose class I 
was presently ‘teaching’ heard that announcement. How much longer would I be able to get 
away with this ruse? I decided I better cut to the chase.  
 
“Uh, have you guys heard the term ‘slow learner’ before? They sometimes use that in the same 
kind of, uh, student description as K & E. What do you know about that word, or those terms?” 
This felt to me like a rather abrupt shift but the students seemed to take it in stride. 
    
Arturo began, “Slow learner is … well, a slow learner basically is that you don’t learn as fast as 
the other students, and you need a little bit of help for you to be able to succeed.  I guess, I have 
been a slow learner and what happened with me is that I was a slow learner, and the school 
didn’t want to struggle with me,” he repeated from his previous reply, “so they just put me in 
ES1 because they thought I had a ‘problem’, that I didn’t learn because I didn’t learn as fast as 
the other … normal students. But I was … I could have … just stayed in the same level, because 
I wasn’t that behind.” 
 
I asked another student, Hope, the cheerful and talkative girl who had answered many of my 
earlier questions. “Have you heard the, uh, expression ‘slow learner’ before?” 
   
“I have,” she replied. “My teachers, when I was back in grade, like … half of grade three to four, 
they called me a slow learner and I asked, ‘What does that mean?’ and they told me, ‘you need a 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    23 

lot of time on projects, and you need a lot of time on booklets and paperwork, and you need 
more time on PowerPoints and copying down.’ That’s what I always think it is.” 
  
“I’m a slow learner too when it comes to notes,” David said. “In my health class I was always a 
little bit slow, and then if I did try to go faster I started to become messy. Like, I kept trying to 
copy it down, and then I’d go way too fast and miss parts. My health teacher, he said he would 
print out the notes so I wouldn’t have to copy them down. He goes incredibly fast. I don’t know 
how the rest of the class can keep up either.  It’s like five seconds on one page and then he flips 
over to the next page.” 
 
This wasn’t the sort of ‘slow’ I thought educators and psychologists were talking about when 
they said ‘slow learner’. ‘Slow’ was shorthand for lower IQ I thought. Whatever the abstract 
concept of intelligence was supposed to mean, and however limited and limiting this concept 
was when reduced to a single number, I thought it was still a lot more complicated than how fast 
a kid could copy off the board. At least I thought it was supposed to be. Is this what they thought 
‘slow learner’ meant? Had someone actually told them this was what it meant?  
 
“I’m far-sighted too,” Hope broke in interrupting my thoughts, “I can’t see far. And then, like, 
my glasses are at my mom’s house…” 
 
“You mean near-sighted, because far-sighted is that you can see far,” Arturo corrected.  
    
“One of the two, yeah,” she replied, unconcerned. “And, um … so, my glasses are at my mom’s, 
so I haven’t had my glasses for two weeks.” 
 
I was considering if not being able to see the board made a student a slow learner too, when 
David, the skinny kid at the back, broke in again.  
 
“Yeah. I’ve heard that I am a slow learner. I need lots of help with my work, and everything I do. 
I did curling, and my friend’s dad was the instructor. He’s tried to teach me how to keep my foot 
from going way up there, but it still kept going up there, so I needed a lot of help with that.” 
 
I considered the arcane sport of rocks and brooms he’d just mentioned, one I was only familiar 
with from a brief viewing of it on television during a lonely night a long time ago when the 
Winter Olympics were the only thing on television. “If you have to be a slow learner at any-
thing,” I thought to myself, “I guess being a slow learner at curling isn’t so bad.” Instead of 
offering this evaluation, in case the kid did think it was a big deal, I just kept quiet.  
 
“I took dance last semester,” Hope remarked, “and my teacher was impressed on how fastly I 
picked up the moves. That was my first time ever taking dance.” 
 
“I’m definitely not a slow learner at basketball,” Arturo offered. 
 
Jonah, who had been sitting silently ever since he’d trailed off telling the story of his placement 
in ES 1 and Arturo had taken over with his own story, suddenly stood up and produced from his 
backpack three bowling pins. He began to expertly juggle them. I supposed I should say some-



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    24 

thing about this interruption in routine, but then I remembered I was only impersonating a 
teacher and didn’t really care whether they did their work or performed circus acts, so I just 
watched him for a while. 
  
“That’s fantastic,” I remarked when he was done. “Where did you learn how to do that?” 
 
“He just saw it on You Tube one day,” David said, speaking for Jonah. “We watched it together 
at lunch time. That night he took some balls and figured it out in about five minutes, he showed 
us the next day. Then he bought some bowling pins and he’s been putting on these shows for us 
ever since.” 
 
Jonah smiled and sat down. I’ve never been able to juggle anything, balls, bowling pins, relation-
ships, money. I didn’t know whether I wanted to hug him, ask him how he did it, or break his 
arms. I reflected on what I’d heard from the kids so far, and felt none the wiser about where the 
slow learners went. These students were in a class for slow learners. Most of them had even 
come from a program for students who were supposed to be intellectually weaker than slow 
learners. But many of the things they said they were slow learners at didn’t really seem that 
central to learning. Furthermore, they often gave thoughtful, articulate answers to my questions 
and had showed me a few things they definitely weren’t slow learners at. Everywhere I investi-
gated, this concept of slow learner appeared for a second, and then pulled a vanishing trick. I was 
getting tired of this act.  
 
I’d heard all I could process from these students. I couldn’t think of any more questions to ask. 
Hopefully I’d be able to figure out a way to see them again if I came up with some more. They 
were paging Bostwick again. I needed to make a getaway. With hunched posture and a little 
moaning, I began to simulate a sudden onset gastric ailment. The students began to look con-
cerned. I told them I suddenly wasn’t feeling well. Then I phoned the staff room where the 
teacher who I’d volunteered to relieve for the period was working, and let her know I’d taken ill 
suddenly and was leaving. Abandoning the class that had shown me such goodwill with their 
answers to my questions, I began a hasty exit. In the downstairs hallway, I passed a classroom 
with an open door and a large man pointing to a map of 1944 Europe on a Smart Board; it was 
Bostwick. As I walked straight ahead past his class, I caught him regarding me curiously before 
resuming his lecture. Since that was all he did, I surmised Bostwick had not yet heard about his 
strange, unsolicited substitute, and I felt grateful that there wasn’t more interdepartmental 
collaboration going on in this particular high school.     
    
I pulled out of the school parking lot, passing the Burgeropolis restaurant across the road at a 
little strip mall I hadn’t paid much attention to on the way in. Noticing the Buick was running 
low on fuel, I stopped at a gas station a few blocks down and filled it up, and then changed out of 
the corduroys in the station’s dirty bathroom. As the itching in my legs subsided, I felt more 
myself again, but I also reflected that for a while there, when the kids and I really fell into 
conversation, I hadn’t felt like an imposter at all.  
 

 
 
 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    25 

IX 
 
I decided to take a drive. I had nowhere to be, but it would give me something to do with my 
hands while I reviewed the recent developments in the case. Reflecting on my earlier realization 
that I wasn’t sure if I’d actually met any slow learners in the class for slow learners, I also 
remembered that Arturo had attributed his academic troubles to language difficulties. If he was 
right about being misplaced in ES1 and K & E over language learning issues this made the 
application of the slow learner label doubly suspicious. This was indeed an elusive category of 
students I was looking for.  
 
The neon sign of a greasy spoon restaurant glowed through the dirty windshield of my car. 
Though I’d already consumed two meals and a snack in five hours, I realized I was hungry again. 
My body had been constantly craving things to burn for warmth since I’d arrived in this city, and 
the stir-fry hadn’t been very substantial. I pulled into the restaurant and walked from my car to 
the entrance, bracing myself against the sudden insult of a harsh wind. I sat down, and the 
waitress rambled over to pour some coffee for me and gave me a menu. Her hair hung in tired 
spirals and she smelled of potatoes and nicotine. I ordered a clubhouse sandwich and, maybe 
because this restaurant was almost as empty as the one I’d been to in the morning, received my 
food right away. There were no stacks of newspapers at this joint to entertain me as I ate but that 
was okay, I had my thoughts about the case to read.  
 
I wondered if I was looking too closely at all of this, if I needed a longer view to find slow 
learners.17 Despite my best efforts to find them by talking to teachers and students I had yet to 
find one. Instead of using the category as a lens to see students who matched the description, 
maybe I needed to study the process by which the school system had learned to find slow learn-
ing students. How long had it been finding slow learners for? I thought about these Knowledge 
and Employability classes, and the Integrated Occupational Classes that preceded them. I won-
dered what came before IOP? I wondered if, at least since public education started, there had 
always been some sort of different schooling for students seen as slower. Did they always sort 
students into these programs by IQ? How did this all come about? Did the alternate schooling 
paths for slow learners always have this vocational emphasis? What called out to me just then, 
was the history of all of this.  
          
I felt, then, the heat of being observed and, using a clean part of my spoon as a mirror, saw that 
someone had slipped into a booth a few tables behind mine and was watching me. Bending to 
scratch my ankle, I stole a longer glance using my seasoned peripheral vision. He wore a grey 
suit with creases so sharp you could shave with them and was alternating between writing in a 
clipboard and measuring me with unblinking, steely eyes. Everything about this guy spoke of 
bureaucratic conspiracy.  I took a slow breath to contain my excitement. This was the break I 
was waiting for. I needed to turn the tables on him; tail him, and find out who he was working 
for. I thought if I dialed up the heat in this restaurant and upset his sense of an orderly stakeout, 
he might want to leave to avoid attention. I could then follow him back to wherever he came 
from. When my waitress returned to refill my coffee, I began to berate her about the quality of 
the meal, the staleness of the coffee, the rubbery bacon, the soggy toast, and the dirty table. I 
                                                
17 See Heidegger (1927/1962) “The Being of the entities encountered environmentally as closest to us 
remains concealed” (p. 131). 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    26 

demanded to see a manager. I pounded the table. The cook came out from behind the grill and 
began to advance towards the table. His greasy t-shirt didn’t succeed in covering a large stomach 
or enormous meaty arms, each one the size of a ham. The bemused expression he wore suggested 
there was nothing he’d like more than to brace me between himself and the table with his giant 
gut while he drummed on my head. My observer got up and skittered out of the restaurant and, a 
half beat later so did I, throwing down enough cash to pay for the meal plus a generous tip and a 
shouted apology to the bewildered staff.  
  
I rushed to my car, looking to follow my pursuer. He had used his head start well and was 
already speeding out of the parking lot in a nondescript grey van. I had to catch up or I’d lose 
him. In my haste, I was only vaguely struck by the novelty of a black Peugeot driving towards 
me. Then I was struck more intensely as it lurched into a sharp arc over the restaurant sidewalk 
and clipped me just below the hip. I fell to the ground clutching my thigh, the nerves in my leg a 
gang of jumping monkeys. Two men scrambled out of the car to see if I was okay. Under normal 
circumstances, an assault such as this would bring out the darkness in me and I’d fight on even 
with four broken limbs. Leading with my fists was, after all, one of my primary methods of 
investigation. But I was so surprised by the event, and the men who were jumped out of the car 
struck me as so odd, that my rage was short-circuited and I simply waited in curiosity and 
agonizing pain.  
        
The first man approached me. As he crouched to examine me, leaning on the car that had struck 
me, I noted that he was not physically tall but had a tall crop of thick snow-white hair that 
seemed to possess a will of its own. Once he determined my life wasn’t in peril, his lips turned 
up slightly in an enigmatic smile that might have been amusement or embarrassment, and his 
brown eyes took on a playful sparkle. I studied him as he inquired about my injuries in a strong 
French accent despite his excellent English. Under his overcoat, he wore a slightly rumpled 
charcoal suit brightened by a burgundy shirt and oddly patterned brown, grey, and purple tie. He 
seemed amicable, but shy and a little distant, alert and inquisitive, and yet haunted by a certain 
melancholic stillness.18 His companion was stranger still. Standing over the two of us, at first 
poised and ready to assist in whatever first aid was needed, and then relaxing slightly when he 
determined my life wasn’t in danger, he had the cunning face of a fox, albeit a completely 
hairless one. He wore thick glasses, and though he was only slightly taller than average, the tall 
effect exaggerated by his thinness and striking baldness. Under his overcoat, he wore black pants, 
a black sport coat and a white turtleneck. He looked almost like a comic book caricature mashup; 
the thin body and outfit of a beatnik jazz musician with the head of Lex Luther, from the Super-
man comics, pasted on it.  
 
After I assured the driver I did not think my leg was broken, the two of them helped me to my 
feet. It was too soon to try to stand and my leg began to throb so they had me sit sideways in the 
passenger side of the Peugeot. From what I could piece together from the French I dimly recalled 
from a boring class during a boring high school career, the bald man had begun to chastise the 
other for his bad driving. Though I couldn’t make out most of the words, listening to him speak 
was like watching a skilled baker knead dough, expertly forming the strands together and then 
slapping the dough into its final form with petite bits of measured violence. The effect was lost 
on the other who just shrugged indifferently. They offered to take me to a clinic to check out the 
                                                
18 Goodrich (2005, p. 814) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    27 

extent of my injury and since this was my favorite leg, or perhaps my second favorite, and I 
wanted to know how soon it would start working again, I accepted.  
 
The shorter man went into the restaurant and inquired where the nearest medical center was. 
When he returned, despite the protests of his companion, Jacques, as I heard him addressed, got 
behind the wheel again and started off. He drove like it was some kind of sport. The liquor stores 
and sex shops and soulless restaurants on the ugly thoroughfare whizzed by my eyes like sign-
posts on a highway to despair. At first the two made polite attempts to converse with me, taking 
turns apologizing and asking how my leg was feeling. When it became apparent I was too sore 
and too shocked to make much conversation, they began a heated debate in French and English. I 
gathered that the topic being debated had to do with the name ‘Descartes’,19 and that the bald 
man was named Michel, but I could not determine either of their perspectives on the topic. They 
seemed deeply divided on some point, whatever it was, yet in how their speaking cadences 
meshed, they seemed somehow inseparable. Though I never caught the overall gist, some of the 
weird things they were saying have stayed with me, half-remembered, to this day and still pop 
into my head if I’m daydreaming.  
 
We arrived at the clinic, a box-shaped building on a small side road of the main drag and I 
limped in, leaning on the bald man for support. When we approached the front desk, the recep-
tionist saw us coming and retrieved a wheelchair from a small room behind the counter. Popping 
her chewing gum absently, she beckoned my new friends to help me sit, and then handed me a 
form to fill out. She said the doctor would see me shortly. My leg was throbbing so badly that the 
pain radiated all over my body, and I could barely see straight enough to complete the form, so 
my new friends volunteered to help.  
        
“You are to list your last name first? Does your first name then become your last name and last 
name your first name?” inquired Jacques, scrutinizing the form. “Writing the last name first 
brings to bear some formality on an event such as this, though making the last name first sug-
gests a strange intimacy too. A formal-intimacy indeed, as you will soon be taking your pants off 
so the doctor can examine you!”   
   
“And your occupation…,” chimed in Michel, who was studying the form as well, “your present 
occupation is occupying this chair waiting to be seen. Why should your occupation matter on a 
form such as this? But before treatment you, through a routine exercise of power/knowledge and 
by the tool of this clerical technology, are to be sorted and classified by how you make your 
living, your gender, marital status and so on. What if you live in the spaces between some of 
these boxes? Without asking you, these discourses are already confirming your so-called normal-
ity or pushing you to the margins. If you are here you may be sick to be sure, but are you a 
‘normal’ sick or an ‘abnormal’ sick’?” He punched the last two words insinuatingly. 
        

                                                
19 See Boyne (1990, p. 63). Descartes’s views on madness became a source of tension between these two 
intellectuals when Derrida described madness as in Cartesian thought as internal to the Cogito and 
accused Foucault of simply and naively rearranging the reason/unreason dichotomy in his writings on 
Descartes’ Meditations. In this parallel universe, it is still something of a sore point in an otherwise 
mended relationship between the two.  



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    28 

A nurse arrived and told me that a doctor would see me soon. She seemed vexed that between 
the three of us we still hadn’t completed the brief patient registration form. I took it with me as 
she wheeled me into an inner office, leaving Jacques and Michel to continue discussing the 
artifact they had just seen. Despite my pain, maybe it was better if I completed the form on my 
own. 
  
I waited in the inner office for some time, taking turns between checking off boxes on the form 
and cursing. I was laying down a familial-themed blue streak when a stern-looking woman in a 
white lab coat entered the room. At her bidding, I took off my pants and she subjected my leg to 
some painful bending and prodding as I continued to mutter profanity. I was usually more of a 
gentleman in mixed company, but I simply couldn’t help it this time. The physician declared my 
wound an acute grade two soft tissue injury to the quadricep, hamstring and gluteal muscles. As I 
struggled into my pants, she wrote me a prescription for some painkillers, and when I objected 
that I was a private investigator and didn’t want to be medicated during this case, she told me 
that I seemed pretty angry, and if I investigated this case while in such intense pain I might have 
difficulties with self-control. It would be good if I submitted to the need for medication. She then 
told me I needed to stay off my feet as much as possible for the next seventy-two hours, and that 
complete healing might take as long as a month. I’d never known complete healing. 
  
The nurse returned me to Jacques and Michel. We left the clinic and they drove me to a pharma-
cy to pick up my pills. “Where are you planning on going next?” Michel inquired, seeming like 
he was enjoying this adventure. 
     
“I don’t really know,” I replied. “I’m a detective,” my two new acquaintances made appreciative 
noises, “and I lost one of my only leads this morning when you two crashed into me. This case 
has gone as cold as this city and now I’ve been disabled too. I might as well go back to my hotel 
and start drinking. Better yet, maybe you could take me out on a nice country road, shoot me, 
and leave me in the ditch.” 
       
“I have a better idea,” said Jacques, “I think we can take you somewhere that will help in your 
investigation.” 
     
“You’ve done enough to help already,” I grumbled. I couldn’t help it; my leg was killing me.   
       
“No, we insist. I think you will have a much easier time finding the ‘slow learners’ if you take 
this journey with us.” 
       
It took a second for this to register with me. After it had I realized that these two had been 
holding out on me. I felt the sudden urge to get away from them. I grabbed the inside handle on 
the Peugeot and shouldered the door open. I launched myself awkwardly out of the car and took 
four steps before collapsing in pain on the pharmacy parking lot. Michel got out and retrieved me. 
Feeling resigned to whatever my fate might be at this point, I accepted his help with docility and 
was soon settled into the back seat where I could stretch out my throbbing leg. I thought I might 
as well pop a painkiller. The one I got out of the box looked appealing. It was a pretty purple 
color with little yellow stripes and tiny white writing. It looked a bit like an Easter egg.  
      



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    29 

“We are sorry to have potentially excluded you from your own investigation in this way,” began 
Michel. 
     
“You see,” interrupted Jacques, “John Williamson asked us to see if we could help you. He was 
worried; he said he you’d been in danger already.” 
    
“Vehicular assault? Is that what passes as help where you come from?”  
    
“I assure you,” Jacques asserted soothingly, “that was accidental. We saw you trying to pursue 
that man in grey and thought we should intervene. We got too excited.” 
 
“You got too excited!” Michel corrected, producing another shrug from Jacques in reply.  
      
I wasn’t quite ready to forgive, but I was calming down. The medication kicked in, and the 
buildings began to glide by in white blurs as Jacques turned into and sped through a long indus-
trial district. As we began to reach the outskirts of town, I inquired where we were going. 
 
“A special place,” answered Michel, “a private museum and archive. It is here that you will get 
the background you will need to crack this case.” 
 

X 
 
By the time we reached the structure, everything was starting to get a surreal tinge that I could 
not decide if I liked or not. I settled on ‘structure’ for a label because it looked more like a 
retaining wall than a building; it was built into a large hill that could just as easily have been 
man-made or natural. Michel parked, and I gingerly got out of the car with some help from my 
new companions. It would be a long, painful and cold walk to the entrance. Only official institute 
vehicles were allowed in the first several spaces in the parking lot and though the inner lot was 
almost completely empty, a gate and key card setup reinforced the boundary. 
   
“Be wary. Do not approach your walk through these galleries as a journey through increasingly 
refined categories of disability.” Michel admonished me as we walked, with the two of them 
supporting me, along a sidewalk leading to the building. I wasn’t sure if his warning was dis-
tracting me from my discomfort or adding to it.  
 
“Disability and slow learner are not, finally, scientific or theoretical discourses, they are regular 
daily practices. What assumptions govern the placement of slow learners on this educational 
track, and how does this track in turn shape understandings of the slow learner label? How did 
separate tracking emerge to construct slow learners as different from ‘normal’ learners? How did 
it come to be that ‘slow learner’ as a label was parceled out as separate from the many disability 
labels that get applied to individuals? What were the prior ways of addressing learning impair-
ments and how did they construct people?” 
 
Even through the haze of the medication, these questions caught my attention. I’d had similar 
ideas, but found Michel’s way of addressing these considerations particularly penetrating. I felt 
less a hostage and more a partner for the first time since meeting these two.   



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    30 

 
“Do not attempt to find a truth or a grounding for the idea of slow learner.” Michel continued, 
“Just appreciate how the systems of knowledge that produce such ideas have mutated over time. 
Do not be so bold as to try to fully understand past appearances of categories, just look for 
discursive traces, clues if you will, by which you might construct a history of the present. Then 
you might find your slow learners.”20   
 
“You have to analyze the history and the historicity of the breaks which have produced our 
current world [of disability categorization]. Out of [a certain] origin, [but] breaking or trans-
forming this origin, at the same time,” Jacques added, emphasizing, as far as I could tell, that the 
transformations Michel was speaking of were rarely smooth or orderly.21 I thought this another 
fair point. 
 
As I hobbled along, a question occurred to me. “I’m not just looking for slow learners, you know, 
my client thinks the ways they’ve been classified have something to do with why they’ve fallen 
through the cracks, or been pushed through the cracks, and he is looking to make sure it doesn’t 
happen again. Is there some kind of tool I can use to expose the problems with the classification 
systems in order to make things safer for them?” 
  
“I have a whole toolbox designed for this sort of thing,” Michel confidently remarked,22 “but do 
not assume the enterprise will make things safer for your client’s students in any stable or 
permanent way. Everything is dangerous.” 23    
  
I took this as less helpful. It sounded both cryptic and paranoid to me but before I could press 
him on it, we finally reached the building. A large sign above the thick wooden doors read 
CODRI. Looking at the black lettering on the door itself, I realized this was an acronym, and a 
rather stupid one in its unwieldiness. It stood for. 
 

Classification 
Of 
Disability 
Research 
Institute 

 
Noting the confusion in my face, Jacques remarked, “The sign is an ill-named thing.” 24  I 
couldn’t tell if he was being cryptic too, or just remarking on the unwieldy acronym.  
 
We entered the facility. It appeared to be a very slow day; I saw no other patrons. Michel and 
Jacques signed me in as a guest at the registration desk. They insisted, due to the very recent 
injury they had helped me acquire, that I borrow a motorized scooter, like the kind patrons with 
limited mobility are sometimes lent in shopping malls, to make my travels easier. They insisted 
                                                
20 Tremain (2008, p. 16)  
21 Derrida (1997, p. 10) 
22 Foucault (1974, pp. 523-524) 
23 Foucault (1997a, p. 256) 
24 Derrida (1974, p. 18) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    31 

that we each travel through the gallery individually, arriving at our own conclusions. We could 
discuss things after my tour. A host standing in front of the reception desk, a smiling, sandy 
haired young man in an official grape-purple blazer, explained to me that to blur the lines 
between observer and observed, I could select a particular disability from the menu above to 
embody and, in my travels, I could experience how I was being treated throughout the ages as a 
person with this disability. He told me each disability had its own self-guided audio tour. I asked 
why it wasn’t a good enough category that I needed a scooter to get around the museum. He said 
that didn’t count, it wasn’t one of the ‘official’ categories. I asked him if picking up his teeth 
with broken fingers was one of the categories and, as he considered this, I slammed the controller 
on the scooter forward, running over his toes, and then turned into the entrance of the gallery.  
 
Glancing quickly at a floor plan on the wall I saw that the museum was set up as a series of long 
ovals, one on top of the next, wrapped around closed-off offices, meeting rooms and laboratories. 
The exit/entrance to the gallery on each floor was the only access point to the stairs and elevator 
to the next floor. The first floor dealt with disability in antiquity. That seemed an awfully long 
way to go back to find slow learners so I opted for the next floor where I could tour ‘disability in 
medieval times.’ 25 
  
I took the elevator to the second floor and began the long circle through the displays. A sign near 
the start of the gallery informed me of the Greek roots of the word idiot, “Idiotes,”26 meaning 
roughly: a layman or one ignorant of the affairs of more educated individuals. I reflected that in 
my early investigation of this rather specialized missing persons case and in many other things I 
was, indeed, an idiot by these standards. In Old English, the word came to mean an intensely 
private person, set aside physically and psychologically in the community, before settling into a 
more evaluative definition interchangeable with the concept of natural fool. In both cases it 
seemed to designate individuals seen as having limited intellectual capacity. This condition 
differed, legally, from the definition of lunatic, which involved the possibility of a restoration of 
sensibility. I had routinely called people idiots and lunatics, to their faces or in my own reflec-
tions, in my life and career. There always seemed to be an abundance of thoughtless, reckless, 
feckless, stupid people and these words were a nice all-purpose paint of disapproval to spread 
over them. But now, confronted by the necessity of facing these words, as words for disability, in 
this gallery I felt uncomfortable.  
 
I learned that going as far back as the sixth century, as criminal law evolved, idiocy and lunacy 
were increasingly considered conditions that exempted one from liability for offenses, with the 
rationale that impaired individuals in these cases acted without intent, malice, or appreciation of 
consequences. I read a legal decree from the English King’s Prerogative (drawn up between 

                                                
25 See Gould (1996, pp. 51-52); Jardine (2012, p. 8); and Stiker (2002, pp. 23-50). I chose not to make 
Max’s decision to bypass this display an impactful one in terms of whether or not he will ‘solve’ this 
case, and did not feel there was adequate room in the narrative to take the geneology back this far. I did 
want to quickly note, however, that scholars continue to point to Western antiquity for many of the 
ideological roots of current issues related to ableism and/or disability. Some of these roots include 
Socrates’ notion of inborn “mettle”, Aristotle’s principle of noncontradiction (X = X), euthana-
sia/abandonment, Abramic religious dictums related to both exlusion of and charity toward people with 
disabilities, and the emergence of Christian charitable institutions for people with disabilities.    
26 Wright (2011, p. 19) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    32 

1255-1290) that superseded legal property and inheritance rights for those deemed lunatics or 
natural fools. In both cases the benevolent monarch would, ‘without waste’, assume custody for 
the property of these subjects and use any profits the land generated to pay for their care. In the 
case of lunatics, these rights were to be restored upon the return of their lucidity. I then saw a 
series of petitions, drawn up by concerned family members, applying for the guardianship of 
idiots and natural fools. I saw a recommendation that the courts select, when possible,  
 

Male relatives… sound of religion, of good governance in their own families, without dis-
solution, without distemper, no greedy persons [and] no stepmothers.27  

  
The next exhibit described itself as a sixteenth century ‘IQ’ test with the first part in quotation 
marks in recognition of its anachronistic use. 
 

An idiote or a naturall foole is he, who notwithstanding he bee of lawful age, yet he is so 
witlesse, that he can not number to twentie, nor can tell what age he is of, nor knoweth 
who is his father.28 

 
I wondered about the ‘knoweth who is his father’ part. What did that have to do with so-called 
idiocy? I’d helped lock up many punks of uncertain parentage who were far from idiotic in their 
criminal schemes. Beside this exhibit was a quote from court records:  
 

Indicted for stealing a silver cup, Thomas Middleton, the third of March last. The evi-
dence against the prisoner that he lodged at Middleton’s house and Middleton’s wife 
missing of said cup made inquiry of the prisoner whether he knew what had become of 
the cup. He confessed that he had taken it and offered it to sale for 20S. But the prisoner 
appearing to be little less than a fool, he was acquitted.29 

 
A further explanation below the quote noted that the reason for acquittals in these cases was 
termed as ‘misfortune of fate.’30   
 
Moving past this section, I read the title “Madness: Familiar Foreignness.”31 I detected some-
thing of Michel’s way of turning phrases in this title, and as I drove through the exhibit I saw, 
out of my peripheral vision, that he was watching me watching the displays and grinning. Unsure, 
again, of the exact relevance of any of this for slow learners, except that categories seemed much 
more plastic in these times, I didn’t linger in this section. I saw, as I drove past figures of Don 
Quixote, as well as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia, King Lear and Lady Macbeth, symbolizing 
some sort of tragic madness - a madness linked with mystery, death but also, paradoxically a 
strange sort of wisdom. I recalled how in Shakespeare’s work, the mad always seemed to get the 
best lines. I read too, about palace fools, Lear’s fool and others, whose jobs involved exposing 
the artifice of the court and or even the sovereign, but again, who spoke from a place of unreason 
as making these criticisms from any other position would amount to treason. I recalled sitting in 
                                                
27 Ibid. (p. 22) 
28 Swinborne (1590) in Ibid. (p. 21) 
29 Old Bailey Criminal Court Session Papers (1685) in Ibid. (p. 22)  
30 Ibid. (p. 22) 
31 Foucault (1988, p. 28)  



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    33 

the professional development session with Williamson, being struck by how much currency the 
professionals seemed to place on the amount of reason that a student supposedly possessed. Had 
this strange niche that unreason seemed to fill in older societies been filled in with cement 
somewhere along the way, leaving unreason with no place to be at all?32 Did that make any 
difference for slow learners? I reflected this was pretty thin as far as my own investigation went, 
after all slow learners were thought to have less reason, not unreason. Feeling I’d gleaned the 
larger sense of this gallery, but frustratingly, little of import about slow learners, I circled back to 
the elevator and rose to the next floor. 
 

XI 
 
The elevator doors opened on a section entitled ‘The Great Confinement.’ In a display case, I 
saw a dollhouse-like model of what would, blown up to its real proportions, have been a mam-
moth institution. This dollhouse was not for kids though; the tiny figures on the inside simulated 
the scenes of abject misery that characterized these institutions at the time. In the display case, 
beside the miniatures, two quotations from visitors to such institutions from this era testified to 
the veracity of the exhibit. The first described the conditions of several ‘patients’ in a large room 
in the asylum: 
 

One of the side rooms contained about ten [female] patients, each chained by one arm to 
the wall; the chain allowing them merely to stand up by the bench or form fixed to the 
wall, or sit down on it. The nakedness of each patient was covered by a blanket only.... 
Many other unfortunate women were locked up in their cells, naked and chained on 
straw.... In the men's wing, in the side room, six patients were chained close to the wall 
by the right arm as well as by the right leg ... Their nakedness and their mode of con-
finement gave the room the complete appearance of a dog kennel.33 

 
A written section along the wall provided some background to the miserable scenes, detailing 
how unlike the prior eras which made room for madness with a strange inclusive form of exclu-
sion or vice versa, the classical age saw an attempted total containment and silencing of madness, 
as well as of disability and poverty.34 The economic crises brought about by war and industriali-
zation resulted in spikes in the ranks of the unemployed, beggars, and vagrants. Declining rates 
of leprosy had emptied leper asylums. In the classical era, these were repurposed to contain not 
only the mad, but the disabled, the poor, and the criminal.  
 
Indeed, the authorities during these times had turned on the indigent with a vengeance. I saw a 
painting of Parisian archers posted on the city walls shooting beggars trying to enter the gates. I 
saw a translation of a law at the time, done up in stylized writing and printed on parchment paper. 
It decreed that those caught begging in the city would be whipped for a first offense and, if they 
were male, hanged for a second offense.35 The preferred intervention, though, appeared to be 
confinement. A caption below another picture of a prison noted that in 1656, one in a hundred 
Parisians, including those we would now call mentally ill and those we would now call disabled, 
                                                
32 Ibid. (p. 202) 
33 Wakefield (1814) in Andrew Scull (1993, p. 113) 
34 Foucault (1988, p. 262)  
35 Ibid. (p. 49) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    34 

were locked up, with similar practices occurring throughout an increasingly industrializing, 
urbanizing Europe.36 I wondered if any of them were slow learners. 
  
I realized as I drove along the exhibits, that they were taking on a greater variety. They were now 
describing the orphanages, workhouses, and prisons that characterized the great confinement. 
Institutional categories bled into each other, like the blood of the inmates pooling on the floors, 
in the overarching project of confinement. I passed along paintings and models of confined 
workers – some apparently able-bodied, some bearing physical disabilities - digging wells, 
polishing glass, rasping logwood, blacksmithing, beating hemp to make ropes, and sewing. I 
realized that, despite the novel ‘cures’ I had read about in the previous section, the preferred 
“treatment” for any confined population was work.37 “What is the source of the disorders of [the 
asylum]?” a sign asked. “Idleness,” was the reply below. “What is the cure?” another asked. 
“Work!” was the reply.38 Or, as the enabling act of the English charity workhouse St. Maryle-
bone spelled out the purpose the institution was:  
 

to admit the poor, both healthy and sick, diseased and infirm; the profligate and idle who 
were to be corrected; and infant poor to be educated `in habits of industry, religion and 
honesty, the profits from their labour to be used for their own upkeep as well as for the 
parish.39 

  
This idea of the formative character of work was interesting. I wondered if it was a stretch to 
think that I was seeing in these exhibits some vestiges of what would later appear as educational 
programming for all learners, but especially slow learners who were deemed to require extensive 
vocational programming. I read a list of rules for a ward for boys and girls under twenty-five in 
one of the larger ‘hospitals’:     
 

1. Work is to occupy the greater part of the day for all inmates with unassigned time is 
to be spent reading pious books. 

 
2. Inmates will be required to work as long and hard as their strengths and situations 

will permit, it is then, but only then, that they can be taught an occupation befitting 
their sex and inclination.  

 
3. The desire for reform will be determined by the zeal with which an inmate works. 
 

Every fault will be punished by reduction in gruel, by increase in work, by imprison-
ment and other punishments customary in the said hospitals as the directors see fit.40 

 
The next exhibit showed the blueprint of the floor plan of a large workhouse. A caption below 
explained how these workhouses were complicated institutions that imposed “care, control, 

                                                
36 Ibid. 
37 Armstrong (2002, p. 440)   
38 Foucault (1988, p. 57) 
39 Markus (1993) in Armstrong (2002, p. 440)  
40 Foucault (1988, p. 60) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    35 

discipline, training, religion and productivity” on the inmates.41 The culture of the workhouse, 
the exhibit read, was built into its very design: 
 

In Bishopsgate Street there were 129 children (increased to 400 by the early nineteenth 
century)...In two 150-foot long workshops. The boys’ lodgings were located above these 
workrooms, the girls’ over the chapel which separated the workhouse from the prison. 
Boys had reading and writing lessons; for the girls sewing and knitting replaced writ-
ing.42 

  
I felt I was finally getting closer to slow learners by getting this glimpse of the rudiments of the 
educational pathway slow learners were often placed on even now. But it was more than just the 
slow learners on this pathway. During the times depicted in the exhibits, I reflected social class 
made one a candidate for a workshop as often as perceived intellectual potential or disability. 
 
I wondered if vocational training in its present form was the same sort of thing as what I’d seen 
in these workshops. Williamson’s school was replete with various welding, carpentry and 
mechanics shops, as well as its kitchens and salon, but the courses offered in these shops all 
seemed more or less voluntary and, in fact, seemed valued in the school. It was hard to imagine 
the students I’d seen confidently striding the halls in their coveralls and chef’s hats as inmates or 
urchins. One of the teachers at my table in the staffroom of the other school had even mentioned 
that it was sometimes difficult to get slow learners into the shop classes because they struggled 
with the bookwork. Williamson had told me the story of the apprentice whose entry into the 
college part of his training had been discouraged by a gatekeeper who was made suspicious over 
the K & E courses on his transcript. That made this form of education sound faintly elitist, quite 
the opposite of a charity workhouse. More like a guild, the mysteries of which were somewhat 
guarded.  
 
Whatever my confusions were in reconciling the two epochs of vocational training I’d recently 
learned about, the ‘work’ section was the last display of the confinement exhibit. I saw, to my 
relief that some “Humanist Reform” would be offered on the next floor. I took the elevator up.  
 

XII 
 
Arriving on the floor I immediately saw a display titled, “The Philosopher’s Idiot.”43 A drawing 
of John Locke stared earnestly out at me, and the caption below explained that Locke had seized 
on the concept of idiocy to help disprove Rene Descartes’ notion that knowledge comes innately 
to humans. An idiot’s limitations or inability regarding reasoning, Locke suggested, was emphat-
ic proof of his tabula rasa, or blank slate theory of human knowledge.44 Whereas individuals of 
normal intelligence, over time, ‘fill’ the blank slates they are born with through sensation and 
reflection on sensation, the slates of idiots, who have trouble drawing conclusions from sensory 
experience, remain blank or at least emptier – proving his theory. I felt ambivalent about this. It 
seemed exploitive to characterize the capacities of this population in order to make this point. On 
                                                
41 Armstrong (2002, p. 440) 
42 Markus (1993) in Ibid. (p. 440) 
43 Wright (2011, p. 29) 
44 Ibid. (p. 30) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    36 

the other hand, the tabula rasa idea itself implied that under the right conditions, most have some 
capacity to learn and implied that the right sorts of environments were required to stimulate 
learning.45 In as much as I’d been hired to look for slow learners themselves, so far I’d often 
ended up getting dragged into an inquiry about the best educational conditions for students in 
general, so the implications of the tabula rasa theory aroused my curiosity. 
  
Seeing little of direct relevance in the next section - The Philosophes - I went through it more 
quickly, pausing in only a few places. I wasn’t driving so quickly however that I wasn’t im-
pressed with the sea-change in thinking that the Enlightenment involved. It was true that this 
period overlapped chronologically with some of the abuses of the classical era, and that the same 
worship of reason had, in different ways, informed the confinement I saw depicted on the floor 
below as well as the advances I was seeing on this floor. Still, the potential impact of Enlighten-
ment thought on how people with disabilities were seen and treated was considerable. I saw 
displays of scientific discoveries and moral and political philosophy suggestive of a breaking 
down of the barriers of “fatalism and pervasive superstition” that had been aspects of how 
disability was understood up until this point.46 I saw an increasing secularism that, instead of 
hoping for divine intervention, spoke to the possibility of advancing individuals, classes, and all 
of society to a more just, free, and rational way of living. I saw a scroll of Rousseau’s revolu-
tionary complaint at the beginning of his version of the social contract, “Man was born free, but 
he is everywhere in chains.”47 I saw, for the first time, documents detailing how the poor and 
infirm ought to be assisted, not, as part of Christian charity, but as a part of societal obligation, 
part of the social contract.  
 
As a pre-cursor to some of the educational research I’d been exposed to since I began the inves-
tigation, I saw in the replicas of the writing of Condillac, Diderot, de l’Epee, and Periere an 
incredible zeal to study, empirically, how deafness and blindness impact an individual’s learning 
and communication, and their subsequent efforts to apply their theories in devising methods of 
teaching children with these disabilities.48 Concerning madness, I read asylum reformers Pinel 
and Tuke arguing that the madness in many inmates was, if not caused, at least aggravated by the 
brutal, inhumane conditions to which they were subjected. Those afflicted with madness required 
only the peace of bucolic settings, attentive care, detailed treatment plans, and the restrained, 
gentle hand of correction to overcome their disorders.49 I saw miniature models and posters of a 
variety of educational/therapeutic institutions, each specializing in the treatment of something 
that was deemed a particular category of disorder at the time. In addition to the new corrective 
methods for the mind I read about, I saw replicas of 17th and 18th century orthopedic devices for 
normalizing the body: neck braces, Scarpa’s shoe for club feet, extension beds, and corsets.50 A 
sign at the end of this section summed it all up rather nicely:  
 

The governing ideas of today’s rehabilitation are already present in [these] institutions. 
The claim that the disabled can tap into the same assets as the able-bodied; the invention 

                                                
45 Ibid.  
46 Winzer (1993, p. 80) 
47 Winzer (1986, p. 42)  
48 Ibid. 
49 See Foucault (1988, pp. 242-246) 
50 See Stiker (2002, pp. 14-119) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    37 

of techniques and pedagogies to achieve these goals; the foundation of specialized insti-
tutions to make this all possible. From this came the thought that there should only be 
customized institutions that were geared toward dealing with the particular situation of 
their client.51  

 
Despite my annoyance at not seeing any slow learners in the exhibit, I had to stop for a minute 
and marvel that all of this progress had taken place in such a short time. My imagination reached 
out to the free thinkers I was seeing pioneering these humane forms of treatment in admiration. 
  
Just as I thought I was having my own moment of enlightenment, however, I felt like someone 
was watching me. I looked over my shoulder and saw Michel’s grinning face again, peeking out 
from behind a portrait of one of the asylum reformers. I’d run into him in the confinement 
display, too. Had he been following me the whole time or was he just touring for himself? I 
couldn’t be sure. He walked over to me and asked me what I thought about this portion of the 
gallery. I said I was relieved to see conditions for institutionalized people with disabilities 
improving so much, and to see all these efforts were underway to learn about impairment and 
help people with impairments. I marveled at what an improvement over mass confinement this 
all was. Then I said this was all very interesting, but I hadn’t seen very many clues about where 
the slow learners were and I was beginning to worry that the rest of the facility might be equally 
bereft of clues. 
 
He seemed to ignore my second concern but, in apparent response to my first warned me, “Do 
not allow yourself to be blinded by this enlightenment. There are games of truth and games of 
power afoot. There is a less apparent form of violence, but violence still: a separation of power 
between those who hold it and those who do not, the production of the truth about what you now 
call disability rapidly accelerating, and even as conditions for the physical confinement improve, 
notice the proliferation of cells of categorical confinement.”52     
   
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “What are cells of categorical confinement? Whatever your 
suspicions are, all I see in the real world is things getting better for disabled people, in both 
thought and practice, over the course of time depicted on these two floors.”  
  
“Reason, Max, consider reason, and not just in the seductive, idealist sense. Everything is 
dangerous.” He said, repeating the advice he’d given me at the entrance. Having gifted me with 
this wisdom, Michel strolled away, pausing only to appreciate a display case of unusual orthope-
dic restraints before continuing to tour on his own. I felt incredulous that he could claim, if I 
understood him correctly, that these humanist reforms somehow concealed a form of violence 
comparable to the horrors I’d experienced on the previous floor. It seemed undeniable that the 
focus on increasingly specialized and individualized forms of therapy and rehabilitation were an 
improvement. 
 
As I watched Michel walk away, I continued to be bothered by what he had said. My mind 
flashed back to the image I’d learned about so long ago in history class. Adoring crowds, all 
gathered in ecstatic festivals honoring a concept both abstract and provocatively embodied in a 
                                                
51 Ibid. (p. 107)  
52 Foucault (1997b, p. 45) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    38 

beautiful, thinly-clad woman: Reason. Girls in white Roman dresses and sashes dancing around 
the costumed Goddess.53 Why was I thinking of this now?  
          

XIII 
 
I noticed I’d again come full circle and was back at the elevators. A sign pointed upward inform-
ing me that the “progress through measurement” section was on the next floor. I rode there. I was 
first confronted with a bust of a youth with medium length hair and vulpine features staring out 
at me with a look that might be described as atavistic alertness. It bore the inscription “Victor: 
The Wild Boy of Aveyron.” A write-up below indicated that asylum reformer Pinel, while 
holding progressive views on the receptiveness to cure those deemed insane, continued to hold 
that ‘idiocy’ was hereditary and irreversible. His pupil, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard felt otherwise 
and, to disprove his mentor’s views, took on the care and rehabilitation of a young boy of twelve 
who had been found running feral in southern France. While Pinel declared the boy incurable, 
Itard felt his condition was due to severe neglect and that he could be rehabilitated through a 
program of training to help him realize to use his senses and eventually learn practical skills 
including speech. Though he failed in his attempt to completely rehabilitate his new patient, Itard 
did, according to reports, realize enough success in teaching Victor to identify letters and recog-
nize simple words to consider his approach of sensory training a promising basis of future 
practice.54   
 
I moved on to further portraits and write-ups. I read that Itard’s methods were widely circulated 
in the French medical community and inspired Maria Montessori and Eduord Seguin. The latter 
became superintendent of one of the first schools, housed inside the Bicetre hospital specializing 
in the education of ‘idiot’ children. Seguin reinforced Itard’s belief that intellectual deficits were 
attributable, at least in part, to sensory isolation or deprivation and that this could be reversed 
through powerful motor and tactual stimuli and adequate nutrition.55 He strongly advocated for a 
specialist approach, asserting the need for intellectually disabled students to be educat-
ed/rehabilitated at different institutions and with different methods than people with mental 
health disabilities or physical disabilities. He also believed that every student could be taught, not 
just confined, and that many could return to successful participation in the larger community 
following the completion of their schooling.56 Seguin published two influential volumes on his 
methods in France before being mysteriously fired from his position and emigrating to the 
United States where his influence on the field continued.57 Seguin, his American colleagues and 
their students, established the theoretical basis for working with so-called ‘idiots’ or ‘the fee-
bleminded’ and advocated strongly for the need for specialized, separate institutions for people 
in these categories as an alternative to the brutal catch-all lunatic asylums that still lingered in the 
new world. Their advocacy was often successful; they won government and charitable funding 
and went on to found the new institutions they had proposed. 
 

                                                
53 Doyle (2002, p. 238) 
54 Wright (2011, pp. 35-41) 
55 Winzer (1986, p. 48) 
56 Ibid. 
57 Wright (2011, p. 37) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    39 

I wondered where the slow learners fit into all of this. I felt I was getting warmer again, as things 
started to get more specialized. In the earlier exhibits, it seemed likely that when so many 
financial, physical and intellectual states of being were defined as deficient and subject to 
confinement, many slow learners were probably confined. But, then again, would a phrase like 
‘slow learner’ even have any meaning in an era when so many were locked up so indiscriminate-
ly? “What about in the more specialized institutions that were beginning to emerge?” I wondered. 
 
With this question in mind I drove past a section detailing the growth of specialized ‘idiot 
asylums’ in Great Britain and its colonies and the rest of Europe in the mid to late 1800s. This 
led into a section that held no portraits, statues, floor plans, busts or miniatures. It was nothing 
but black and white charts, mathematical formulations and quotes from scholars.  
 
I happened upon a chart made in 1848 by Samuel Gridley Howe, an American colleague of 
Seguin’s. What caught my attention was the highest functioning of his two categories of idiocy: 
 

Fools are a higher class of idiots, in whom the brain and nervous system are so far de-
veloped as to give partial command of the voluntary muscles; who have consequently 
considerable power of locomotion and animal action; partial development of the affective 
and intellectual faculties, but only the faintest glimmer of reason, and very imperfect 
speech. 

 
Simpletons are the highest class of idiots, in whom the harmony between the nervous and 
muscular system is nearly perfect; who consequently have normal powers of locomotion 
and animal action; considerable activity of the perceptive and affective faculties; and 
reason enough for their simple individual guidance, but not enough for their social rela-
tions.58  

 
I noticed that in 1866, Seguin, my hero of the prior exhibit, and two of his colleagues had come 
up with their own classification system declaring “the distinction between the perfect and the 
imperfect mind is ... clear,”59 and proposing eight separate categories of unclear minds. These 
categories took into consideration both presumed “tissular lesions” or identifiable diseases of the 
19th century tied to idiocy as well as observation of traits including intellect, willpower, and 
physiological functioning.60 
 
Then, a shiver ran down my spine as I read on, a free-standing exhibit about a category I hadn’t 
seen in this gallery before. The “Enfant Arrière.” According to Seguin, as the sign explained, 
this category was a borderline sort, as:  
 

the idiot makes little or no developmental progress compared to the ordinary child, whilst 
the backward child develops in degrees intermediate to the two groups. [A difference of] 
“arrest” rather than “retardation” of development.61 

 
                                                
58 Simpson (2012, p. 546)  
59 Ibid. (p. 544) 
60 Ibid. 
61 Ibid. (p. 545)  



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    40 

Had I finally, after three floors, found slow learners in this museum? Here was the backward 
child, the “enfant arrière” pushing back, blurring the emergent boundaries. I saw a wisp of white 
hair behind this exhibit. Jacques emerged and wandered over to me. “Border towns, interesting 
places …” he remarked. 
  
“Dangerous places,” I added after a second or two of thought. “You never quite know where you 
stand. Folks who come from border towns can’t be trusted.” My voice sounded hard-boiled as I 
uttered this last sentence. Maybe I was getting my edge back.    
 
“Your slow learners have appeared on the border,” remarked Jacques. “This undecidable, the 
slow learner label, this nearly normal/nearly abnormal, has been shoved into a cell designated 
abnormal. But perhaps it cannot be contained. Perhaps it will burst out and call both judgments 
into question.”62 
 
I considered this. It sounded weird the way he said it, but I thought maybe Jacques was on to 
something. Maybe I needed to look for slow learner in the in-between places in this institution. 
Maybe I needed to look for the ways the label troubled these emerging categories. Maybe I 
needed to look for how the authorities tried to contain this trouble.          
 
Jacques wandered away and I drove next past a shelf labelled “phrenology” which contained a 
collection of skulls, rulers, and “fact” cards. I didn’t get out of my scooter to examine them. I 
then happened upon a large photograph of a bearded man with a kind and inquisitive face and 
eyes alertly staring out from behind an oddly shaped pair of pince-nez. This, I read, was Alfred 
Binet, father of the modern IQ test. The biography beside the portrait read that Binet, the director 
of psychology at the Sorbonne, began his career as a dedicated phrenologist. He published 
several papers on the relationship between cranial volume and intelligence before eventually 
growing disillusioned with how inconclusive research in this area was beginning to seem to 
him.63  Seizing on some emerging research proposing psychological determinations of intelli-
gence instead, Binet decided to direct his research along these lines. Commissioned by a Minister 
of Education to develop techniques for identifying those children whose lack of success in 
normal classrooms suggested the need for some form of special education, Binet devised a 
battery of tests meant to simulate everyday reasoning tasks such as counting coins or assessing 
which faces in a series of pictures were prettier.64 His contention was that a large number of 
these sorts of progressive tasks, administered by a trained examiner, could be used to estimate 
intellectual capacity and thereby flag the learning deficits he had been commissioned to find. On 
the second revision of his tests, he decided to assign each of the tasks in a series an age corre-
sponding to its difficulty. From this he was able to glean composite ‘mental ages’ of the test 
subjects as determined by their average ages on the tasks subtracted from their chronological 
ages. Children whose mental ages were well behind their chronological ages were flagged for 

                                                
62 See Simpson (2012). The author describes the backward child as one of Derrida’s undecidables and, 
illustratively, refers to another example of categorical undecidablity. In India in colonial times between 
the British colonial elite and the subaltern classes there existed an ambiguous indigenous elite class. This 
class formed a blurred, indeterminate, and shifting boundary between the elite and the subaltern masses; 
sometimes part of the dominant group, sometimes part of the dominated.   
63 Gould (1996, p. 177) 
64 Ibid. (p. 179)  



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    41 

special education programming.65 Binet, the exhibit noted, went on to develop special education 
classes, offering “mental orthopedics” as a means of boosting the intelligence of his pupils.66 
 
The now familiar concept of intelligence as a quotient was born out in a refinement of this 
method when German psychologist W. Stern argued that, in order to better represent disparities, 
the mental age should be divided by chronological age instead of subtracted from it.67 
 
I read, next, a list of Binet’s fears regarding potential misuses of his invention. These included: 
 

1. Mental age is a rough empirical estimate for practical use, in reality the tasks cannot 
be superimposed on one another so there can be no real overall intelligence. Low 
scores shall not be used to mark children as innately incapable. 

 
2. There is a danger of mental age being abused by schoolmasters to exclude unruly pu-

pils and also abused as a self-fulfilling prophesy reducing the effort that is invested in 
teaching some pupils. 

 
3. Mental age is best used to determine which pupils require additional help, it should 

not be used to rank all pupils. 
 
4. No opinion is offered on whether the student’s performance is indicative of hereditary 

or environmental factors or predictive of future potential. It is the mental age at the 
time of testing only.68	

 
This all sounded eminently reasonable to me. Indeed, it was hard to see how IQ came to mean so 
much more than this from reading about the modest aims of its founder. I admired Binet’s 
cautious practicality, his efforts to provide a tool to help children and educators, combined with 
his insistence that this tool be wielded carefully. Then, however, I happened on the copy of Binet 
and co-writer Simon’s The Intelligence of the Feeble Minded left out on a podium for museum 
patrons to browse and I read a few passages:69 
 

Taking account only of the practical acquisitions we find, that is of instruction, we find it 
an absolutely clear difference between the two subjects. The normal child of seven years 
can read hesitatingly; an imbecile of twenty years cannot read, and can never learn to 
read.70  

 
As I browsed through it, I saw the book was a detailed volume of the limitations inherent in 
various levels of ‘idiocy’. It included many photographs of its subjects. A lengthy section 
discussed the almost animalistic insensitivity to physical pain in imbeciles as compared to 
‘normals’. A photograph showed a subject, one of the case studies, reaching forward for a biscuit 

                                                
65 Ibid. (p. 181) 
66 Ibid. (p. 184) 
67 Ibid. (p. 185) 
68 List paraphrased from Ibid. (pp. 181-182) 
69 Binet and Simon (1916, p. 133) 
70 Ibid. (p. 133) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    42 

that had been offered him, “in animal fashion” with his mouth instead of with his hand.71 Here 
was a volume that not only sought to detail “how a superior intelligence differs from an inferior 
one.”72 It also sought to introduce a pecking order of sorts between the various levels of imbecili-
ty that it so meticulously described.73 For someone whose ambitions for his tests were so cau-
tious, Binet now appeared to boldly assert how this separate lot of humanity, set apart by meas-
ured intelligence deficits, was so very different than the rest of the species.  
  
I next saw a urethane replica of a thick, mighty tree. Across its branches and foliage hung the 
banner “eugenics.” Its intertwining, exposed roots bore labels such as “Genetics, Biology, 
Mental Testing, Archeology, Surgery, Psychology, and Law.” An inscription read:  
 

like a tree eugenics draws its material from many sources and organizes them into an 
harmonious entity.74  

 
A banner entitled “Social Darwinism” hung just a little past the eugenics tree. This section of the 
exhibit bore a picture not of the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, but of his cousin 
Sir Francis Galton. A piece of trivia indicated that Galton was a polymath who pioneered twin 
studies in behavioral genetics, came up with the first free association psychological test, and who 
devised a reliable system for storing and recording fingerprints.75 I hoped I would someday be 
able to use these facts in conversation at a dinner party before remembering that I didn’t get 
invited to dinner parties. More relevantly, Galton was moved by his cousin’s evolutionary 
theories, particularly those focusing on selective breeding of domestic animals, and became 
convinced that the human race could be improved by careful breeding too. Coining the term 
‘eugenics’, he suggested that those of high merit should be encouraged, even financially awarded, 
for marrying amongst themselves and having children when they were still young. He presented 
the following vision of a social Darwinist utopia: 
 

The best form of civilization in respect to the improvement of the race, would be one in 
which … every lad had a chance of showing his abilities, and, if highly gifted, was ena-
bled to achieve a first-class education and entrance into professional life … [and] where 
the weak could find a welcome and a refuge in celibate monasteries or sisterhoods.76  

 
The last sentence caught me by surprise, and gave me the creeps. I then passed under a hanging 
banner quoting the bible verse:  
 

Now therefore ye are cursed, and there shall none of you be freed from being bondmen, 
and hewers of wood and drawers of water.77  

 

                                                
71 Ibid. (p. 16) 
72 Ibid. (p. 11) 
73 Hall (1997, p. 19) 
74 American Philosophical Society (n.d)  
75 Gega (2000) 
76 Galton (1892, p. 362) 
77 In Gould (1996, p. 212) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    43 

That was odd. I wondered about its relevance. A short ways down I noticed I was about to pass 
under something else. I initially thought was an arch. Then, straining my head up and back in the 
scooter, I realized it was a gigantic bell curve subjecting, symbolically, any who sought further 
passage in the museum to an exercise in sorting. Assuming it was oriented for forward progress, 
I maintained a path somewhat, but not excessively right of center. I figured bright but not too 
bright was a good path. 
 
An illustrated film on a monitor went over the early history of the curve, showing a figure 
repeatedly flipping a coin, with distribution tables scrolling across the screen below the cartoon. 
The video then described, with another animated sequence, how the curve also found use in 
astronomy, as a means of averaging out the errors in various sightings of a star when trying to 
calculate its location. I mentally noted that Michel would say it was almost inevitable that such a 
powerful tool would be turned on modernity’s favorite subject of measurement – man. Indeed, 
the film next indicated it was an astronomer, Adolph Quetelet, who was actually the first to apply 
the curve to the study of humans. He felt that the statistically average man embodied values of 
moderation as well as the rightful political ascendance of France and Britain’s middle classes.78 
“How paradoxical,” I thought. “Average is suddenly great.” After a few seconds, the following 
text, a quote from Quetelet, scrolled up over the picture:  
 

One of the principal acts of civilization is to compress more and more the limits within 
which the different elements relative to man oscillate. The more that enlightenment is 
propagated, the more will deviations from the mean diminish…. The perfectibility of the 
human species is derived as a necessary consequence of all of our investigations. Defects 
and monstrosities disappear more and more from the body.79 

 
More tables scrolled across the screen, these ones of a variety of human traits including height, 
weight, strength and eyesight. I was interested to learn that the idea of ‘normal’ was such a 
recent invention, only finding widespread use with the rise of social statistics in the 1800s,80 and 
agreed that in many ways it was still viewed the way Quetelet saw it, as a desired state of being. 
Indeed, since taking on this case, I’d often wished I was employed in a more ‘normal’ investiga-
tion, as if I’d ever had one. The finer points of the statistics eluded me, but as far as I could tell 
this idea of producing a more normal population seemed like a dog chasing its own tail. After all, 
the curve that created all the fuss about the desirability of ‘normal’ would also produce a large 
number of abnormals whenever it was applied, so how could you move a population towards 
normal by using its data? Then, I remembered a radio show I used to listen to in the Buick during 
long surveillance engagements, something about a town where “all the women are strong, all the 
men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”81 Sure, it seemed like normal was 
often the going concern even now, but I also wondered if somewhere along the way, ‘superior’ 
got thrown in as an even more desirable state in the populations the curve measured. I remem-
bered glancing at the psychologist’s website where I found the information about slow learners, 

                                                
78 Davis (2006, p. 4) 
79 Ibid. (p. 5)  
80 Ibid. (p. 6) 
81 Keillor (2013) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    44 

way back in the library, and seeing that one of the current grades of human intelligence, as 
measured by IQ testing, was labelled “very superior.”82 
  
Just as I was thinking this, the video flashed back to a bell curve, on which data of human 
characteristics including height, strength, agility, and, most relevantly, intelligence were plotted. 
It explained how Galton had renamed the error curve as the “normal distribution” curve, divided 
it into quartiles, and ranked the extremes he saw as most desirable highest, and least desirable as 
lowest.83 Although it was a dog chasing its tail again, all of this implied, to those amenable to 
interpreting it this way, that there was a way that most humans should be, that the human race 
was indeed perfectible, and that negative deviation from the norm was an affront to social 
progress.  
  
The video advanced to a description of types of citizen unfitness that showed the trend, once the 
statisticians had constructed this sorting machine, to find and lump together all the deviants who 
threatened the health of the nation. “The habitual criminal, the professional tramp, the tubercu-
losis, the insane, the mentally defective, the alcoholic, the diseased from birth or defect.”84  This 
list had been given, in 1911, by Karl Pearson, a leader of the British eugenics movement. “How 
widespread were these views?” I wondered. The next scene answered my question. Across the 
screen scrolled a who’s who of public supporters of eugenics. Some of the names I caught were: 
John Maynard Keynes, President Theodore Roosevelt, Bertrand Russell, Alexander Graham Bell, 
George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, and H.G. Wells.85 I’d seen enough. In solidarity with 
the subjects I had been hired to find, and with the rest of the deviants on Pearson’s list too, I did 
a U-turn with my scooter, drove back to the giant curve, and circled under it again. This time I 
went through on the left hand side of the center.   
        
Passing the video on my way back to the gallery, I saw a sign that provocatively asked, “Did it 
work?” Was this in reference to all this curving business? It seemed a sort of a silly question 
without clarifying what exactly was supposed to work. Below, however, were some interesting, 
if somewhat confusing points about the normalizing curve. The self-same Karl Pearson who had 
come out so strongly in favor of eugenics itself nevertheless worried about the universality of the 
curve. Doing his own observations of distribution in many of the same phenomena considered 
textbook examples of the curve (rolls of dice, roulette wheels) he claimed to have been often 
unable to reproduce the normal distributions originally found.86 I then learned that a pair of 
contemporary researchers had pointed out that Galton had never directly identified normal 
distributions in human populations when studying various traits. He had to produce his distribu-
tions through the conversion of his data to standard scores and the averaging of these scores 
together. This was important to remember, they suggested, because it remained unclear whether 
Galton’s ‘correction’ actually found the normal distribution in human populations he claimed it 
had.87 Additionally, many statisticians continued to worry that many human traits and phenome-
na had too many uncontrolled-for variables to be randomly occurring, and were therefore inap-

                                                
82 King (n.d., para. 8) 
83 Davis (2006, p. 8) 
84 Ibid. (p. 9)   
85 see Brignell (2010a) and (2010b) 
86 Dudley-Marling & Gurn (2010, p. 14) 
87 Ibid.   



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    45 

propriate applications of the normal curve.88 While the curve had enabled a practice of labelling 
many types of people deviant, all of these considerations left me in doubt about the meaningful-
ness of the concept of human normality that Quetelet had claimed to discover, or the possibility 
of an orderly meritocratic ranking of any human trait as Galton had claimed to discover.  
  
The next display was a long, illustrated timeline painted horizontally along the far wall, entitled 
“IQ – An Institutional Journey.” I learned how the normalizing curve, despite these problems, fit 
well with interpretations of Binet’s work with intelligence, and the concept of a measurable 
hierarchy of intellectual fitness became widely popular with American psychologists. Under the 
energetic promotion of H.H. Goddard who brought the scale to America, and who, despite 
Binet’s warnings, celebrated IQ as a reified measure of hereditary intellectual fitness, intelli-
gence testing was soon put to widespread use.89 Goddard and other social planners believed that 
a single, hereditary gene was responsible for the phenomenon they understood to be intelligence, 
and that it could be bred for as readily as early geneticists had bred for desired traits in plants and 
insects.90 They felt that the nation’s fitness depended on the careful breeding of its citizens in 
order to maximize intelligence and minimize ‘feeble-mindedness.’  
  
There was a picture of soldiers in desks writing with pencils. A caption indicated that, by the 
outset of World War, I intelligence tests had become so popular as a tool for social planning, that 
psychologist R-M. Yerkes, was able to persuade the army to test a hundred and seventy-five 
million conscripts and volunteers at the outset of the United States’ participation in World War I. 
The data from this mass testing was used not only to rank soldiers for various duties,91 but also to 
establish a base of supposedly objective data that vindicated hereditarianism claims, and led to 
the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which severely limited immigration from lands afflict-
ed by populations seen as genetically inferior.92  
  
A caption below a picture of smaller people in desks, also writing tests, indicated that during this 
same period, the keeping of educational statistics began to emerge as a dominant practice in 
schools. Lewis Terman, a prominent psychologist who’d worked for the army testing program 
and Columbia University’s Edward L. Thorndike, while disagreeing on the ideal types of intelli-
gence tests to administer, felt that testing of all students was essential in determining their 
potential for school success and making educational decisions on their behalf based on these 
measures.93 The social efficiency movement in education, or the idea of the mandate of the 
school to provide society with “socially useful citizens” informed the use of academic tracking 
along ability lines with the idea that these tracks would feed the students into appropriate voca-
tional pathways suited to their “mental, moral, and physical endowment.”94       
   
As the timeline continued along the wall, there was a standing display of quotes and pictures to 
my left. It was entitled “Menace of the Feeble-Minded.” I realized that while these developments, 

                                                
88 Ibid. (p. 15) 
89 Gould (1996, p. 190) 
90 Ibid. (p. 192) 
91 Noll (1995, p. 31)  
92  Gould (1996, p. 206)   
93 Gavin Loss & Loss (n.d.)  
94 Terman [1914] (2013, pp. 2-3) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    46 

the one-two punch of IQ testing and genetic theory, did not bode well for people with the IQs of 
the students I’d been hired to find – those deemed low average – they were disastrous for the 
many individuals with levels lower than this. The widespread theories of innate, measurable 
intelligence combined with eugenics to create, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson,95 a wide-
spread and enduring fear and loathing of those deemed intellectually deficient, the ‘idiotic’ and 
‘feeble-minded’ in the punitive vocabulary of the time. Goddard made the following comments 
on the different types of threats posed by people with varying degrees of intellectual impairment:   
 

The idiot is not our greatest problem. He is indeed loathsome... Nevertheless, he lives his 
life and is done. He does not continue the race with a line of children like himself…It is 
the moron type that makes for us our great problem.96  

 
I pieced together that this ‘problem’ Goddard perceived actually had two aspects; so -called 
‘morons’ or ‘feeble minded’ persons, though capable of marginal functioning in society, were 
seen as intellectually incapable of developing higher moral sense and, therefore, prone to careers 
in crime and, in Goddard’s vast exaggeration of the potential role of heredity in determining 
intelligence, they were also seen as threatening the quality of the gene pool of the ‘race’ in 
general.97 I got to the first realization by reading a series of quotations like this in the display 
section on Goddard: 
 

Not all criminals are feeble-minded, but all feeble-minded persons are at least potential 
criminals…Morality cannot flower and fruit if intelligence remains infantile.98  

 
Beside the quote, a pair of eyes stared expectantly, as if to ask if their owner was correctly 
following the instructions she’d been given by the photographer. They belonged to a young girl 
in a white dress, primly posing for a photo. She had a cat in her lap and an open book in her 
hands. I saw it was the blown up cover photo of Goddard’s 1916 book The Kallikak Family. An 
accompanying summary told me that it was a cautionary tale of how, during the American 
Revolution, a revolutionary soldier of good breeding had a dalliance with a feeble-minded 
barmaid. Though he subsequently married a respectable Quaker woman and had many children 
of good standing, Goddard claimed to have found conclusive proof that almost all of the one 
hundred and eighty descendants that sprang from this soldier’s brief union with the barmaid were 
feeble-minded. Moreover, Goddard claimed that these ill-bred descendants were more prone to 
infant mortality, and, if they survived to adulthood, given to sexual immorality, alcoholism, and 
crime.99 Goddard contrasted the bleak outcomes of the majority of the Kallikak children with the 
idyllic life of Deborah, a Kallikak descendent living out her life ‘carefully guarded’ from bad 
influences and from the possibility of ‘breeding’ more Kallikak descendants, residing in his 
Vineland Training School for feeble-minded boys and girls.100 As described by Goddard, Debo-
rah had an ambitious schedule of activities at Vineland including reading, writing and math 
lessons, gardening, woodworking, sewing and music. One could almost have said the descriptor 

                                                
95 Thompson (1998) 
96 Goddard (1912, pp. 101-102) Kallikak is a pseudonym.  
97 Ibid. (p. 190) 
98 Ibid. (p. 211)  
99 Ibid. (pp. 18-19)  
100 Ibid. (p. 12) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    47 

suggested she was being offered a rather thorough vocational and life skills training program 
were it not for Goddard’s intent to keep her permanently institutionalized.  
 
The next displays in the ‘menace’ exhibit suggested the pleasant conditions Goddard claimed 
Deborah experienced were not typical of such institutions at the time. As I saw from the pictures, 
the treatment of people with intellectual disabilities in some institutions resembled nothing so 
much as the contemptuous neglect shown towards the more generalized indigent populations 
during the great confinements of the classical era. These practices continued for a long time in 
many institutions.  On this theme, the ‘menace’ exhibit ended with a provocative display about 
an American institution for intellectually disabled children. Posing the question “1846 or 1966?” 
it provided the following quote from an eyewitness:  
 

Dirt and filth, odors, naked patients groveling in their own feces, children in locked cells, 
horribly crowded dormitories, and understaffed and wrongly staffed facilities … rooms 
with “groups of 20 and 30 very young children lying, rocking, sleeping, sitting – alone. 
Each of these rooms were without toys or adult human contact.”101 

 
The horrific photographs, depicting such conditions, continued below the quotation. Beneath this, 
the answer key on the next display depressingly read “1966.”  
  
Despite my abhorred fascination with these exhibits, I realized that after Jacques’ promising lead, 
I felt like I was losing the trail of the slow learners again. Notwithstanding the likelihood the 
categories constantly bled into each other, the so-called ‘feeble-minded’ might have tested a little 
below those who would now be considered slow learners. Then again, so too might some of the 
students I met in the investigation – the ones in the K & E class who said they were upgrading 
from a program for students with intellectual disabilities. 
 
I drove away from the exhibit and back to the timeline. Back in the early nineteenth century 
again, I learned that as public education became the norm in Canada and the United States in the 
late 1800s to early 1900s, it was accompanied by massive increases in enrolments in special 
education (including large residential institutions like Vineland) as a separate form of education 
for students with disabilities.102  For these students, eugenic sensibilities informed not only their 
placement in separate institutions, but their treatment within these institutions.   
 
I stopped and looked to my left, along the floor, at another brief exhibit. It was a mannequin of a 
masked surgeon with gleaming, but antiquated instruments. I learned from an informative plaque 
at his feet that, for the first half of the century onward, particularly after mass IQ testing was 
pioneered, it became a legally sanctioned practice in many countries to forcibly sterilize children 
and adolescents with diagnosed intellectual disabilities. Reinforced by a 1927 Supreme Court 
decision in favor of eugenics in the United States, 60,000 operations to sterilize disabled children 
took place in thirty states before the practice was stopped in the 1970s.103 The Alberta Eugenics 

                                                
101 Blatt & Kaplan (1974, p. v) 
102 Winzer (1993, p. 324) 
103 Spaulding & Keith (2010, p. 30) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    48 

Board approved the sterilization of 4,725 children diagnosed as intellectually disabled before 
1972.104  
 
There was a display case beside the surgeon that showed the picture and biography of a woman 
from Alberta named Lelani Muir. I read that Ms. Muir had, in the 1990s, successfully sued the 
Alberta government over her sterilization while she was institutionalized as a child.  Signed over 
at the age of eleven by an abusive and neglectful mother to the Provincial Training School for 
Mental Defectives in Red Deer, Ms. Muir was sterilized as an adolescent. She was told she was 
being sent for an appendectomy. The institution took these actions on the basis of her tested IQ 
of sixty-four, which placed her, in the vocabulary of the time, in the range of a ‘mental defective 
moron.’ From records of the case, this single test - the results of which likely reflected a cultural-
ly impoverished upbringing - was apparently the only evidence of an intellectual disability. She 
was doing well in her classes in the institution, and was reported to be “talk[ing] easily and 
volubly” in an interview with a supervisor.105  
 
Later, after leaving the institution and benefitting educationally from the opportunity to live as an 
adult in society at large, Ms. Muir had another IQ test and this time scored eighty-nine, which I’d 
learned was highest possible score in the low average (slow learner) range, or just one point shy 
of a score of average range. I reflected that had she tested in this range initially, she never would 
have been sterilized.106 I wasn’t proud of myself for thinking this, it was horrific that she was 
sterilized regardless of her IQ, but it did show how tentative and arbitrary such measures could 
be. Maybe, I thought, trying to be as generous as I could, that the scores were helpful, as Binet 
had proposed in his more egalitarian writing, as a tentative estimate of current functioning for the 
purposes of remediation. But as a justification for the state-sanctioned violation of citizen’s 
bodies? I wondered what Michel would have to say about that. 
 
Another sign pointed to a sectioned off exhibit about a program in Nazi Germany titled “Aktion 
T-4.”107 The sign warned that it was disturbing, as if the rest of the exhibit wasn’t. It was, with-
out doubt, a part of the larger eugenics section, from these same roots, but I didn’t think I could 
take much more, so I didn’t enter this section, choosing to go back to following the timeline. I 
hoped I wasn’t leaving any slow learners behind therein.  
 
Where were the slow learners? Lelani Muir tested in the right range, but her history of neglect 
and institutionalization seemed to suggest that even her best test score might have been an 
underestimate. There was the enfant arrière label I’d seen at the start of the measurement section, 
but that was before the tests were standardized. Why was I unable to find clear examples of slow 
learners in this section?  Where was this border haunting Jacques had suggested I look out for? I 
reminded myself to look specifically for this as I returned to the timeline. I finally caught a 

                                                
104 Wahlsten (1997, p. 190)  
105 Ibid. (pp. 192-193) 
106 Ibid. (p. 195) 
107 See Wright (2011, p. 103). Aktion T-4 was a Nazi program to murder, under the euphemism of 
euthanasia, disabled residents of German hospitals. It resulted in the killing of between 75,000 and 95,000 
adults with disabilities and 5000 children with disabilities before protests in German churches and local 
communities resulted in the official termination of the program in 1941, state-ordered “wild cat” killings 
continued thereafter.  



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    49 

glimpse of a possible slow learner in one of the comments of Lewis Terman regarding the 
concerned parent of a child who had recently tested below normal: 
 

Strange to say, the mother is encouraged and hopeful because she sees that her boy is 
learning to read. She does not seem to realize that at his age he ought to be within three 
years of entering high school. The forty-minute test has told more about the mental abil-
ity of this boy than the intelligent mother had been able to learn in eleven years of daily 
and hourly observation. For X is feeble-minded; he will never complete the grammar 
school; he will never be an efficient worker or a responsible citizen (1916). 

 
The child’s IQ was seventy-five, currently seen as borderline, not an indication of disability,108 
and potentially within the slow learner category as Williamson had explained it to me. Terman’s 
‘nevers’ sounded pretty vicious. I had read in the programs of study for both K & E and its 
predecessor, the Integrated Occupational Program that preparing the students for responsible 
citizenship was a primary intent of programming, meaning that they were assumed to be capable 
of this. Compared to Terman’s gloomy thinking, the literature I read from these programs had 
suggested slow learners had a lot of potential. Was I wrong when, in the library, I thought these 
programs sounded exclusionary? On the other hand, they were still forms of separate program-
ming based on students’ deficits in learning. Did they honor the idea that slow learners had the 
potential to learn, or were they merely a much gentler form of eugenics?      
  
Just towards the end of the timeline, I saw the title, “Walks of Life.” I was confronted by a few 
quotes by Goddard, and slowly another connection began to form in my head. The first quote 
was from a recanting of sorts in which Goddard had softened some of his views on the feeble-
minded: 
 

They do a great deal of work that no one else will do... There is an immense amount of 
drudgery to be done, an immense amount of work for which we do not wish to pay 
enough to secure more intelligent workers... May it be that possibly the moron has his 
place.109 

 
In another, he noted that, in terms of career hierarchies, “the people who are doing the drudgery 
are, as a rule, in their proper places.110   
  
In other words “the poor are poor because they are stupid.”111 A sucker for the underdogs, I 
reflected on how all of this might function as one more way to stack the deck against ‘the people 
doing their drudgery’, not only to muse on where their ‘proper places’ were, but to actually keep 
them there. Did the IQ tests sometimes reflect the more privileged ways of knowing of their 
designers, and then tend to reward those test subjects more practiced in these ways of knowing? 
Reasonably well trained for polite society, I’d nevertheless occasionally had dispersions cast on 
my character for using the wrong fork for the wrong dish and, similarly, I suspected the ques-

                                                
108 American Psychological Association (2000, p. 48)  
109 Goddard [1917] in Gould (1997, p. 108) 
110 Goddard [1919] (2013 pp. 246-7)  
111 Erevelles (2005, p. 68)  



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    50 

tions that supposedly measured reasoning in isolation often got contaminated by relying on this 
sort of insider knowledge.112  
 
Aside from this, I wondered, seeing as how I’d read in the library that the tests favored ‘abstract 
reasoning’, if ‘abstract’ reasoning really was possible and if it was, how, other than by way of 
privileged cultural inheritance maybe, did it come to be seen as the pinnacle of intelligence in the 
first place? I’d more or less solved every case I’d been hired to investigate, but I wasn’t sure if 
I’d ever used it. My reasoning was most successful when it was good and dirty with context. My 
mind flashed back to the French Revolution image of the Goddess of Reason. A Goddess for all, 
supposedly, but who did she really serve in this case? Seeing as how more privileged students 
likely had experienced better life-long access to academic learning activities that developed their 
so-called abstract reasoning abilities, might this all not feed back into a vicious circle where 
privilege was presented not in a democratically unpalatable way, as a birthright, but as a reflec-
tion of merit in a mythic land where everyone supposedly got a fair shot? Was the fix in all 
along? I felt like I was on to something here.     
 
Below Terman’s quote, in honor perhaps of our locality, was a quote from an early vocational 
school program for slow learners in Calgary. It maintained its mandate was not to serve “the 
bright pupils, but the dull, uninterested ones.”113 I felt the case might be coming together again. 
Perhaps a new niche for slow learners, based on their perceived potential to be the workhorses of 
their nation’s economies had emerged.   
  

XIV 
 
I continued to follow the timeline around the bend, learning about further refinement of IQ-based 
categorization and special education programming but, to my frustration, again losing the trail of 
slow learners. I had come pretty far, at least in distance, and thought maybe there would be only 
one more section of exhibits on this floor before it rounded back to the entrance. Just as I was 
beginning to wonder if I’d seen all the relevant history on this floor, something from above 
jumped into my peripheral vision and made me slam on the brakes. It was a large, hanging, silver 
ball with four thin protuberances sticking out like spider’s legs. I wondered if my mind, unable to 
bear another image of oppression, had forced me to hallucinate this object. It seemed as though it 
belonged in a different institute. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. I was not hallucinating. I 
realized the object was a life size model of Sputnik, humankind’s first artificial satellite. I 
wondered what it was doing here. 
  
A display case below the satellite contained several magazines from the late 1950s decrying the 
American public education system in light of the lead the Soviet Union had taken in the space 
race with the launching of Sputnik. 114  A Saturday Evening Post headline that provocatively 
asked, “Can Ivan Read Better Than Johnny?” caught my eye. The other magazines, late fifties 

                                                
112 See Gould (1997) in which the author demonstrates how these army assessments were culturally and 
economically biased. In one example, subjects were asked to analyze pictures of culturally specific 
activities such as tennis and lawn bowling for missing features, the absence of which would not be readily 
apparent to someone unfamiliar with the game.  
113 Gordon [1919] in Knobbe (1978, p. 33)  
114 Sleeter (1987, p. 215) 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    51 

editions of Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, Time, US News and World 
Report, Look, Newsweek, and Readers’ Digest all asked similar questions.115 I realized that at this 
point in the cold war, the space race was not a friendly competition; it was a method of war by 
other means closely linked, by way of rocket technology, to the nuclear arms race. The panic that 
ensued after this Soviet display of superior technology had resulted in widespread criticism of an 
American education system that apparently had failed to produce scientists of the ilk of the 
Soviet team that built and launched Sputnik. A clipping in the display case from the magazine 
with the “Ivan and Johnny” title went so far as to note: 
 

What Russian students learn in school and what American students learn in school may 
do much to determine whether the free world will check and defeat Communism, or 
whether Communism will check and defeat the free world.116  

 
“This is all very interesting,” I thought, “but what does it have to do with the previous exhibits 
about disabilities, or with slow learners?” Then, in another display case, I read some of the 
specific criticisms of the American school system at the time and about the ensuing curricular 
reforms that followed the Sputnik launch. I began to understand. Educational planners, fearful 
that lax educational standards had caused American children to fall behind, and concerned with 
augmenting the abilities of American students to compete on the world stage, began to develop 
elementary school curricula that were much more rigorous and difficult than they had been the 
previous two decades. 117  Under this new curriculum it became natural for many teachers to 
assume that as many as a third of the students in an elementary school class would be below 
grade level and unable to handle the programs they were being instructed in. Achievement 
testing practices increased to continually evaluate if children were meeting the new, higher 
curricular standards. The move towards increasing rigor occurred as American schools, for the 
first time, were dealing with the mandate to end formal racial segregation in education.118 De-
spite the legal requirement of desegregation, minority children were often assumed to be less 
capable and therefore re-segregated into their newly integrated school’s special education 
programs.119  As school became more demanding academically, white, middle class children, 
despite often being the recipients of preferential treatment in schools, struggled more frequently 
with the revised curriculum, and this became a concern for parents and educators. Many white, 
middle class parents of academically struggling students did not want their children placed in 
special programs with minority students, and many of the same parents were not willing to 
accept the application of any of the four existing academic deficit labels, mentally retarded, 
slow learner, emotionally disturbed, or culturally deprived to their children.120  

                                                
115 Ibid. (p. 216) 
116 Trace [1961] in Ibid. (p. 216) 
117 See Ibid. (p. 218). Sleeter identifies a significant change in the readability of first grade textbooks with 
the years 1944 until 1962 being marked by progressively easier texts and 1962 to the early 1970s revers-
ing this trend and the texts becoming progressively more difficult. Sixth grade textbooks also became 
more difficult during these years. 
118 Ibid. (p. 220)  
119 See Erevelles  (2005, p. 77).  By 1968, 60-80% of students in special education programs in American 
schools were African American, Native American, Hispanic, non-English speakers, and/or from econom-
ically disadvantaged backgrounds.       
120 Sleeter, (1987, pp. 221-224) emphasis added. 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    52 

 
I read the descriptors of what educators during these times considered to be the characteristics 
and predicted educational pathways for students falling into these four categories. They all 
sounded quite negative. I could see why parents wouldn’t have much interest in the application 
of any of these labels to their children. I read the description of slow learner from a leading 
expert at the time:  
 

Slow learners compose the largest group of mentally retarded persons. Among the gen-
eral school population, 15 to 17 or 18 per cent of the children can be considered slow 
learners.121 

 
That statement didn’t surprise me much. I had already studied that bit of categorical shifting and 
realized slow learner was once but was no longer considered an intellectual disability category. 
What interested me more was the following statement: 
 

Preferred suburban communities where executive and professional persons reside will 
have very few slow learners… The subcultural areas of large metropolitan communities 
where the children receive little psychosocial stimulation present quite a different pic-
ture… Fifty per cent or more of the children can appropriately be designated as slow 
learners.122 

 
I wondered if the same measurements existed in feudal times if the statistic might have read that 
ninety percent of the population was slow learners? It was an apples and oranges thing and sort 
of a stupid, impossible thought, but I had it nonetheless. The descriptor went on to suggest that 
slow learners were likely to experience regular schooling as too difficult and eventually drop out. 
For these reasons they were better served in a more remedial educational stream where they 
could gradually advance at their own rate and not hold other children back. Slow learners were to 
be trained for semi-skilled or unskilled occupations. Slow learners were likely to be followers 
instead of leaders in society because they could not understand the subtleties of the social 
order. 123  I wondered how many of these assumptions still informed current thinking about 
students thought to be slow learners. 
   
I continued my tour of this section and next came to a sign that said “Learning disability - The 
birth of a label.” A caption below explained how, since the 1900s, some physicians, psycholo-
gists and educators had been interested in the idea of an organic defect, a form of brain damage, 
that severely impacted people’s reading abilities while having no impact on their overall intelli-
gence or reasoning abilities. I had heard the word ‘dyslexia’ before, and recognized it among the 
list of labels that researchers were using at the time to describe this sort of disorder.124 Other 
labels included ‘brain injury’ and ‘psychoneurological learning disorders.’125 This research had 
gathered steam over the fifties and sixties and had begun to receive popular attention. Both 
Newsweek and Reader’s Digest had published articles about reading impaired but normally 
                                                
121 Johnson [1963] in Ibid. (p. 223) 
122 Ibid. 
123 Ibid. (p. 224) 
124 Ibid.  
125 Ibid.  



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    53 

intelligent children and the interventions that were thought to hold the promise of curing them. 
These included exercises that were said to stimulate new brain cells to take over the role of the 
dead cells during reading.126  
 
To many parents of struggling students, particularly more privileged parents, this was a more 
tolerable label. It did not imply global defects in their children’s intelligence and it did not 
suggest their children were falling behind due to deficiencies in how they, as their children’s 
primary educators, had prepared them for school. Unlike the labels mentally retarded and slow 
learner, assumed to describe life-long deficits, it was thought at the time that this particular 
disability might be curable. Institutionally, the addition of a new disability category also rein-
forced a conservative agenda of locating school failure as a defect in individual children instead 
of questioning an educational system that, at the bidding of military and business interests, had 
begun to leave more and more students behind.  
 
I toured through the gallery and saw a display chronicling the growth of advocacy groups 
consisting of parents of children diagnosed with this recently discovered disability. A series of 
black and white pictures showed people gathered at meetings, sitting in folded chairs, filling 
Styrofoam coffee cups from aluminum urns, and looking intent as they listened to expert speak-
ers. 127  Further displays went on to explain that, at a large conference that brought together 
parents from a number of these advocacy groups, Samuel Kirk, the most prominent researcher in 
the field, proposed the label ‘learning disabled’ to describe this population of students. The label 
stuck. I next drove past time-faded periodicals now using the title learning disabilities, and black 
and white pictures of newly formed learning disability classes in schools.  
 
An accompanying list of statistics explained that the majority of test subjects in studies of 
learning disabilities at the time, parents in learning disability advocacy groups, and students 
placed in learning disability programs in the United States were white and middle to upper class. 
The logic of this theory of the category’s emergence very nearly overwhelmed me. It also added 
even more evidence to the increasingly obvious impression I had gathered so far in the case that 
in the impairment pecking order,128 slow learners were less valued than students with learning 
disabilities.  
 
As I was leaving this section, I heard a piercing siren followed by a low–pitched hum. The main 
lights in the museum went out and dimmer emergency lights painted the gallery in shadowy 
illumination. I smelled smoke. I kept going for a minute, figuring I was nearly round the floor, 
but I was driving into an increasingly thick cloud of smoke. By now the sprinkler system had 
engaged but it only added to my confusion about what was up ahead. I turned the scooter around 
to go back the way I came. I saw flames start to lick the exhibits I had just seen as I retreated 
from the Sputnik section and reversed my course along the timeline asking the scooter for more 
speed than it was prepared to offer. I made it under the bell curve a split second before it crashed 
to the floor. I saw Jacques and Michel rushing to find me.  They told me the elevator was out of 
commission and we had to get to the stairs. I got out of the scooter and, supporting myself on 
both of them, hobbled as quickly as I could.  
                                                
126 Ibid. (p. 230)  
127 Ibid. (p. 228)  
128 Hall (1997, p. 19)  



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    54 

 
We descended the three flights, a choking, cursing journey, my leg absorbing each step with the 
pliability of an old dry two-by-four. We made it past the burning admission desk and out into the 
frozen darkness – how long had I been in the museum?  The few staff members on duty were 
already mustered in the parking lot; it appeared we had been the only visitors. Some fire trucks 
arrived but it was too late to save the building, and the frozen foothill it was built into didn’t need 
much saving. There were probably other such museums but no one would be coming back to this 
one. After what I had seen I wasn’t sure I would have wanted to come back anyway. Wet, cold, 
and stinking of smoke, in the intermittent warmth of the Peugeot’s heater, we watched the 
museum burn until all that was left was a pile of smoldering grey, like a lower row of rotten teeth 
in the gaping mouth of the foothill. There wasn’t much to say.  
  
Jacques and Michel drove me back to the restaurant where we had met, and did me the further 
kindness of driving the Buick back to the hotel for me so it might be available to me when my 
leg recovered enough that I could drive. My companions had been responsible for the most 
recent injury I had experienced on this case, but this was more than cancelled out by their saving 
me from the inferno. What was more, I could see they had been right. There was no way I would 
be able to find slow learners in this current setting without the benefit of seeing where they and 
their many companions in disability classification had come from. They hadn’t exactly given me 
the straightforward break in the case I was hoping for all day, but I was finally starting to under-
stand how complex and dangerous all of this was. I had a million questions for them but couldn’t 
clearly think of a single one. I was tired and disoriented and needed time to think.  
  
We planned to meet up the next morning, at the restaurant nearest my hotel, to discuss the case. 
They offered to help me in, but my room wasn’t far from the front desk and I thought I could 
hobble there. It occurred to me I should warn them to be careful too. They’d been seen helping 
me, and between the choking in the library, being tailed, and the likelihood the fire had some-
thing to do with the case, I’d faced a lot of danger over the last two days. Unfortunately, that 
thought only struck me as I watched the tail lights of the Peugeot begin to fade into the darkness.   
 
I asked for a plastic bag at the front desk, filled it with ice from the machine, and limped to my 
room. I peeled off the stinking suit and wrapped a threadbare blanket around myself. I took a few 
pills, poured a double and sat and dutifully iced my injury despite the unpleasantness of the cold. 
I thought hazily about the case. I must have nodded off for a while; when I woke up, I noticed I 
was still holding the remainder of my drink but my home-made icepack, now half melted, had 
fallen to the floor. Transferring myself to the bed, I slept deeply despite the throbbing pain in my 
leg and my growing sense that Williamson had been right to hire me – slow learners had been in 
danger for a long time.  
 
To be continued… 
 

 
Acknowledgements 

 



Williamson  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2016 Article 5    55 

I would like to thank Journal Of Applied Hermeneutics editors Drs. Nancy Moules and Angela 
Morck for the laborious and skillful wrangling it has taken to adapt this complex and multifacet-
ed text into its present accessibility on the page.  

 
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