Dyslexic writer and disability rights activist Jonathan Mooney '00 told a Salomon 101 audience Wednesday that his alma mater made a "progressive, courageous and innovative" move by inviting him to speak.
In his lecture - titled, "Freaks, Spazzes, and Gimps: Disability Rights, Pride, Community and Culture" - Mooney identified an educational culture that champions normalcy and compliance and regards learning differences as defects. He called on individuals and institutions to reject that paradigm by realizing the value of cognitive diversity.
"My job with you tonight is to immerse you into the social, emotion and educational experience of someone who grew up labeled 'disabled,'" Mooney said. He then traced his personal history along a "journey beyond normal" in which he learned to cast aside the myth that something was wrong with him and replace it with a self-concept that celebrated the way he thinks and behaves.
Mooney, the author of "The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal," said Brown changed that journey.
"This is an institution that forever altered my conception of myself, forever altered what I thought about learning and what an education should be," Mooney said.
But growing up in Los Angeles, Mooney said he was "one of those kids" who hung out with the janitors and hid in the bathroom to avoid having to read aloud in class. Finding no respite at home, where his father called him a "retard" on a nightly basis, Mooney dropped out of school by the sixth grade and was contemplating suicide.
In high school, Mooney recalled, he was told he'd end up flipping burgers at best, but more likely find himself in jail.
The common message of all this criticism was that Mooney was "defective" and had to "fix himself" to get back on track, he said. It was only when he recognized and rejected the "tyranny of normalcy" that he appreciated his situation as amanifestation of cognitive diversity.
"Dyslexia was not my problem," Mooney said. "My problem was 'disteachia.' "
Mooney emphasized that the persecution of those who think differently extends beyond the classroom. He noted that the first state-sanctioned Nazi extermination efforts targeted mental "defectives." The American eugenics movement in the early 20th century forcibly sterilized 40,000 citizens deemed unfit for procreation on account of their cognitive differences, Mooney said. Brown had a eugenics department at one point, he noted.
Such a deplorable past should not belittle the dangerous present state of disability rights in American society, Mooney said.
"We have a system that is constantly trying to identify who is normal and who is not," Mooney said. He went on to describe what he regards to be a warped social concept of "good kids" and "bad kids."
"In our culture, the myth of the normal is that good kids sit still," Mooney said. "If you open your eyes, do you realize how sick that is?"
Mooney recalled the virtual impossibility of staying still in class. This inability is frequently attributed to a deficit of attention when it should really be understood as a surplus of interest, he said. Mooney cited recent research that suggests physical movement activates cognition and argued that when kids are told to turn their bodies off, their minds shut down, too.
"I spent most of third grade watching squirrels build a nest," he said.
Mooney also talked about the ways that labels of cognitive difference don't accommodate a broader concept of intelligence. He recalled a "mentally retarded" Fox Point High School student he worked with while at Brown, who would hug each of his classmates on a daily basis.
"Robert had the emotional intelligence of Jesus ... the spiritual I.Q. of Ghandi," Mooney said.
Mooney's work with Fox Point High School students spawned Eye to Eye, now a nationwide grassroots organization that partners students who share different learning styles.
Mooney noted that popular measures of intelligence seem to have no bearing on whether people can succeed, citing himself as a prime example. Though he was a Rhodes scholar finalist and is the author of two books, Mooney proudly admitted he still reads in the 12th percentile and spells like a third grader.
Rebecca More, director of the Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, which hosted the event, said Mooney's message fits perfectly with the center's mission to "provide stories that help us understand better the richness of people's experience." In introducing Mooney, she evoked the famous behavioral neurologist Norman Geschwind, who argued that disabilities "are merely an anomaly."
"Across the spectrum of learning, we all are disabled, if that's the word you want to use," she said. "We all learn differently."
