THE WORLD UNDER CONTROL
309
to those who, through good grades, have demonstrated that their wills are sufficiently broken to qualify for elite positions in society. Certainly there are a lucky few who simply love schoolwork, but for most school is a chore, a discipline through which we demonstrate our willingness to do as we are told. Those who cannot bring themselves to fully comply with the instructions, whose attention wanders, who clown around in class, who would rather play outside than do homework, and whose aversion fuels a spirit strong enough to resist the institutional, cultural, and parental mechanisms that enforce compliance, will not get good grades in school. Instead they will earn labels such as stupid, lazy, bad or, increasingly, medicalized versions of these such as ADD (attention deficit disorder), ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), or my favorite, ODD (oppositional defiant disorder). Then, where the veiled threats, phony incentives, and other forms of scholastic manipulation have failed, we can resort to pharmaceutical methods of control to rein in the recalcitrant child. Society will do just about anything it takes to compel the child to take “no” for an answer. This is a vast undertaking, because it is anathema to the human spirit of exploration and creativity. That is why we see toddlers repeating the word to themselves over and over, trying to come to grips with it, trying to reconcile its life-denying force with the creative potency within them. Try this sometime: go to one of those little playgrounds for young children, the ones full of young mothers with their toddlers. Close your eyes and listen. One word will stick out like a sore thumb; again and again you’ll hear it, pronounced in menacing tones. “No Jeremy!” “No Ashley!” “No Courtney!” No, no, no. Think of the impact on a small child: the parents are gods in his eyes, enormous omnipotent figures nearly coextensive, especially in the young toddler, with the universe itself. The gods tell us, “No”, with menace and the threat of alienation. The universe is not friendly. We are not free. Internalized at a young age, the relentless refrain of “no” echoes throughout our childhood and adolescence until, by the time we reach maturity, it has silently imbued itself into our fundamental perceptions. The result is that we come to doubt the validity of our own creativity; we are constantly looking over our shoulders and wondering if it is okay, wondering if it is acceptable to venture into new territory. And eventually we become accustomed to this state of being, comfortable with a world in which everything is either expressly permitted or explicitly forbidden, where there is no uncertainty, no ambiguity, no open territory. Our entire