My boyhood friend Thurmond would do all right in today’s environment, probably graduate from high school and maybe even go to college.
As it was, back in the 1940s in rural South Mississippi, he never made it through the eighth grade, and nobody worried much about it.
I am convinced, in retrospect, that Thurmond was afflicted with some type of dyslexia, which prevented him from learning how to read in an era when teachers didn’t know much, if anything, about the disorder.
I was reminded of Thurmond while recently reading Julian Prince’s book “Balancing the Scales.”
In the part of the book about his childhood in Greenwood, the former Mississippi school superintendent writes about his own struggle as a child with dyslexia, which he wrote “covers many different types of mental mis-wiring.”
Prince, who had been taught by his grandmother to read early on by recognizing words, struggled with math and writing because of an inability to place letters and numbers in the right order.
He wrote, “My bad mental wiring caused me pain in elementary school. I understood what was being taught, but my efforts at writing troubled adults who looked at my incorrect spelling, handwriting, and math problem solving efforts” and thought it carelessness.
Thanks to a teacher who, recognizing he was smart but somehow handicapped, tutoring him, Prince made it and became a highly educated adult.
Thurmond, several years younger than Prince, wasn’t that fortunate.
His parents were good people but with limited educations. They operated a small farm near where my family lived and later got jobs at a garment plant, brought to Hattiesburg under Gov. Hugh White’s Balance Agriculture with Industry program.
Unlike Prince’s teacher, who recognized his intelligence and helped him, our teachers wrote Thurmond off as a disciplinary problem, which he was.
They passed him from grade to grade “to get rid of him” as was the custom in those days until he dropped out and got a job delivering milk from a local dairy.
An adult drove the truck, and Thurmond ran the milk bottles from the vehicle to porches in town.
Eventually he went on to other jobs, but he was rejected by the Army, probably because he couldn’t read.
Looking back, I can recall that he wasn’t dumb.
He could make up games to play with limited resources, and he could memorize verses from the Bible and poems he had heard read aloud.
There were no compulsory school attendance laws in Mississippi in those days, and kids like Thurmond were expected to drop out and get a job which required a strong back, a good work ethic but little literacy.
Prince’s book reports that in 1949, Mississippi graduated 25 percent of the number of students who had enrolled in the public schools 12 years earlier and only three percent of the black students.
Associated Press writer Jeff Amy reported over the weekend that Mississippi is now “graduating a greater share of its students in four years than ever before, with 84 percent of public high school seniors earning their diplomas on time last year, the Mississippi Department of Education said.”
There are several alternate paths to graduation these days, and sometimes I wonder if the requirements for a high school diploma have been dumbed down from when I graduated in the 1950s.
Actually, those of us who were fortunate enough to be born white with parents who were educated and insisted we go to school along with some who made it without much encouragement from home, got good high school educations in those days.
But we were a minority.
Too many, including the blacks who were woefully underfunded in shabby schools with hand-me-down resources, and poor whites like Thurmond, were almost encouraged to drop out before graduation.
So, regardless of whatever faults there are with public education in Mississippi these days, there is much now that is better than there was then.
At least the public policy is that every kid should go to school, and disabilities like dyslexia are recognized.
