Another Brick in the Wall Part 1: The Socialization Trap

Forcing me to study alongside people my own age as a child never brought me any closer to neurotypicality.

I used to tell my parents from time to time growing up that I feared becoming “another brick in the wall”. Photo by Aryo Yarahmadi on Unsplash

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This is the first part of a two-part series about my experiences with education in the United States.

How my academics fell by the wayside

The day I started school, it became apparent that I did not belong in the traditional public morning kindergarten in which my parents enrolled me. My teacher quickly realized that I was the only kid in that classroom of typically developing five and six-year-olds (and one seven-year-old) who could read chapter books and do multi-digit arithmetic in their head. To add insult to injury, I was already using splinter skills to compensate for academic challenges that included struggling to understand and communicate plots in fictional works (I still do), difficulty learning new things in large group settings, finding it much easier to absorb text than audio, time-blindness, and disorganization, and nobody knew it.

My parents briefly flirted with the idea of sending me to kindergarten a year early and never enrolled me in preschool. However, the…