If we critically reflect on the idea of "dumb," we can rightfully ask from where this judgment comes. It comes as a perspective and judgment, surely, because "dumb" isn't an inherent pat of anyone's whole being. No child of two wakes up and says, "Well, here comes another day where I am dumb." Coming to hold our dumbness as a meaning perspective works contextually and culturally and in many ways that have little or nothing to do with our whole being. Dumbness often relates to the person originally labeled as "slow." Slow isn't always a negative way to behave or learn.
Slow works relatively. If we hear about some surgeon who spent 12 hours on a delicate operation, and in the end, when all comes out well, we sigh admiringly at such determination, knowledge, and achievement. Even when it doesn't come out well, we might still admire the attempt. If we go back to our floor bound child with all the scattered toy pieces and demand that the pieces be put away in ten minutes, we will complain about how slow the child is when the task remains unfinished in fifteen minutes. We might sigh and ask (perhaps rhetorically), "Oh, why are you such a slowpoke?" (Why do we not know what is a "poke" in this regard and why is a poke so annoying when it's slow?) What wrong with "slow" in this regard as well?
Slow can mean careful and thoughtful, but not in the educational and other systems as currently constituted. Inside the belly of the educational system, we find that intelligence and ability are subdivided by time and thus pressure and stress. We can't just be smart. We have to be smart—fast. Very young children and later adults feel they have to deal with the pressure of the inherent demands of time and the inevitable threat of failure—no speed, no smart.
We can imagine two children on the floor with the same number of toy pieces scattered about each. We instruct both children to construct something out of the pieces that fulfills a certain criteria. Child A looks carefully over the pieces, examines the function of each, tries out a few combinations, and two hours later comes up with something absolutely brilliant and original, something that fulfills and exceeds the given criteria. Child B looks around with little interest, picks up a few pieces, puts them together with little enthusiasm, and comes up with something that barely satisfies the given criteria in forty-five minutes. If we just look at the result, at the structures completed, which child looks smarter, more capable?[7] Most of us would choose child A's work as the better of the two by most even objective standards. However, what if this was an intelligence test with a time limit of forty-five minutes? Who gets the higher score, that is, who appears the more intelligent than the other when divided and degraded by time? Child B's work becomes the artifact of intelligence and ability. That shows how dumb Child A really is. In forty-five minutes, child A is just getting comfortable with the pieces and their possible forms, and has not completed anything. Besides Child A feels very bad, very uneasy about the time problem and the feeling of failure that looms, so Child A, confused and pressed for time, moves a little more slowly than normal. According to the systemic structures and rules that govern official intelligence and ability subdivided by time and stress, Child A is slow and therefore a perfect candidate for special education classes. Everyone knows what "special" means in this context—dumb. Slow equals dumb.
People rarely escape the external and internal stigma of that judgment, of that condemnation. It's how school works. It's how all testing works. It's how people can feel dumb for life or fear having dumbness thrust upon them.