February 7, 2013

Last week, I met a man in his 60s whose father survived the Holocaust. He told me that, as a child, he trembled when he brought home a report card with anything less than straight A’s. “My father would say, ‘I managed to survive Auschwitz, and you can’t manage to get an A?’ ” the man said. We do, as a people, put a premium on intellectual prowess. Which of course raises the question of how we treat those of different, or lesser, abilities.