What if your child's teacher thought this about your son: "He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time"?

Teachers want us to believe that they love children and care for and support them. They have — through the compulsion of the state — the opportunity to observe them and interact with them for long hours and many days in their formative years. To trust teachers in that role, we need to believe that if they saw that our child was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time, their heart would go out to our poor little child, and they'd talk with us and try to help. Or maybe we would wonder whether the teacher understands psychological diversity. Why is she tagging our child as "a loner" rather than appreciating the introvert or trying to figure out if there's some unseen burden making the child withdrawn? The teacher shouldn't be like another one of the children, who decide that a kid is a weirdo and shun him. But imagine a teacher who remembers the children she thought about as a weirdo, waited decades, and when that fellow human being achieved some success in his adult life, she wrote a newspaper column to tell the world "He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time."

This is Nikki Fiske, Stephen Miller's Third-Grade Teacher. Stephen Miller is a Trump political adviser. Maybe Nikki Fiske was lured into "writing" this article. I put "writing" in quotes because the byline is "Nikki Fiske, as told to Benjamin Svetkey." I hope she's dreadfully sorry at her terrible breach of a teacher's moral responsibility toward a child. I was a teacher for more than 30 years, and my students were all adults, but I have never — in all the tens of thousands of blog posts I've dashed off and published impulsively — even considered naming one of my students and saying something negative I thought I observed about their personality.

I googled the line "He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time" and not everything that came up was about Nikki Fiske and Stephen Miller. There was also:

1. "The Badass Personalities of People Who Like Being Alone/Four studies shatter stereotypes of people who like to be alone" by Bella DePaulo (Psychology Today).

True loners are people who embrace their alone time.... If our stereotypes about people who like being alone were true, then we should find that they are neurotic and closed-minded. In fact, just the opposite is true: People who like spending time alone, and who are unafraid of being single, are especially unlikely to be neurotic. They are not the tense, moody, worrying types.

2. "The Lethality of Loneliness/We now know how it can ravage our body and brain" by Judith Shulevitz (New Republic).

“Real loneliness”... is not what the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard characterized as the “shut-upness” and solitariness of the civilized. Nor is “real loneliness” the happy solitude of the productive artist or the passing irritation of being cooped up with the flu while all your friends go off on some adventure. It’s not being dissatisfied with your companion of the moment—your friend or lover or even spouse— unless you chronically find yourself in that situation, in which case you may in fact be a lonely person.... Loneliness... is the want of intimacy.

3. "The Virtues of Isolation/Under the right circumstances, choosing to spend time alone can be a huge psychological boon" by Brent Crane (The Atlantic):

And even though many great thinkers have championed the intellectual and spiritual benefits of solitude–Lao Tzu, Moses, Nietzsche, Emerson, Woolf (“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table”)– many modern humans seem hell-bent on avoiding it....

Generally, [Matthew Bowker, a psychoanalytic political theorist] contends that our “mistrust of solitude” has consequences. For one, “we’ve become a more groupish society,” he says.... “We’re drawn to identity-markers and to groups that help us define [ourselves]. In the simplest terms, this means using others to fill out our identities, rather than relying on something internal, something that comes from within,” Bowker says. “Separating from the group, I would argue, is one thing that universities should be facilitating more.”

4. "Why do some people become loners? What type of people become loners? What are the advantages of being a loner?" by Anonymous (Quora):

I don’t really have any big hopes for future. At least I am glad I live in North America where loners are somewhat accepted by the society. I used to blame my parents a lot for being this way. I used to be very angry, especially at my father. There is a saying “You become like the people you resent to”. I think it’s happening. My father is a loner too. The difference is that he belongs to a different generation. He was able to build a family and his own family is big. He is a loner at heart who never had a chance of actually becoming one. Now he is in his 60s and my mother complains that he has no friends to spend time with so he is bored all the time.

5. "Depression is a disease of loneliness/A lack of friends can suck someone into solitude – sharing the language of affection could help to ease the pain" by Andrew Solomon (The Guardian):

It would be arrogant for people with friends to pity those without. Some friendless people may be close to their parents or children rather than to extrafamilial friends, or they may be more interested in things or ideas than in other people....

Many people, however, are desperate for love, but don’t know how to go about finding it, disabled by depression’s tidal pull toward seclusion....

For some, friendship has become a vocabulary as obscure as Sanskrit. Lack of emotional fluency may cause depression; it may exacerbate it; it may cast a shadow over recovery. But there are ways to help people who want friendships to learn the language of affection. Parents and schools can teach children productive ways to engage....