Editor’s Note.
[Les Shuck was an important colleague of my father, Dr. David West Keirsey, for Les, as a school administrator, often ran cover for David’s “experiments” in human intervention for helping “troubled and troublesome kids.” — without punishment and drugs. For an analog, the dog whisperer Cesar Millan, changes the dog owner’s behavior as much as the dog’s behavior. “Fixing the kid” also involved changing the adults (both parents and school personnel) behaviors too: not an easy task since the adults never saw themselves as part of the problem. Les and my father often worked together to get results. With the backing of Les and Leeland Newcomer, a Fieldmarshal Rational, (ENTJ in those days) my father gathered and developed his techniques of “corrective intervention” in Covina and Newport-Mesa School Districts. In the bureaucratic school system, even in the fifties and sixties, it took significant strategic intelligence to swim against the traditional “simple fix” (which often made things worse) tide of beatings, other punishments, or chemical pill pushing. Although chemistry wasn’t used as much in the fifties on children (most of psychiatry hadn’t caught on that easy money making trick yet), it has grown wild ever since (because of money). ]
Les Shuck remembers: