Fifty-seven years locked in a cage. It’s hard to fathom being trapped in a small space that isn’t even large enough to stand upright.

Such was the fate of Josiah Spaulding Jr. in the late 1800s. By all accounts Josiah was a kind-hearted young man and, at the time of his incarceration, a 21-year-old schoolteacher in Plainfield. As a child he threw spitballs and even put a dead snake in his sister’s bed.

Why was Josiah placed in a cage for 57 years? Why did he end his life at 81 as a paid attraction at the Buckland poor farm? He was disobedient to his father in the wrong century. I remember coming across an announcement about a talk concerning Mr. Spaulding, also known as the Caged Man of Buckland. As a special education teacher, it’s a story that has haunted me and horrified me for a few years now and one I can’t stop returning to.

The behaviors described in the accounts that inspired this unwarranted incarceration that left Spaulding with bowed legs, unable to move — but still with a mind that was described as quick and sharp even after so many years of monotonous, painful existence — are not only very innocent and commonplace, but they also speak to the strong possibility of a learning disability.

The enduring legacy of this medieval-quality quackery is a lesson that has, I think, a vital importance for our educational community of the present because, while lifelong incarceration in this particular fashion is thankfully not legal, there is now a well-established school-to-prison pipeline populated by many students who struggle in school because of learning disabilities.

Illiteracy is rampant in the state and in the country, with a rough figure of 36 million functionally illiterate adults in the nation. We don’t know how many children aren’t identified as having disabilities under the federal Child Find mandate because the data doesn’t exist. Whether Mr. Spaulding definitively had a disability is a question for the historians, but his story not only haunts me, it also makes me think about how many students are rendered voiceless in school today.

The bars are not physical, but school can very much feel like a prison for the student who is not able to keep pace with “the expectations.” For too many students, the way things work now contribute to a system that simply isn’t working for very many people.

Josiah’s experience couldn’t possibly happen today, you might say. Not in this puritanical sense, but as an educator I often see students who struggle and who feel trapped as they are shoved through the rigid model we have, and it breaks them in ways we are often too blind to see until it is too late.

Our region has a rich, progressive history, but I think it’s important to look at what happened to a bright young person like Mr. Spaulding and ask ourselves in the present how open-minded we really are.

Could this particularly horrifying scenario unfold? I hope not and I would like to think it couldn’t. More often than not, as a special educator, I find that while there is discussion of social-emotional learning and other very non-puritanical concepts, the reality and the actions of our system don’t often match the utopian language being espoused.

With all that is going on in the world right now, I think looking to stories like Mr. Spaulding’s are vital because the threads of that narrative reach into the present, manifesting as an approach that otherizes people and silences opinions that are maybe not the same as the majority. I used to think it felt very much like the 1950s and what went on behind white picket fences. I have met people who had their tongue membrane surgically removed because certain learning disabilities weren’t well understood at the time. Or people who were shoved in a room to twiddle their thumbs out of sight and out of mind.

In the 1800s, Mr. Spaulding was the son of the local minister, and his incarceration was noted on official documents for years without any issue. That he was in this state, in a cage, was relegated to “out of sight and out of mind.”

Massachusetts adopted the first real special education law in response to stories like Mr. Spaulding’s (and far too many others), and we have a bullying law that is one of the strongest in the nation, but some of these larger issues have not yet been addressed by legislation or the latest social-emotional program or some new gadget.

For me, as an educator, it’s rarely about the money and it boils down to a willingness to engage with truth (objective or otherwise). I want to see bigger, bolder change, not just for people who struggle but really with how our entire education system is structured. Mr. Spaulding was himself a teacher in Plainfield, and he continues to offer lessons from a past we would do well to move beyond.

Ben Tobin lives in Williamsburg. 

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