The Rise of the Pornogogue, II

     Judy Warner has sent round this fine satirical piece on the differences between school fifty years ago and school nowadays:

     SCHOOL - 1957 vs. 2007
Scenario: Jack goes quail hunting before school, pulls into school parking lot with shotgun in gun rack.
1957 - Vice Principal comes over, looks at Jack's shotgun, goes to his car and gets his shotgun to show Jack.
2007 - School goes into lock down, FBI called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors called in for traumatized students and teachers.
Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fistfight after school.
1957 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up buddies.
2007 - Police called, SWAT team arrives, arrests Johnny and Mark. Charge them with assault, both expelled even though Johnny started it.
Scenario: Jeffrey won't be still in class, disrupts other students.
1957 - Jeffrey sent to office and given a good paddling by the Principal. Returns to class, sits still and does not disrupt class again.
2007 - Jeffrey given huge doses of Ritalin. Becomes a zombie. Tested for ADD. School gets extra money from state because Jeffrey has a disability.
Scenario: Billy breaks a window in his neighbor's car and his Dad gives him a whipping with his belt.
1957 - Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college, and becomes a successful businessman.
2007 - Billy's dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy removed to foster care and joins a gang. State psychologist tells Billy's sister that she remembers being abused herself and their dad goes to prison. Billy's mom has affair with psychologist.
Scenario: Mark gets a headache and takes some aspirin to school .
1957 - Mark shares aspirin with Principal out on the smoking dock.
2007 - Police called, Mark expelled from school for drug violations. Car searched for drugs and weapons.
Scenario: Pedro fails high school English.
1957 - Pedro goes to summer school, passes English, goes to college.
2007 - Pedro's cause is taken up by state. Newspaper articles appear nationally explaining that teaching English as a requirement for graduation is racist. ACLU files class action lawsuit against state school system and Pedro's English teacher. English banned from core curriculum. Pedro given diploma anyway but ends up mowing lawns for a living because he cannot speak English.
Scenario: Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers from 4th of July, puts them in a model airplane paint bottle, blows up a red ant bed.
1957 - Ants die.
2007 - BATF, Homeland Security, FBI called. Johnny charged with domestic terrorism, FBI investigates parents, siblings removed from home, computers confiscated, Johnny's Dad goes on a terror watch list and is never allowed to fly again.
Scenario: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Mary. Mary hugs him to comfort him.
1957 - In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing.
2007 - Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces 3 years in State Prison. Johnny undergoes 5 years of therapy.

     It's a witty exaggeration of our current madness, but not much of an exaggeration, either.  I'd have been doped up on Ritalin myself if the junkies could have persuaded my parents.  After all, what but a dire chemical imbalance might cause a boy to stare out of the window for hours, or to draw embarrassing pictures of nuns deshabille, or to read backwards from the back of the book, or to write messages in an invented language?  As for my brother, forget it.  That young fellow who never earned an A in his life (though he was given a few he didn't earn), who in another age would have led his troops in triumph through Persepolis and who now is doing quite well for himself selling insurance, would have been tossed among the mind-stiflers for certain.

     One thread is common to almost all of Judy's scenarios: the loss of trust.  In The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (I may be botching the title there), Edward Banfield noted that you can't get anything so complex as a large business off the ground when you aren't reasonably sure of a moral orderliness and sobriety around you.  That is, you have to be sure that most of your workers will show up on time, that they will not steal from you, and that the local officials will leave you alone and not soon ask for protection money once you start to clear a profit.  But even in the society that Banfield focused on -- the southern Italy of my ancestors -- you could trust in many things, though not the ones that assist you in developing a modern economy.  You could be sure that if Giovanni had his way with Filomena by force, Filomena's brothers would see to it that he could never do such a thing again.  In general, you could count on families to protect and promote their own.  You could expect hospitality, some cleanliness (not as much as in Switzerland, but still more than you will find in middle class American flophouses now), respect for the aged, and self-reliance.

     What happens when the windows in a neighborhood are smashed?  Rudy Giuliani, no moralist, can tell you: crime sets in.  That's because the causal arrow goes both ways: where there's crime, you'll find broken windows, but broken windows themselves attract crime.  The people lose heart.  They grow used to disorder.  They lose trust: you cannot depend that the owners of the properties around you care enough about them to evict a dope-peddler, when they do not trouble to fix a window.  Your street looks like a crime scene, and that's enough to set it on the way to being one.

     Our schools have perversely chosen to permit their moral windows to be smashed.  More: administrators and teachers have taken up the hammers and done plenty of smashing themselves.  It isn't only that they have permitted students to dress like knaves and hookers.  Nor that they habitually teach a moral relativism that justifies knavery and whoring.  Nor that they pride themselves on running down their nation, turning American history into one vast criminal enterprise.  All these things undermine trust.  But there's one thing that blows it sky high -- and that is their decision to set themselves essentially at enmity with the family, arrogating to themselves the rights of parents.  I may trust a friend, or, upon a friend's recommendation, a stranger.  I may make a pact with an enemy.  The enemy may be a fine person.  But a relational enmity remains.  Therefore I cannot trust the enemy.  I must always watch for the knife.

     In some of the cases above, the reaction of the school now would be quite understandable -- because there is no trust between the school and the community, nor is there much of a "community" to trust the school or to be trusted.  A frequent visitor to the Mere Comments site (but not a blogger; he won't engage us in argument here) once taunted me for saying that I longed to see more guns brought to school.  I don't care if there's never a gun brought to another American school for the next hundred years.  I long for a world wherein bringing a gun to school would be inconsequential, because everybody could be sure that it was for hunting rabbits, or for a Civil War display, not for shooting your fellow students.  That would be a world of self-reliant and stable families, the communities they foster, and the schools they permit to teach their children.  The windows wouldn't be broken.  In that world, you would no more teach high school students puerile obscenities, or you would no more hand out estrogen to little girls, than you would take a gun to pepper the gym class -- or smash the windows of your own home.

    

Comments

[Ethan C.]

The gun comment reminds me of a funny and almost pertinent story.

My older brother had a high school history teacher who was more than a little crazy, one Dr. Roberts. He would play reveille on his bugle most mornings and was known for throwing books and heavy objects at the PA speaker whenever it interrupted his lessons. Doc Roberts' teaching style was of the anecdotal school, as he considered hilarity a better criterion of historical importance factual accuracy. Needless to say, he was the most popular teacher in school.

Up until a few years before my brother had him, Doc Roberts had an annual custom of bringing a black powder musket to school for a lesson on the Revolutionary War. The pedagogical idea must have been to impress upon the students how loud, smokey, and cool such firearms had been. To that end, he would load this weapon with a blank charge and fire it out the classroom door into the hallway. The resultant teeth-shaking kaboom and thick clouds would make the point quite well.

One year, however, the school decided it was time to hire a full time safety officer to patrol the building. This wasn't (yet) an actual policeman; rather, it was a smallish middle aged woman, no doubt with much academic experience studying the subject of school violence, well-versed in all the latest theories as to its causes and remedies.

On the day of the Revolutionary War lesson, Doc Roberts began his lesson in the usual way. He poured the powder, tamped it down, instructed his students to cover their ears, and fired into the hall.

After about fifteen minutes, as the smoke began to clear, a small head was seen nervously poking around the frame of the doorway. It belonged to the safety officer, who had been walking toward the door and was about five feet away when the shot was fired.

And so ended the golden age of American education.

[Wonders for Oyarsa]

Wonderful, Dr. Esolen. This really is the center of it.

[Matthias]

Serious question - when schools stopped trusting families, did they do so without reason? Or did a breakdown in families precede the troubles with the schools, so that schools found they could no longer rely on families the way they formerly had?

I have heard it said that in the Good Old Days the most terrible discipline a school could mete out (or needed to) was a phone call home. That accords with my own recollection of early school days. But today, it is said, one cannot expect the phone call home to accomplish anything. That too accords with things I have heard from public school teachers: if there is any adult at home who can be reached, telling them "your child is being disruptive in class etc. etc." may get no more response than a shrug, if not a "well it must be your fault". Whereas once upon a time it would have been, "Miss Jones, I GUARANTEE YOU that will not happen again!"

[Kamilla]

Oh Ethan, how hilarious! That history teacher reminds me of my high school science teacher who taught us various practical uses of silver nitrate. His favorite use of youth had involved the toilet seats in the girls dorm around the beginning of bathing suit season, but he taught us other uses more (but only slightly more) appropriate to a mized high school class. Of course that was only after he had told us his favorite WWII story of the day.

Kamilla

[Stuart Koehl]

I'll speak from my own experience, since I was born in 1956, and my public school career covered the period of transformation from the old paradigm to the new.

First, there is more than enough blame to go around. Parents were starting to get more defensive about their kids by the time I was in fourth or fifth grade. I think a lot of it had to do with the sense of entitlement that the Great Society was instilling in people, as well the rise of the "therapeutic culture" in which everything is the fault of society's shortcomings (as the song "Officer Krupke" noted, kids "are depraved on account of being deprived").

That said, a great deal of fault lies with the teachers--or rather, educators, as they came to be called at this time. I blame the "professionalization" of teaching, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels, and the emergence of an academic discipline called "education" that became more and more divorced from reality over time. Through the process of credentialization, the distance between parents and teachers opened into a chasm. Teachers, being "degreed professionals", acted with disdain towards mostly blue collar parents, while the obvious lack of academic rigor in the teaching profession generated equal disdain among well educated professional parents (I'll never forget one memorable PTA meeting I attended in which the principal of the local public elementary school tried to pull rank on my next door neighbor by boasting, "I have a doctorate in education", to which my neighbor--now dean of the University of Michigan snorted, "So? I have a real doctorate"). In such an atmosphere, mutual distrust was inevitable.

In the background of all this was the overarching narrative of the liberal welfare state, which believed in the omniscience of experts (who usually had very little practical experience), together with a perverse "hermeneutic of suspicion" towards traditonal nexes of authority (I think, though, that these same people who called for "stickin' it to the man" realize that they ARE the man).

A final contribution to the brew is our litigious society, which believes that someone must be responsible for everything, and that the solution to all life's ills is to sue someone. This causes bureaucrats to insulate themselves from litigation by drafting comprehensive books of rules and regulations which must be implemented in the most literal sense possible, without any adminstrative discretion, thereby absolving any one individual of personal responsibility for anything. In the event of a problem, point at the rule book and shrug. Sure, it's stupid, but your ass is covered, and you only need to put in your 20 in order to retire.

So there you have it--we're all to blame in one way or another. Except me, of course, because I never had time to play this stupid game and always tell everyone where to get off. Sometimes the even do what I say.

[Bobby Winters]

>>(I'll never forget one memorable PTA meeting I attended in which the principal of the local public elementary school tried to pull rank on my next door neighbor by boasting, "I have a doctorate in education", to which my neighbor--now dean of the University of Michigan snorted, "So? I have a real doctorate"). <<

Snort.

[Red Cardigan]

This is very interesting.

In pondering the reasons for the breakdown of trust between parents and schools, is there any possibility that the often acrimonious battle over school segregation had anything to do with it? 1957 was the year of the showdown in Little Rock over the issue of segregation, and Brown v. Board of Education had been decided only three years before.

In hindsight it's easy to see that desegregation was morally the right thing to do, of course, but I wonder if parents, particularly in the South, saw the whole matter as a Federal usurpation of what they thought should have been a local matter; the fact that the schools "bowed down" to the pressure to desegregate might have been one of the many factors which caused parents to distrust schools--while some within the schools may have been shocked and disappointed by the resistance to desegregation and the hostility parents began to show toward the institution of public education at that time.

(And showing up for school with a shotgun in your truck might have been interpreted in a more sinister way in some states in 1957 than in others.)

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>In hindsight it's easy to see that desegregation was morally the right thing to do, of course, but I wonder if parents, particularly in the South, saw the whole matter as a Federal usurpation of what they thought should have been a local matter<<<

Of course it was, but the most acrimonious disturbances took place in northern cities like New York, and especially Boston, where busing shattered stable ethnic neighborhoods, generating white flight both out of the public school system and then out of the city and into the suburbs. In the South, more ethnically homogeneous even if racially diivided, the process actually was much more smooth.

That brings to mind an old observation: In the South, whites did not mind how close blacks got as long as they did not rise too high, while in the North, whites did not mind how high blacks rose, as long as they did not get too close.

[Bill R]

I sent Judy's email to my daughter, now in her third year of teaching high school English. She replied: "It's scary how true this is!"

[Jenny Islander]

I wonder what would happen if I sent my eldest daughter to third grade with my old jackknife. It was confiscated for the afternoon when I took it out to sharpen a pencil at my desk. If I was sharpening a pencil, I obviously wasn't paying attention to the teacher; also there was the mess I was making. I got it back the next day.

The local pizza parlor used to hand out cheap little jackknives with the restaurant's name on it--to the kids. Can you imagine?

[Jenny Islander]

PS: I won't be sending my eldest daughter to third grade at all, God willing, because I plan to homeschool when she is old enough (she's three). The situations parodied in this entry helped form this decision. My husband and I don't want our family chewed up in the gears of bureaucracy.

[Bobby Winters]

>>That brings to mind an old observation: In the South, whites did not mind how close blacks got as long as they did not rise too high, while in the North, whites did not mind how high blacks rose, as long as they did not get too close.<<

Another on being, Southerners hate the race, but love the individuals. Yankees love the race but hate the individuals.

[Franklin Evans]

Bobby, I think you give at least some Yankees too much credit.

Being a participant in the first thread with this subject line, I decided to catch up on this one. My interest is also, understandably, for being married to a public school teacher who has taught in the same school district for nearly 35 years.

I want to encourage everyone to see Stuart's post of Oct 25, 2007 7:34:15 PM as covering the basics thoroughly... I also admit to some bias towards his POV, being born the same year he was.

I've lived with my wife for 26 years. In that time I've met a few dozen of her colleagues, met other public school teachers along the way, and was a public school student K to 12. I like to think of my view as a bit better than anecdotal, and that is that I see the main culprit in the decline of public ed residing squarely in the state capitols. My descriptions are for Pennsylvania, that being my home state and the one with which I'm most familiar. In researching other states, I've found only the rare exception to the following:

1) With special education at the top of the list, there has been a long string of unfunded mandates from state government. They pass nice looking laws requiring schools to do nice sounding things, but do nothing to address the additional cost those things entail. Since my wife is a special ed teacher, that is the one I'm also most familiar with, but gifted students are covered under the same statute ("special" referring to both ends of the curve).

2) There will always be anecdotal problems in any given school. But, because they are so highly politicized, such problems become campaign fodder, until well-meaning people are told that the problems are endemic, ubiquitous or both. I strongly suggest that each parent do the actual research themselves, bypassing the political mouthpieces at every turn and from any side. The problems are serious, but also much less common than one is usually lead to believe.

3) On expertise and professional credentials: there is no doubt that some administrators (a voice echoes to me from the living room, "Only some!?") can be pompous and arrogant, and that some of those do so to cover up their less than stellar competence. However, in much more than what my wife has shown me, teachers (if they are paying attention, of course) are trained in areas that most parents only hear about. In a very limited way, they have a depth of knowledge about children that is matched only by pediatricians. A couple of examples: abstract reasoning does not commence until about the age of four (every parent recognizes that onset: "why" prefaces every statement the child makes), because the area of the brain that contains that activity has finally finished physical development; handwriting skills are not taught in earnest until 2nd grade (there are always local variations to that), for the simple reason that bone and tendon development in the children's hands has not progressed far enough to support that usage until that age range.

4) Those two examples should be a guide for the research of a parent, and for a critical eye towards any educational program. Age-appropriate is for much more than movies and books; the physical application of that concept is at least as critical. The entire mindset, fostered by No Child Left Behind but predating it by a long stretch, of more-better-faster-earlier, if (when!) it contradicts developmental wisdom, must be seen as at best a politically motivated push to make voting parents happy. Writing personally: there is no cause for pride in the child that achieves more than other children, or faster or earlier; the source of pride should be that the child has done his or her best given the child's "equipment" and individual place on the developmental track. Comparisons with other children is dangerous. A parent could unwittingly be chastising a child for failing to do or achieve something that the child is not at present actually capable of doing. There is no blanket answer or approach. Every child is different in some way.

... which, I submit, is why teachers really do deserve our best offering of respect. Try spending six hours a day, for 180 days, with 30 distinct individuals, whilst being told that every single one of them must achieve a certain standard without any acknowledgment given to their individuality.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Another on being, Southerners hate the race, but love the individuals. Yankees love the race but hate the individuals.<<<

Yankee liberals are from the Lucy van Pelt school of humanitarianism: "I love mankind. It's people I can't stand".

[DGP]

>>The entire mindset, fostered by No Child Left Behind but predating it by a long stretch, of more-better-faster-earlier, if (when!) it contradicts developmental wisdom, must be seen as at best a politically motivated push to make voting parents happy.

Yes, but this political expedience must be understood in the context of an ongoing battle over the criteria for good education. When NCLB is repealed, it will not be replaced by the ideal, individually sensitive approach you describe. Instead, we are more likely to edge farther into the realm of totalitarian "public" education, where education is considered good insofar as it forms youth according to the political agenda of, say, the NEA.

>>Writing personally: there is no cause for pride in the child that achieves more than other children, or faster or earlier; the source of pride should be that the child has done his or her best given the child's "equipment" and individual place on the developmental track.

Teachers and pediatricians may have some helpful insights here, and those who have spent a lot of time (i.e., years) with an individual child may acquire some degree of real knowledge, but in the end the only people qualified to judge this are a given child's father and mother. Sadly, some parents simply live out their personal ambitions through their children, and their judgments are distorted.

>>There is no blanket answer or approach. Every child is different in some way. ... which, I submit, is why teachers really do deserve our best offering of respect. Try spending six hours a day, for 180 days, with 30 distinct individuals, whilst being told that every single one of them must achieve a certain standard without any acknowledgment given to their individuality.

No teacher mystique is necessary. There are plenty of teachers who happily embrace their function in the Brave New World, and diligently conform their children to the demands of Holy Mother School. Others recognize the inhuman burden of the public school system and nobly attend to the needs of their students as best they can.

Folks often observe that the best we can give our soldiers and sailors is not generic respect, but good leadership. The same is true of teachers. While teaching is a noble vocation and those who answer the call may rightly be honored, it is even more important to provide a social context in which teachers can teach, and teach well.

One element of that social context is a more substantive understanding of the common good and personal formation. As Prof. Esolen might put it (wrote he as inelgantly as I), you can't do a good job teaching a boy if you have no idea who or what a boy should become.

[DGP]

Sorry, that should be "inelegantly."

>>Yankee liberals are from the Lucy van Pelt school of humanitarianism: "I love mankind. It's people I can't stand".

Misanthropy is a sadly misunderstood virtue. :-)

[Franklin Evans]

DGP, thank you for that thoughtful commentary.

In my general agreement with you, I would suggest one modification: when you wrote ...the only people qualified to judge this are a given child's father and mother..., my thought was to change "judge" to "make decisions from". Parenting is fraught with guess work, the best advice from the most respected sources being capable of getting it completely wrong for any given child. The judgment, I submit, is in how well I can trust the expertise of the professional giving me the advice, and not how closely it happens to jive with my own perspective of the moment. I trust best my own judgment concerning my children; I do not trust it absolutely, having also a ringside seat for all the mistakes I've made.

I have observed here in Philadelphia many teachers who unhappily surrender to the Brave New World, as you put it, and the older ones are departing the vocation in droves. I've seen commentary to the effect that NCLB is deliberate sabotage. I find that to be an increasingly accurate description as time goes on.

[DGP]

>>In my general agreement with you, I would suggest one modification: when you wrote ...the only people qualified to judge this are a given child's father and mother..., my thought was to change "judge" to "make decisions from".

I have no objection to your phrase. I take it for granted that all human judgments are subject to error. At the same time, the ability to make this particular judgment presumes the kind of personal knowledge born of love. As such, as far as this world can usually ascertain, only the parents are able to make the judgment.

>>I have observed here in Philadelphia many teachers who unhappily surrender to the Brave New World, as you put it, and the older ones are departing the vocation in droves.

A surrender would be tragic, no matter how happily or unhappily executed. Here in the western part of the state, I've seen no evidence of a sea change. Then again, I more or less gave up on the public schools about fifteen years ago, so I haven't been paying close attention.

>>I've seen commentary to the effect that NCLB is deliberate sabotage. I find that to be an increasingly accurate description as time goes on.

I agree. It's sabotage as an act in an ongoing war. For my part, I lament the bombing of a serviceable railroad, but I applaud the debilitation of the enemy.

I believe we now have the technology to do away with public education in its entirety, and I suspect that steady progress toward privatization would be a great boon to children, schools, and to the civil order.

[Tim]

When I was a community organizer a couple of years back I saw John McKnight, a longtime observer of the field. He gave a speech to a room filled with "experts," those involved with providing services to people in social services, education, health and other fields (such as my community organizing). He outlined his observation that in our move from a manufacturing to a service based economy we have found ourselves continually in need of discovering new problems that we can build services to address (not to do so would threaten GDP growth, in his opinion, the master we have surrendered to). Hence the growth of services to "fix" what ails us. In the process, he said we've (the people) had our abilities to care for ourselves and our fellow man taken away from us. The "experts" have taken over and have convinced us that we don't know what we are doing. Unfortunately these "experts" upon whom we are to depend, in the community organizing field I was in, experience high rates of turnover and most are young and don't know what they are talking about. In addition, I observed that when help is needed the most (during economic downturns) it is precisely at that time that the resources dry up (from decreasing tax revenues) - perhaps a blessing in disguise? It is clear that depending upon Guv'mint for salvation is foolhardy. Problem is, so many people have bought into the argument that they've surrendered their responsibilities to be their own stewards. And, in the case of their children's education, they've surrendered stewardship of that also. Over the 10 odd years that I was an educator, both public and private, many people have asked me which I thought was better. My reply has always been that there are good schools in both arenas. I said that, on the whole, though, I'd say you probably find an advantage going to the private schools because, by the very fact that the parents are paying "extra" for it, they generally will be more involved. And that is the key to the best education: parental involvement, parental stewardship.

Post McKnight speech: t'was interesting - I couldn't find anyone then or since in the social services fields who would engage me in chewing on what he had pointed out, which I thought was spot on. It was like it was threatening. His book on the subject: The Careless Society: Community and its Counterfeits.

[zamir]

Tim,

you might check out Michel Foucault

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault

[labrialumn]

All sorts of very good comments. I'd only say that things are worse than described.

But I am curious about this cure for ADD - a known genetic difference (the precise codons involved are known) that results in the prefrontal cortex slowing down, or even going into sleep state, with the attempt to concentrate, by the application of kinetic energy to the gluteous maximus.

[Sue Sims]

In many areas of England, if the school phones the parent, they're likely to get a visit from an irate mother (occasionally father, though most fathers vanish sometime between impregnation and birth) whose only wish is to deck the teacher who scolded little Sade or Declan.

Many parents now see the school as their enemy. I think that the analyses here are spot on.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>But I am curious about this cure for ADD - a known genetic difference (the precise codons involved are known) that results in the prefrontal cortex slowing down, or even going into sleep state, with the attempt to concentrate, by the application of kinetic energy to the gluteous maximus.<<<

I'm sorry. What were we discus--Oh, look! A bunny rabbit!

[Tim]

Watch out ... the rabbit's dynamite!

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Watch out ... the rabbit's dynamite!<<<

I soiled me armor!

[Tim]

... bring out the holy hand grenade!

[GL]

Of topic -- as if this thread wasn't already -- but did anyone else happen to see the story last week about the foster parents in Britain who had their foster children taken away because they refused to teach "tolerance" of the "gay lifestyle" to the little innocent one under their care. See Christian foster parents condemn 'gay laws' available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/24/nfoster124.xml

So we can make it The Rise of the Pornogogue, III. This is beginning to sound like a bad series of Halloween season horror flicks.

[Peter Gardner]

From what I read elsewhere, the children have not been taken away.

Some digging came up with http://www.careandhealth.com/Pages/Story.aspx?EntityID=dae1cdb3-ca4b-451c-865e-90f93ed345aa