THE DANGEROUS DIRECTION OF EDUCATION
Recently, events in our society that would surely have been considered so bizarre when I was a child that those responsible would have been placed under arrest and held for a thorough psychiatric evaluation, are becoming commonplace. The ruthless, inept response to children in distress today is handcuffs and police. Our society has become so depraved, so devoid of individual, unrestrained common sense and critical thinking, that we have found it necessary to have armed police officers enter a school and forcibly handcuff and arrest… A FIVE-YEAR OLD CHILD!!!…while a clueless educational bureaucracy stands-by paralyzed, and passes all responsibility on to law-enforcement. Any attempt, it seems, to relate to children in any way that even hints of nurturing has been abandoned as unworkable. A fifteen year-old, doodling on a desk - done as long as there have been school kids and desks - now requires taking police action! No longer will staying after school, or a note to parents suffice! These dangerous, hardened thugs will no longer be coddled…restrain them …taze them if necessary and take them away!
Having never been forcibly restrained, I find the thought personally frightening and consider it a very extreme measure in a free society, a forced denial of liberty and control. I have forcibly restrained another human being…. but it was in a war and it was a wounded Viet Cong during a fire-fight, where men were killed. There was not the least compunction on my part nor any concern for his wounds, the danger in our midst was immediate and had to be rendered harmless and I tied his hands behind his back and covered his eyes. If those in academia today are lacking of the intuitive reasoning skills to communicate with and evaluate very young children - and maybe even consider the fact that their behavior is by definition childish and at times difficult - they should immediately be trained or terminated. Despite the quest for advanced degrees and the financial reward given them in the academic world, there seems little concern for the steady coarsening of the treatment of innocent and inexperienced children by supposedly learned and highly trained educators with no inkling of how disproportionate and inappropriate their philosophy of education really is
It must be noted that there are cases of troubled and disturbed children whose problems are beyond that of a classroom teacher or principal and require parental and professional attention outside of academic considerations, but there always have been. They must be identified and their problems addressed well before a decision is made to traumatize very young and highly impressionable kids with a shameful spectacle by invading the safety of the classroom and forcibly taking one of them away in shackles, and if any school administration is unable or unwilling to provide a proper legal and humane remedy to a child’s difficulties, they should be prosecuted for child neglect.
The problems and pressures that school kids and teachers face today are extraordinary, but there must be wise and temperate people in charge who can discriminate between a kid being a kid and a dangerous sociopath. Disruptive children are nothing new. As a child I had them in my classes, and I know that when they became unmanageable they were reassigned to schools where they could get more individual attention and if needed clinical help. There was the rare case of kicking and screaming and a very persuasive escort to the principal’s or nurse’s office to await the arrival of parents, but that was something easily dismissed as not especially significant by the the rest of the class…there were no police actions, no stun-guns, no handcuffs, no stupid adults hell bent on turning a minor difficulty into an earth-shattering confrontational event. These are the new-rules being taught to the current crop of teachers and they have no choice but to comply. Administrators and their lawyers, sheltered from reality, have issued written “practices” designed with the interests and liabilities of the administrators of primary concern. Simply waving papers and claiming to be following guidelines that directs these kinds of behaviors towards children cannot be construed as a shield to those possessing no common sense, and they must be held accountable. Between disinterested parents and incompetent school administrations that recklessly damage children by crushing their developing self respect and dignity, it remains that the question of who should be in handcuffs needs serious review.
When the adults lose their minds….all is lost.
Semper Fi
CW