Bianca, You Animal, Shut Up!
Our problem in
understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong
it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can
see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because
an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA,
YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school
doom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo
had poisoned her.
Do I make too
much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen
thousands of times every day in schools all over. I’ve seen it many times, and
if I were painfully honest I’d admit to doing
it many times. Schools are supposed
to teach kids their place. That’s why we have age-graded classes. In any case,
it wasn’t your own little Janey or mine.
Most of us
tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of
psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime
directive of the system: putting children in their place. It’s called
"social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward
to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her
comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid,
or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the
country, or the strange lady who lives next door.
I picture this
animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn’t go to school for
a month after her little friends took to whispering, "Bianca is an animal,
Bianca is an animal," while Bianca, only seconds earlier a human being
like themselves, sat choking back tears, struggling her way through a reading
selection by guessing what the words meant.
In my dream I
see Bianca as a fiend manufactured by schooling who now regards Janey as a
vehicle for vengeance. In a transport of passion she:
- Gives Jane’s car a ticket before the meter runs out.
- Throws away Jane’s passport application after Jane leaves the office.
- Plays heavy metal music through the thin partition which separates Bianca’s apartment from Jane’s while Jane pounds frantically on the wall for relief.
- All the above.
You aren’t
compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to
surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a
livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of
physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about
thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children
were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother
didn’t have to surrender her children. What happened?
If I demanded
you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed
work you’d think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay
that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you
so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a
schoolteacher?
I want to open up concealed aspects of modern
schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You
have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their
backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is
as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive.
What does it mean?
One thing you
do know is how unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the
personality of your particular child or anything significant about your family,
culture, religion, plans, hopes, dreams. In the confusion of school affairs
even teachers so disposed don’t have opportunity to know those things. How did
this happen?
Before you hire
a company to build a house, you would, I expect, insist on detailed plans
showing what the finished structure was going to look like. Building a child’s
mind and character is what public schools do, their justification for
prematurely breaking family and neighborhood learning. Where is documentary
evidence to prove this assumption that trained and certified professionals do
it better than people who know and love them can? There isn’t any.
The cost in New
York State for building a well-schooled child in the year 2000 is $200,000 per
body when lost interest is calculated. That capital sum invested in the child’s
name over the past twelve years would have delivered a million dollars to each
kid as a nest egg to compensate for having no school. The original $200,000 is
more than the average home in New York costs. You wouldn’t build a home without
some idea what it would look like when finished, but you are compelled to let a
corps of perfect strangers tinker with your child’s mind and personality
without the foggiest idea what they want to do with it.
Law courts and legislatures have totally absolved
school people from liability. You can sue a doctor for malpractice, not a
schoolteacher. Every homebuilder is accountable to customers years after the
home is built; not schoolteachers, though. You can’t sue a priest, minister, or
rabbi either; that should be a clue.
If you can’t be
guaranteed even minimal results by these institutions, not even physical
safety; if you can’t be guaranteed anything
except that you’ll be arrested if you fail to surrender your kid, just what
does the public in public schools
mean?
What exactly is
public about public schools? That’s a question to take seriously. If schools
were public as libraries, parks, and swimming pools are public, as highways and
sidewalks are public, then the public would be satisfied with them most of the
time. Instead, a situation of constant dissatisfaction has spanned many
decades. Only in Orwell’s Newspeak, as perfected by legendary spin doctors of
the twentieth century such as Ed Bernays or Ivy Lee or great advertising
combines, is there anything public about public schools
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