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:
1 .
Gives Jane's car a ticket before the meter runs out.
2.
Throws away Jane's passport application after Jane leaves the office.
3.
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.
4.
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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