1. 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:
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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