My heart aches for the parents of Phoebe Prince, the 15-year-old Massachusetts high school student who committed suicide in January after being relentlessly bullied at school and online.
My heart aches for her younger sister, who found Phoebe hanging in the stairwell of the family's home. A scarf the sister had bought her as a Christmas gift was knotted around Phoebe's neck.
My heart aches for Phoebe, who arrived from Ireland last fall only to endure months of abuse from classmates at South Hadley High School, the apparent result of Phoebe's brief fling with a popular football player.
My heart aches, but I also question the wisdom of filing criminal charges against nine of Phoebe's former classmates, as happened last week. Bullying should be taken seriously -- by teachers, administrators, parents and, yes, fellow students. I'm doubtful, though, that criminal prosecution is the best way to punish or prevent it.
WASHINGTON—According to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education, an increasing number of American parents are choosing to have their children raised at school rather than at home.
The attention “bullying” is getting due to the recent suicide of Phoebe Prince has created a long overdue discussion on the issue, but one that completely misses its mark. No one wants to know the real root causes because the solution isn’t one anyone is prepared to respond to. The behavior witnessed occurs in arenas where people are powerless and have to carve out some situation where they can exert some degree of control. The most dramatic displays of that kind of abusive behavior are in prison followed by schools. These oppressive environments are wholly responsible for creating breeding grounds for aggressive behavior. The article below is very well written and presents some heartbreaking cases, but is endemic of the misguided response. In this instance the proposal, unsurprisingly, is therapy. The underlying theory is that schools will function the way we desire when every student has been psychologically conditioned to accept the nature of their incarceration. Obviously, the biggest bullies in school are the administrators and teachers who exert virtual absolute power over students and use that power capriciously.
The new principles introduced by the Obama administration with regards to renewing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act can be summed up essentially as harm reduction. The plans to ameliorate NCLB and provide additional funding for schools demonstrate an earnest desire to improve schools, but also reveal an utter lack of imagination through the continued support of an institution that does much more harm than good.
A number of fallacious beliefs are at the heart of education reform movements. One in particular, which enabled the enactment of NCLB and which persists today, is that teacher performance can be objectively determined through testing. Even after one ignores the basic fact that quality teaching is dependent on there being a conducive environment which schools by design can never provide; the process of trying to gauge accountability is one of many recipes for failure. Among the problems with this approach is that curriculum becomes solely about the test and teachers who may have been engaging are effectively undermined. Obama seeks to minimize this, but even in his plan, testing remains the arbiter of determining a teacher’s competence. An easier and more accurate way to find out who the poor teachers are would be to ask a student. You would only need to ask one because every single student in any given school can tell you exactly who the ineffectual teachers are. Of course that will never happen because the group best able to determine aptitude, and who are most affected by reforms – students – play no part in any discussion about education. They remain solely as subjects of mercurial social experiments.
Obama did provide an ideal, albeit a vague one, that "all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career.” Exactly what it means to be prepared is absent from his speech. If being prepared for college means having the capacity to think critically and produce original work in a coherent manner, public schools will not provide such skills. Schools are institutions where scores of children are herded together such that they must be governed by social efficiency. Real creativity must be squelched when it emerges because schools would not be able to function if they had to treat each child as an individual whose intellectual interests had to be respected.
Career preparation is possible if one is profoundly cynical. Since virtually all public schools are removed from society and keep students confined in classrooms, jobs that students are prepared for would be restricted to work that takes place indoors, isolated from communities, and which involve doing tedious boring tasks. Few practical skills are learned in school. Information is presented in an abstract manner and students are taught dependency. This is inherent to the structure of all public schools. Where schools do succeed in preparation is teaching children to become good prisoners.
The sad fact is that public schools can never provide the functions Obama calls for because it violates their essence. Trying to make schools into places where children can become freethinking self-actualized individuals is like trying to turn lead into gold.
Alchemy persisted for over 6,000 years while public schooling has only been around for 150 years. Until a new paradigm is sought, schools will continue to fail. Let’s hope we learn the futility of reforms in shorter time.
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