Kids These Days!

It is spring again, and the sound of automatic gunfire in the public schools echoes throughout the land. It appears that, from an actuarial point of view, April is to the public schools what the Full Moon is to the streets and alleyways of our inner cities -- the time of badness, danger, and anarchy, when all of society's guardians must be vigilant and on full alert. And yes, as tempting as it is to, once again, blame the public schools and the education bureaucracy for everything that ever goes wrong within their domain, I will resist, for once, that path of least resistance. For as pathological as the schools are, and as ill-considered as the "educational theories" and policies and regulations that misshape them are, it is entirely possible that some kids just show up, on the first day, already bad. And whose fault is that? It can't be the schools'.

Now, whether they do anything to "treat" these problems is another matter. In fact, whether it's even their _job_ to treat these things is another matter. The schools -- along with the social work industry -- have pursued a program for at least a generation now of taking over virtually every family function that there is -- _except_ for the responsibility and accountability part. The day-to-day policy, which is almost stated this explicitly, is: "Your children are ours, and you will have no more say in the matter of their upbringing or education. However, when we run into a problem we can't solve, they become (temporarily) _your_ children again -- at least long enough to enable us to assign blame, and refer the case to the proper authorities -- after which time your children become ours again, or maybe even (under ideal conditions) permanent wards of the state." Oops, wait a minute -- I was copying material from an old Soviet Five-Year Plan. Or was it something from the Third Reich? Nope, sure enough, this is the actual, expressed policy of the American CNE (Combined Nanny Establishment), which includes schools, the social work system, "welfare" agencies, public libraries, and any and all busybodies who look out their window and decide there's something lacking in your "parenting skills". And it goes without saying that a corollary to the above is the policy of "if it ain't broke, fix it anyway", i.e. if a kid doesn't appear to be sick, well, surely _something_ is wrong with him, and it's our job to ferret it out. Same goes for his "learning disabilities", "anti-social tendencies", and all the rest of it. The program depends, and thrives, on the Universal Pathology Model, as I will call it -- the notion that "well" children have little or no need for "help", and as such are not proper subjects of state attention and control. And this cannot be tolerated. So we have to attribute pathology to everybody, which is the only way to justify declaring their natural caretakers, AKA "parents", incompetent, and absorbing them into the system as "cases". So the schools -- which, at one time in the long-lost past were supposed to concentrate on educating -- are now the sorting centers and clearing houses for the detection and definition of pathology, all to the greater glory and prosperity of the regime and the neutralization of the family.

But I digress! Because I started this post in an attempt to _uphold_ the notion that all is not always well on the home front, and that the schools might, on occasion, have reason to express concern. In my day it was the kids who showed up with lice in their hair and smelling vaguely (or not so vaguely) of urine. It seems, in retrospect, that they were actually "homeless trainees" who had somehow wandered into the classroom. But those problems were relatively easily dealt with. We had hyperactive kids too - but back then they were simply referred to as "bad", and they spent their golden years of youth sitting in the principal's office, driven into a frenzy by the incessant clacking of manual typewriters. We had bullies too, and although they could be dealt with in class (unlike now, teachers were even allowed to physically coerce them, e.g. to keep them from inflicting permanent injury on other children) they ruled the roost on the playground and in locker rooms. My theory is they all either wound up in jail or became cops.

But again, I digress. Let me offer for your consideration two recent news items, and let you be the judge. The first concerns a couple of "preteen girls" who assaulted a third girl on the school playground and "stomped on her head and legs, breaking her hip." This was in retaliation for the victim's telling them to stop splashing water on her younger sister. OK, now these kids had been in public school for, say, five or six years, so we can't exactly call them blank slates. But surely their educational experience did not constitute incitement of violence of this magnitude -- after all, the victim was clearly not a religious conservative, a "hater", or an adult white male heterosexual. So I think we can discount the influence of public school propaganda -- at least until we learn more about the case.

The second incident -- on the same page -- concerned a "murder list" that two high school girls had compiled, resulting in their being charged with "making terroristic threats". Now, let me say something about this tidbit of law enforcement. I imagine that, in the wake of 9-11, the new, extra-thick and heavy, layer of law imposed on all American citizens included something like "making terroristic threats", which I guess would be something like threatening to fire-bomb someone's house or ambush them on their way to Shoppers' Food Warehouse. But we see that this charge has already become the basis for a goodly number of arrests in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and it is added, as a sort of fillip, to the list of existing charges in what appears to me to be the majority of cases of what used to be termed "disorderly conduct". So, when a drunken Penguins fan shouts across the alley to his neighbor, "I'm gonna kill ya", that is considered a "terroristic threat" and he is treated the same as a guy named Rashid who tries landing on the Outer Banks with a boatload of IEDs.

So anyway, these teenaged female terrorists are in deep popo because of this "murder list" because one of the intended murderees snitched to the school principal. And when one delves into the story a bit, one finds that the only "terroristic" thing about the "murder list" was that it was entitled "Murder List". There is absolutely no supporting evidence of any evil or violent intent. But too late for all those refinements -- the kids have been caught in the "justice" machinery and will be lucky to come out of it any better than the characters in one of those "women behind bars" movies from the 1950s.

So what do these two pairs of waifs have in common? Simply that I doubt that the baleful influence of public education was a critical factor in their delinquency. The former case, in particular, has a kind of "mean streets" air about it, as if these kids showed up on the first day all ready for a rumble in the jungle. The latter story is a bit more inane, and probably represents -- as much as anything -- the usual gross over-reaction on the part of school authorities. In fact, I could argue that the public schools actually create the conditions for this kind of thing, i.e. for petty and malicious bickering and hostility. Do they create the conditions for mass murder, of the Columbine sort? Highly doubtful. That seems to depend primarily on family pathology -- and we know that the schools are already hard at work on that one. The schools may make bad kids worse, but they don't make them bad. What they do to good kids is mostly make them bored out of their skulls -- primarily because the good kids have to spend most of the day waiting around while the staff deals with the bad kids.