Robert Hairless
Member
- Joined
- Oct 11, 2003
- Messages
- 3,983
You do make a point, this will continue until so many people feel angry enough that they take action.
True, and that's why my posts on this and related subjects are so passionate. It hurts to see children ruined: no 10-year-old girl should be sacrificed to make a point that rules are rules.
I don't share Joab's resolution that "Th schools are only ruining the ruinable children those with heart will remember these incidents and work towards change in the future". All children are ruinable. I'm not a soft person, I'm not sentimental and don't sentimentalize kids, and my own children have been adults for many years, but there is nothing in my heart or mind that allows me to see any child as expendable. Schools for me are not boot camps or prisons in which only the fit should survive and dedicate themselves to fix the institution that hurt them or change it. And I don't think it's reasonable to expect young children to fix problems created by adults who don't know what they're doing. It's especially unreasonable to expect success in that line from children who have passed through the meat grinder of American schools. What we force into the grinder is better than what comes out. No one is really happy with what comes out the other end or with the schools that produce it.
Unlike many others here, I suspect, I am a firm believer in public schools. Just not in the kind that destroys kids for the sake of some bizarre social scheme that has no chance of success at accomplishing anything except destroy kids.
Perhaps the nature of my arguments would be different if American schools could show that the children who pass through them are at least well educated. I still would argue that the transmission of knowledge and skills can be achieved without repression, and achieved with much better results when kids are not twisted into being frightened by the world around them, but these schools are dismal failures by any measure.
I've lived through generations in which educational theorists have imposed various philosophies, strategies, techniques, and approaches on American educational practices. Today's panacea always becomes tomorrow's problem that requires immediate remedy because it has failed. There is nothing new. It's the inherent rhythm of American education and has been for decades. Superimposed on it is a web of law that becomes increasingly complex and counterproductive. It doesn't work, hasn't worked, can't work, and so we do more of it, which makes no sense at all.
Schools don't even accomplish the purported goal of these Zero Tolerance policies: to help keep the kids physically safe. Perhaps they do achieve the creation of Zero Tolerance people, but is that the result we should want?
It's the parents and other adults who must fix the problems. That's why they are adults and not children.