When Children Run the Schools, Society Suffers
If people were asked whether the inmates should run our jails, most would probably say no. However, this is what has been happening in many of our schools. We have been allowing our inmates (that is, our students) to run our schools.
In one Southern California public school, the teacher tells an unruly group of eighth-graders that they are reading two to three years below grade level. This should not be breaking news because they get their test scores yearly. Rather than accepting responsibility for their deficits and working harder, the more savvy among them tell the principal that the teacher is insulting them.
This same naive teacher then goes over the eighth-grade graduation requirements with them. Those who get two or more fails and more than two unsatisfactory marks in work habits and cooperation will not be graduating onstage with their peers. This time some of them write letters to the principal complaining that the teacher is calling them losers and telling them that they will never succeed in life.
As with any dysfunctional system, A may equal B, but B does not equal A.
And those who try to get the teacher fired over the slightest infraction often resort to unseemly behavior. One junior high school boy misconstrues what a substitute teacher says and admonishes her in front of the class by telling her he could have her fired for that. It takes a girl sitting next to him to repeat the correct version of the statement to put the child’s and the nervous sub’s minds at ease.
Unprompted and unprovoked, an eighth-grade girl tells her overweight teacher she smells bad and that she can’t stand to look at her. Another child calls her teacher a “fool” and a “she-devil,” and a boy calls his teacher an “idiot” and a “retard” before storming out of the room.
Yet these are the very same children who bring their parents to school and complain about teachers over some real or imagined insult that takes hold over their young minds. They do this because they know they can. They know that the administration will be open to their comments and concerns. At times it gets so blatant that it seems that some upper-level administrators are running for public office, with the students and their parents as their constituents.
The lack of free speech for adults on most campuses is the point where teenagers who can’t add and subtract fractions and who can barely stumble through grade-level textbooks are told that they are “smart,” smart for failing to grasp the most basic concepts that have been presented to them for several years. Years ago, when teachers and administrators weren’t afraid of telling the truth, these kids would have been thought of as anything but smart.
This lack of standards and integrity has begun to take hold of society in general, and the seams are beginning to fray.
Food franchises like McDonald’s, for instance, have cash registers with pictures of the purchases for employees who can’t read basic words like “hamburger,” “shake” and “fries.” In just about every store, cash registers compute the change for the clerk. Most cashiers probably couldn’t count back the change from a $10 bill.
Customer service fares no better. A caller asks an assistant supervisor at a major health-care organization for a certain phone number and is told he can’t find it. It is only after further questioning that the supervisor says he did find two other numbers for the company. Even then, the caller still had to ask for the numbers. As for integrity, a phone company representative thanks a customer who forgot to pay the bill one month for being loyal and responsible. “At least you pay,” he tells her. “Some people don’t, and when we cut off their service they put the phone under the names of one of their children and do the same thing again.”
It is hard to pin the lowering of the bar for standards and integrity on one factor; there may be many. But one thing is certain. At least some of this can be traced to allowing the inmates to run the jail.
