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What is happening in our schools?
Oct. 3rd, 2000 09:24 pmBack twenty-some-odd years ago, a government study of American education concluded that had a foreign power been responsible for bringing the country's educational system to its current state, such an act would have been considered an act of war. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear to me that schools at all levels (except perhaps, the nursery school level) just don't impart any kind of meaningful education any more. Back when I did some adjunct faculty work at a community college, I found the whole thing very frustrating, because students were interested only in getting the answer and not finding it. Borrowing from the old saw, they were interested in receiving a fish, not in learning how to fish.
Based on experience and some recent reading, the environment at many schools has transcended the inability to teach people how to think, and poses what I think is a very dangerous threat to the health of society.
A few years ago, when I lived in Colorado, the local school district installed camera enclosures on all district school buses. This was an attempt to identify and control students who behaved in an unruly fashion while traveling to and from school. (Granted, the district did not have enough cameras to go around, but the idea was that students never knew whether the box up front of the bus had a camera inside or not.)
In my day, the solution to such a problem would have involved stopping the bus until the guilty party (or parties) calmed down, and then proceed to school. All students arriving late would report to the principal's office, and would have notes sent home for signature by parents. Parents would prevail upon their children to act in a decorous manner, and kids would exert peer pressure on each other to keep the driver from stopping, thus keeping them from being late. Not any more, apparently. The modern approach, it seems, relies upon one or more parents raising holy hell because their li'l darling was counted late on account of some other child's actions. Every such infraction must be proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, via due process, etc. with justice meted out only to the guilty parties.
Today, it's not hard to find schools with permanent metal detector stations at all entrances. The schools feel "forced" into adopting such measures, and since I have no handy alternative solutions (key word: "handy"), there's not much more to say on the subject. However, as an observation, schools have become subject to the same kinds of "security" precautions as airports, including...arbitrary search of personal possessions and positive photo identification.
Recently, I read of a student who protested wearing such an identification badge in school. Besides being a piece of laminated plastic with a name and photo, the badge apparently had a passive transponder built in, so that when the wearer passed through certain doors, the fact would be registered and thus, school authorities knew pretty much where people were at all times. The protest was met with stiff discipline, including - if memory serves - the threat of suspension.
And just a couple of days ago, I read of a jurisdiction in Alabama (if I recall properly) that plans to implement random, mandatory drug testing among students (not among teachers or administrators, by the way) to test not only for the usual suspects, but for nicotine use as well. Students found with nicotine in their system will be subject to suspension from school athletic teams and will be directed to mandatory smoking education classes. Given the anti-smoking hysteria sweeping the nation, it's an easy bet to predict this tactic spreading like wildfire to other school districts.
The common pattern in all of this, it seems, is the gradual desensitization of an entire generation of students to invasions of privacy, to the point where anything and everything that is demanded of them will be surrendered without a murmur - as if they were little more than lab rats - and any attempt to protest will be considered subversive criminal activity.
There is a company out there - the name escapes me right now, but it's on the East coast - that is creating exactly the right technology for such a society. It plans to market miniature transponder devices capable of determining where they are via GPS signals and of monitoring vital body functions (such as heartbeat). The "plus" side of the coin is the ability to implant these devices in the elderly and infirm and to keep track of their health remotely. Too, the device can be used to track criminals and folks out on bond. The "con" side ought to be pretty obvious. Quoting the late Barry Goldwater: "Any government big enough to do things for you is big enough to do things to you." It's not hard to imagine a future where otherwise law-abiding folks who decline to wear one of these trinkets may have some heavy explaining to do, or may not have any voice in the matter at all.
Did George Orwell merely get the year wrong?
Cheers...
Based on experience and some recent reading, the environment at many schools has transcended the inability to teach people how to think, and poses what I think is a very dangerous threat to the health of society.
A few years ago, when I lived in Colorado, the local school district installed camera enclosures on all district school buses. This was an attempt to identify and control students who behaved in an unruly fashion while traveling to and from school. (Granted, the district did not have enough cameras to go around, but the idea was that students never knew whether the box up front of the bus had a camera inside or not.)
In my day, the solution to such a problem would have involved stopping the bus until the guilty party (or parties) calmed down, and then proceed to school. All students arriving late would report to the principal's office, and would have notes sent home for signature by parents. Parents would prevail upon their children to act in a decorous manner, and kids would exert peer pressure on each other to keep the driver from stopping, thus keeping them from being late. Not any more, apparently. The modern approach, it seems, relies upon one or more parents raising holy hell because their li'l darling was counted late on account of some other child's actions. Every such infraction must be proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, via due process, etc. with justice meted out only to the guilty parties.
Today, it's not hard to find schools with permanent metal detector stations at all entrances. The schools feel "forced" into adopting such measures, and since I have no handy alternative solutions (key word: "handy"), there's not much more to say on the subject. However, as an observation, schools have become subject to the same kinds of "security" precautions as airports, including...arbitrary search of personal possessions and positive photo identification.
Recently, I read of a student who protested wearing such an identification badge in school. Besides being a piece of laminated plastic with a name and photo, the badge apparently had a passive transponder built in, so that when the wearer passed through certain doors, the fact would be registered and thus, school authorities knew pretty much where people were at all times. The protest was met with stiff discipline, including - if memory serves - the threat of suspension.
And just a couple of days ago, I read of a jurisdiction in Alabama (if I recall properly) that plans to implement random, mandatory drug testing among students (not among teachers or administrators, by the way) to test not only for the usual suspects, but for nicotine use as well. Students found with nicotine in their system will be subject to suspension from school athletic teams and will be directed to mandatory smoking education classes. Given the anti-smoking hysteria sweeping the nation, it's an easy bet to predict this tactic spreading like wildfire to other school districts.
The common pattern in all of this, it seems, is the gradual desensitization of an entire generation of students to invasions of privacy, to the point where anything and everything that is demanded of them will be surrendered without a murmur - as if they were little more than lab rats - and any attempt to protest will be considered subversive criminal activity.
There is a company out there - the name escapes me right now, but it's on the East coast - that is creating exactly the right technology for such a society. It plans to market miniature transponder devices capable of determining where they are via GPS signals and of monitoring vital body functions (such as heartbeat). The "plus" side of the coin is the ability to implant these devices in the elderly and infirm and to keep track of their health remotely. Too, the device can be used to track criminals and folks out on bond. The "con" side ought to be pretty obvious. Quoting the late Barry Goldwater: "Any government big enough to do things for you is big enough to do things to you." It's not hard to imagine a future where otherwise law-abiding folks who decline to wear one of these trinkets may have some heavy explaining to do, or may not have any voice in the matter at all.
Did George Orwell merely get the year wrong?
Cheers...
