: SDF: Perhaps, but please consider why radicals such as Martin Luther King Jr. chose "mainstream society" as their public-speaking audience -- approaching the mainstream is the only way of confronting these "typical aspects" of society head-on.: DADDIO: Yes, yes, agreed. But we're talking about vulnerable young beings here, not OUR jaded hard asses. I just have grave doubts about the effects of using our kids in the front lines. You can stuff your kid chalk full of all kinds of good values and revolutionary sentiments, but handing him over to the "machine" at that point objectifies him as a weapon of revolt and, I'm speaking first hand here, can put him in tremendous psycho/sociological perril when he discovers that everyday is battle for control over his mind.
SDF: Your understanding of "peril" is a worthwhile and important one -- I don't think that it should leave either of us with a guilty conscience, though. I think that many children already realize that adults are in battle for the control of their minds -- the problem is, that in many of the cases I've observed, there are no adult authority figures in favor of the concept of the children controlling their own minds, and that's what has to happen before children are to be removed from the psychological peril they're already in. Children need ALLIES to move forward, especially the young ones, the ones I teach. That's our role. We don't need the warfare metaphors: the performance of nonviolent civil disobedience, of course, would be ideal for children learning to create a space for themselves in hostile environments, but nonviolent civil disobedience is the hallmark of individuals who already control their own minds.
What's needed is a whole new school culture, in the great majority of schools that serve lower-income students, at least the ones I've seen. There are a lot of ways to create this new school culture, but in most of these ways, the school's adult authority-figures will need to change their behaviors. Thus a good old fashioned appeal to the sensibilities of adults will be necessary, in places where a childhood revolt or a rebellion is unlikely to succeed.
Let's be clear about this, readers -- if your mommy and daddy make a lot of money, you've got fewer problems than you would have if your mommy and daddy didn't make a lot of money. So what we're talking about, Daddio and I, isn't usually about the schools of the rich.
As a teacher, I should say that the people at CenterSource Systems want to change the culture of schools. Their whole notion is centered around "community building," creating the classroom culture around the idea that the input of each student is to be respected by all adult authorities and that the students are individually each in charge of choosing what to learn. The success of "community building" requires the co-operation of students, principals, parents, districts, you name it -- it's a hard thing to do, requiring lots of work with no guarantees of success. Unfortunately, these same folks have hired themselves as hucksters, selling "classroom management" plans to well-meaning teachers. Tribes is thus more likely to fail than it is to succeed -- there is one school in my district that has instituted Tribes as its school-wide classroom management plan, but at that school, Tribes has become just another authoritarian mechanism for getting kids to sit down and shut up while they're being fed the boring mush mandated by the State and passed along by apathetic, overworked, overthreatened, and underpaid teachers.
There is an authoritarian mainstream against stuff like Tribes -- a couple of slick LA sales reps named Lee and Marilyn Canter have been promoting a line of product around a program for "classroom management" called Assertive Discipline. This stuff is, according to Lee Canter, used in about half of America's classrooms, (a more severe indictment of the system than any I've heard) and there are a few schools/ districts in my area where it has become district/ schoolwide policy. Assertive Discipline is a basic appeal to power-mad teachers, and it "works" by treating students as Pavlov's dogs, punishing them when they're bad (usually starting with putting their names on the board, thus perverting the atmosphere of classroom publicity), rewarding them when they're good, everyone the same way. Assertive Discipline classrooms are horrible places to substitute teach, and I wouldn't dignify the teachers who use this stuff with the title of "human being." My current district has an Assertive Discipline school -- by fifth grade, the kids in the abovementioned school had learned to dislike school so thoroughly that no act I could perform could break the spell. If you want to do a service to the public schools, Daddio, please hound the Canters out of business.
: SDF: The kids I see each day are "already integrated" into mainstream society. One of them attacked me today as I was substitute-teaching his class -- I found it interesting, in this regard, the regular teacher was foolish enough to put, in plain sight on her desk, a standard form for "reporting suspected child abuse" with this kid's name penned in on it. Don't you think kids like the one I mentioned ought to be "integrated" into a society with better, less abusive parents?
: DADDIO: Yes, if by "better and less abusive" you mean better and less abusive than mainstream parents.
: That's a wierd story by the way. What was that kid attacking you for and what in the hell kind of a person would leave a form like that in plain sight with one of the students' name penned in. Sounds like you gotta pretty desperate situation going on there. I haven't visited a public school in a while. Do you find that this is pretty typical of the bullshit that goes on there?
SDF: I was attacked because I put this student's name on the board, in accordance with the classroom policy of "Assertive Discipline," (see above) because this student was already fighting with another student. Assertive Discipline usually works for the substitute teacher for about five minutes, and I had about five minutes to burn (after a rather successful day teaching a special education classroom despite being a sub for a probationary teacher who left no lesson plan, and a very lazy and hypercritical instructional aide) before the school day was to end. Unfortunately, I forgot whom I was dealing with.
This isn't the usual student reaction to me. Usually lots of students wave and say "hi," sometimes I am surrounded by crowds of playful admirers, usually Mexican kids grades 1, 2, and 3. Often they form a mass group hug with me in the center. Some of the naughtier little boys try to pick my pocket out of some Mexican tradition of play.
My point in the previous post was that simply recommending withdrawal from the school culture as a solution for everyone, doesn't allow teachers to separate abused children from their abusive parents, and thus isn't a solution for those people. For such people, "it takes a village to raise a child."
As for the form about reporting suspected child abuse, it's likely the regular teacher had no clue as to who was going to read such a form. At the school in question, teachers tend to come and go from year to year, since working conditions there are not really all that good for the teachers. So it's possible she was new to the profession, tho "don't quote me on that."
As for the kids at Columbine High, check out this page
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