Schooled
A young child was led to the center of a small bright room, in a school. The child faced a man who examined a list of the little one’s wrongdoings.1
The parents of the child stood several feet away. A few teachers were required to attend.2 They gathered off to the side. They checked the clock. An administrator watched from the doorway.3
The room was new to the child but somehow familiar: completely bare, antiseptic; speckled tile floors; pale cinderblock walls. The child thought of this room as the bright room.4
The man with the paper read the charges:5
—failure to stand in line
—talking out of turn
—drawing when should be writing
—lingering after recess
—daydreaming
—attitude
—gross displays of wit
“Do you have anything to say for yourself, young man?”6
“Will I lose recess? For how long?”
When there was no reply, the little one searched each face. Nobody returned the child’s gaze except the mother for a moment. Her look was sorrow.7 Then like her husband she half-averted her eyes.8
“Come here now,” the man with the list said so cordially that the child automatically followed him into a corner. The man circled round, trapping the child. “Face the wall for a moment, won’t you?” the man said. “Like a good kid.”
The child shrugged.9 Then faced the corner.
The man with the list of wrongdoings took out a slender handgun from a nook in the cinderblock wall.10
He put the gun to the back of the child’s head.11
He squeezed the trigger.12
The teachers nodded and returned to class.
The man with the list returned the gun to the wall.13
The administrator ushered the parents to a table of refreshments in the breezeway where they were offered coffee, juice, and fresh pastry. Before long, they left the school.14
_________________________
ENDNOTES:
1 “Adults and adult institutions in our society regularly commit acts of abuse, coercion, deprivation, indoctrination and invalidation against young people. From the moment of conception, young people are oppressed by their elders, entirely based on the difference of age, via a process known as ‘ageism’.” –from “Young and Oppressed” by Sara Zia, age 17, and Brian Dominick, age 20, in Liberating Youth, www.messmedia.rootmedia.org/kidlib/libyouth.htm and http://www.zmag.org/youthwatch.htm
2 “Those who practice teaching do not for the most part succumb to cynicism or indifference—the children are too immediate and real for the teachers to become callous—but, most of the school systems being what they are, can teachers fail to come to suffer first despair and then deep resignation? (Naturally, the resigned teacher may then put on a happy face and keep very busy).” –Growing Up Absurd, 24
3 “A recent study by Edgar Friendenberg concludes that spirit-breaking is the principal function of typical lower-middle-class schools…” –Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education
4 “I couldn’t help but notice that the [elementary school] building smelled exactly the same as every grade school I’d ever attended, like chalk and floor wax, and like a Pavlovian puppy, this scent filled my belly with fear. I don’t know why elementary schools do this to me…” –Sandra Cisneros, in Greg Michie’s Holler If You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher and his Students
5 “All the children—the bright, the average, and the dull—are systematically retarded one way or another, while the teacher’s hands are tied.” –Growing Up Absurd “A great neurologist tells me that the puzzle is not how to teach reading, but why some children fail to learn to read. Given the amount of exposure that any urban child gets, any normal animal should spontaneously catch on to the code. What prevents? It is almost demonstrable that, for many children, it is precisely going to school that prevents—because of the school’s alien style, banning of spontaneous interest, extrinsic rewards and punishments. (In many underprivileged schools, the I.Q. steadily fall the longer they go to school.)” –Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education
6 “The burden of proof, as to who is ‘wrong,’ does not rest with the young but always with the system of society. Our society…stands the test poorly.” –Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
7 “Disappointed and resigned, adults do not see a future for their own children, for they do not know the Way themselves. Immigrants of the first generation wanted their children to make good and have careers; in the third generation they just ‘want their children to be happy’.” –Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
8 “The most common popular, and mayoral, prescription for delinquency is ‘more parental supervision.’ In the usual circumstances this would likely increase the tension and trouble….” –Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
9 “My purpose is a simple one: to show how it is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up…” –Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
10 “Let me repeat the facts. From early childhood, the young are subjected to a lockstep increasingly tightly geared… There is little attention to individual pace, rhythm, or choice, and none whatever to the discovery of identity or devotion to intellectual goals…” –Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education
11 “The very process of becoming an adult entails the imposition of compromise and conformity. The state of mature adulthood as currently defined by society is preposterous and detrimental. Adults are violent towards each other. They rule each other and make demands upon their peers. Worst of all, they introduce these and other harmful activities to young people who will then practice them throughout their lives.” –Brian Dominick, “Revolution Kid Style” in Liberating Youth
12 “The soldier at My Lai reports his inability to feel in these words: ‘You feel it’s not real. It couldn’t possibly be… They’re actually shooting people for no reason…’ This man is six months out of public school. He is six months distant from the Glee Club, Flag Pledge, textbook, grammar exercises, Problems of Democracy. It is essential that we be precise. It is not the U.S. Army that transforms an innocent boy into a non-comprehending automaton in six months. It is not the U.S. Army that permits a man to murder first the sense of ethics, human recognitions, in his own soul: then to be free to turn the power of his devastation outward to the eyes and forehead of another human being. Basic training does not begin in boot camp. It begins in kindergarten, and continues with a vengeance for the subsequent twelve years.” –Jonathan Kozol, The Night Is Dark and I Am Far From Home
13 The picture is an exaggeration. In important ways the American system is not inhuman but human-all-too-human. The tone of dependency, for instance…is a regression to childhood. –Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
14 Or put is this way: These conditions are absurd, they don’t make sense: and yet millions, who to all appearances are human beings, behave as though they were the normal course of things… –Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
More Endnotes:
“In our society, bright lively children, with the potentiality for knowledge, noble ideals, honest effort, and some kind of worth-while achievement, are transformed into useless and cynical bipeds, or decent young men trapped or early resigned, whether in or out of the organized system.” –Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd
“The legal justifications for compulsory schooling have been to protect children from exploitation by parents and employers, and to ensure the basic literacy and civics necessary for a democratic electorate… [However] our schools reflect our society closely, except that they emphasize many of its worse features… Given their present motives, the schools are not competent to teach authentic literacy, reading as a means of liberation and cultivation… …most teachers—and the principals who supervise their classes—operate as if progressive education had not proved the case for noise and freedom of bodily motion. (Dewey stressed the salutary alternation of boisterousness and tranquility.) The seats are no longer bolted to the floor, but they still face front. Of course, the classes are too large to cope without ‘discipline.’ Then make them smaller, or don’t wonder if children escape out of the cage, either into truancy or baffled daydream.” –Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars
“It is simply a superstition, an official superstition and a mass superstition, that the way to educate the majority of the young is to pen them up in schools during their adolescence and early adulthood. The hard task of education is to liberate and strengthen youth’s’ initiative, and at the same time to see to it that they know what is necessary to cope with the on-going activities and culture of society, so that this initiative can be relevant. It is absurd to think that this task can be accomplished by so much sitting in a box facing front, manipulating symbols at the direction of distant administrators. This is rather a way to regiment and brainwash… We are witnessing an educational calamity. Every kind of youth is hurt… Sloan Wayland of Teachers College points out that, in cases of necessity, kids pick up in a few months the reading and arithmetic that was supposed to have taken eight years to acquire. It is ridiculous to structure elementary education around such ‘subjects’.” –Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-Education
