PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE BEGINNING TO resemble prisons. The purpose of a K-12 education is to keep countless potential criminals off the street.
Or maybe my perception is off. Maybe our schools are just aggrandized baby-sitting facilities. After all, in prisons there are consequences for misbehavior.
As a substitute teacher, I see an appalling number of students coming and going from class as they please, eating junk food, littering, spitting, falling asleep, listening to iPods, cheating on tests — generally doing whatever they can to shirk studies.
Once a student asked me if she could “kick back” during the high school exit exam.
I said, “Sure, dear. Let me grab you a beer and peanuts.”
At many of our county schools, an administrator gets on the PA system during passing period and gives a minute-by-minute countdown urging students to be on time to their next class.
Stragglers are “locked out” of rooms and corralled in the cafeteria where time is wasted doling out tardy slips before students are sent to class anyway.
Sound silly? Welcome to our public schools. Sometimes hundreds of students are rounded up during tardy sweeps. What else can administrators do, declare martial law? Students aren’t doing their job.
Most county high schools seem to have a policy in place that allows 10 absences and 15 tardies a semester. It sounds good on paper. However, I never hear of students being kicked out of the district for attendance; just shuffled on to the next school.
Since school funding is based on enrollment, not performance, the incentive is to keep students seated at all costs, except maybe at a cost to them for repeated truancy.
Santa Monica schools fair better than the county. The difficulties in education are universal, however, in that they are tied to a vision of our culture.
America of the not-so-distant future will be a far cry from the proactive, informed middle class that historically distinguished it. Our youth will inherit a third world country consisting of a few uber rich individuals and a mass of poor working families who constantly toil, owe and rarely get ahead.
Ours will be a society of restored feudalism with a few landed gentry and the rest of us indebted peasants.
And it’s all because we’re raising automatons, not citizens. No wonder our schools are facing chronic problems of disengagement. What do our students have to look forward to? Why are they in school? Can anyone tell them? Are we raising Americans, or a surplus of uneducated, unskilled consumer workers?
Parents, the media and public officials must play a bigger role in preventing the erosion of civilization. We’re buying our students Beamers before they can balance a check book, deferring their upbringing to gangsters and porn stars, pacifying them when they’re late, praising them when they do what little is required.
There’s a prominent myth that if our students learn to read, write and do some arithmetic, they’ll go to college and live happily ever after. The truth is, not exactly. It depends on what you’re trying to do. Too bad they don’t teach that in school.
To make our K-12 system more viable, we need to implement mandatory civics and life skill courses. These classes would explain how our democratic capitalistic system works with an emphasis on how our students can participate effectively as citizens and make successful choices.
We also need to stop placating to mediocrity in the classroom and find alternatives for students who are making a poor show in terms of academics and/or attendance.
Maybe lagging pupils can spend a semester filling potholes. Perhaps then they’d realize how easy they have it in the classroom.
We also must realize not everyone is college bound. Some students are being set up for failure on a course that doesn’t suit them. They need to be channeled into trade schools and the civil service by the time they reach high school.
If we fail to make such investments upfront, we’ll be paying for it in the near future, when most of our youths have been swept up in a life of crime and incarceration.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 3, 2007. Read the original PDF.