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Originally posted by sycamore
Essentially, the kids are being sold. (And given the large number of black students in the system, I don't blame anyone for getting pissed one bit.)
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Oh, come on, syc. The *kids* aren't being sold. What a silly piece of rabblerousing that idea is. The concession to make money from trying to teach them is being sold...the government having failed miserably at the task. Again I direct people's attention to
The writings of Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian for some talk about what's wrong with schools and schooling.
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Maggie, you make a few good points as well. Discipline begins in the home, and it seems like kids today get away with so much more than even I did...at the same time, maybe it has always been like that, just not as obvious.
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I can assure you that it has *not* always been like that...it drastically deteriorated over the time that I was in the system, and not uniformly. During my childhood the worst bit of disorder there ever was was timed paintpan droppings to annoy a substitute teacher. By the time I got to high school, there were known "good schools" and "bad schools". While I was in high school (a "bad school) we had three shootings and one bomb...not a bomb *threat*, but an actual bomb. This was in 1969.
Up until then, kids who were disruptive were suspended, with the next level of sanction being expulsion--being sent to a reform school lowered a pall of shame over an entire family. The present of a police squad car outside a school was a notable scandal.
Today, urban schools routinely pass kids through a metal detector to disarm them on the way to class. The halls aren't patrolled by teachers, but by uniformed city police. There are *way* too many parents who don't give a shit what their kids do *anywhere*, much less in school, as long as it down't interefere with the parents having a good time.
At this point in time, the same parents probably raised hell when they were in school as well..and in some cases that wasn't all that long ago. How much discipline can you expect from a mother who got pregnant at 16? If she had no sense of responsibility of her own, how can we think she will somehow convey one to her kids? How many kids like that in one classroom does it take to make education a nearly-impossible task? Again, from my own experience: not many.
We now have a society where the only constraint on the behavior of a significant cohort within the public school student population is the legal system: if it won't get you busted, go right ahead. And even if you *do* get arrested, it's only a juvie offense.
And it doesn't have to be that way. In terms of discipline and maintaining order, the schools in the Upper Merion School District today are much like the Philadelphia Public schools were up to about 1967. Don't tell me it's a matter of money; that's bullshit. No amount of money in the school district budget will fix what's *culturally* wrong with the kids in Philly schools today.