Episode IX.05 - Sympathy for the Bully: Part One - Sit and Listen

Episode IX.05 - Sympathy for the Bully: Part One - Sit and Listen

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-You ought to go to a boy's school sometime. Try it sometime. It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques.

-a quote from JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye

(Music)

The other night, I was watching a show on Netflix with my youngest son. The segment of the show that we were watching took place in a high school and we watched as a bully knocked another kid’s books out of his hands and pushed the younger, smaller kid to the ground. Having grown up as a bookish nerd, back in the 70s and 80s, it was a familiar scene to me.

My son, however, was very upset at the scene. Surprisingly upset. He went off about, “that kid just pushed him down! Why would he do that?” In the scene, the smaller student in the school had been doing homework for the bully and the bully was upset about something in their arrangement, I can’t remember what.

I paused the show at that juncture and took what you might consider to be an unexpected line of argument with my son.

I tried to get him to sympathize with the bully.

I know, I know. Very unpopular. We’re all supposed to be against bullies in school. When our kids are not busy shooting one another, having sex with their teachers or using drugs and alcohol, bullying is always a nice fall back topic when it comes to discussing the problems of the modern school system.

But my intention here is to show that traditional schooling, or schooling as we know it, anyways, is not some hallowed institution that is simply flawed by the misbehavior of a few bad apples.

When I hear people go on about fixing the problems in our failing schools, I think of that sarcastic remark people sometimes make about communism, or about the people that still inexplicably defend it:

Oh well, they portray communism’s defenders saying, oh well, communism really works, its just that real communism hasn’t been tried yet. You see, we just need to get communism right.

I feel the same way about those who defend our system of schooling. They believe that if we can just get it right, school will be a good place for our kids.

When, in truth, it is an inherently flawed and, in fact, dangerous institution which will never nurture or educate our children properly.

There is no “doing it the right way.”

This episode will be the first in a sequence of episodes in this ninth series, a sequence about the ways in which schools are not simply underperforming in the West in general, but are actually, fundamentally defective.

But, before I get into this seriously, let me preface it all with a caveat. Make no mistake, I did well in school. I have good memories and bad, like everybody, but school was good for me in many ways in the long run. I have always been a bookworm. So you might think that I would be the kind of person who would rally to the defense of the school system. So this is not really a sour grapes sort of situation. I’m not someone who flunked out and now I’m trying to turn around and take a crap on schools. I did well on my SATs, earned scholarships in high school, I graduated from the University of Arizona in 1995 with an English degree, I loved most of my teachers and professors. I made friends. Even occasionally met a college girl.

And I became a teacher. I taught for 13 years, everything from 4th grade up through high school. I was a Montessori teacher in grade schools, both private and charter, and I was an English teacher in a public high school.

So I wasn’t just familiar with the issues that I will outline here…

I was part of the problem.

(Music)

It fascinates me that there is this widespread belief that schooling like we do now is traditional, you know, 30 desks and kids, teacher, rallies, spirit week, PE, Social studies, athletics, a peer community of kids the same age, PTA, principals and superintendent. In some people’s minds, school has an apostolic succession that stretches back into time immemorial.

And, to be clear, I speak here about both public and private, charter, even a lot of homeschools. It’s the whole set up, the classroom idea itself, is the focus of much of my tirade today, though there is much more that is wrong with school.

Actually, before I get into destroying the idea that school is in any way traditional, notice that I used a term, a few moments ago, apostolic succession. I said that pointedly, because religious language about school is actually appropriate, especially in America. And no, I am not coming down on the prayer-in-school conservative types. It’s all of us. Even hard-core liberals approach school with a religious awe, sometimes.

Because school is the place in which we have indoctrinated our kids, into conservative or liberal molds, left wing or right wing ideology, Christian or multicultural, its been the place where we attempt to turn our kids into the model citizens for which the current zeitgeist calls.

Schools are secular temples. When we enter a school, no matter our politics, we may hush our voices a little, watch how we dress or speak a little at least. There’s at least a bump of caution and respect that many of us don’t even reserve for churches anymore.

I think we don’t see how school, for decades, has prepared us to be defenders of this society in which we live, defenders of the way things are done here in the West, and school turns us into supporters of the most powerful elements of society. We read in textbooks or online about ancient cultures and the way that their religious institutions formed them and encouraged them to support institutions like monarchy, and a variety of religious ideals. Indeed, in my series on ancient Greece, it is apparent that even in so-called democratic places like Athens, the state and religion were one. The state supported the religion and the religion taught values that supported the state.

We do not see how our schools do the same thing now, how they function as the religious wing of the government, how they prepare us and guide us and form us to support and defend the institutions that undergird our society.

And you may think, well that is all fine and good. Schools, after all, are teaching our students to believe in democratic, multi-cultural ideals, to accept others, to fight for freedom and equality. Right?

The reality is that our schools really form us into becoming people ready, eager even, to support big business and its role in our lives. And don’t fool yourself into  thinking that you’re liberal so this doesn’t apply to you. Liberals or conservative, each of you is just a tool for one or another branch of big business.

I am willing to bet that there is some institution, and there are probably several, which operate on a large scale in our society, and which you will, at a moment’t notice, come to the defense of.

If its not the insurance companies, maybe its big Pharma, or the military, or the IRS, or maybe its the police, or big agriculture, or the health system, or even the CIA, there is some huge element of our society, which commands immense resources but which you, nevertheless, will immediately go to bat for if some A-hole like me dares to criticize it.

When you think about it, I hope that you can see the absurdity of this, the idea that some person like you or me, who is alone and vulnerable in this world, and really needing to focus on his or her own fate and the welfare of our families, the idea that one of us will drop everything and fight to defend outrageous drug prices or unreported sums for secret defense projects or rural police funding to buy rocket launchers and armored cars or military drones that kill civilians as acceptable collateral damage or the fact that the government can now see pretty much everything that you do online, whether you like or not.

I’ll take another trip down memory lane. I was at a party many years ago, much younger, back when I wasn’t quite so boring and still went to parties. And the topic of insurance rates came up. I’m sure you are all big fans of insurance rates and insurance companies.

Well, as usual, there was a guy there that instantly came to the defense of insurance companies. And there were probably several other people that agreed with him or were easily convinced by him. The guy talked about the slim margin of profitability for insurance companies, how they had no choice but to raise rates, etc.

Now, this guy was either underemployed, semi-employed or unemployed at the time, I don’t remember exactly, but here he was defending these huge corporations, for free! I said, “Dude, why are you carrying water for these people? These companies have high paid lawyers to defend them in public, why are you going to bat for them?”

You see, I’m a lot of fun at parties. Maybe this is why I don’t get invited any more.

I mean, these companies make tons of money, their executives fly around in private jets, their employees work in huge air-conditioned office buildings with break rooms and gyms and health benefits, and here’s this guy, barely working, swinging a bat for them at a party where every one is drinking supermarket beer.

That’s when it finally started to hit me. He’d been trained to do this his whole life. We all have.

Because its in school, where we spend our formative years, that we learn to have these knee-jerk responses, to carry the banners of these institutions that underpin our society. In school, we are indoctrinated. We are indoctrinated into the prevailing culture.

Now, I know that this is one of those scare-words, right. You’re probably pigeonholing me as we speak, a far-right conspiracy theorist fear-mongering about indoctrination in schools.

But, I’m actually okay with indoctrinating our children. I mean, we should all indoctrinate our kids. A doctrine is simply a teaching. The word “doctor" in latin actually means teacher and has nothing to do with medicine. To indoctrinate someone means to teach them and to form them into a certain way of thinking, a certain moral code. We all do this, or I hope we do, with our own kids. When you raise them up and teach them about being nice to other kids, and washing their hands before dinner and cleaning up their room, you are indoctrinating them.

The term has come to be associated with brainwashing, and today it probably has the same resonance that the term “gaslighting” has taken on in recent years in popular culture. But, the fact is that indoctrination is simply how the culture is passed on.

The real dilemma is when we start to feel like the school is passing on a different culture than the one that we, as parents, proclaim or possess. And this is not just a conservative issue. Decades ago, plenty of liberal or left-wing parents were upset when teachers and coaches prayed in school. I remember, myself, going to grade school in the seventies, and hearing prayers over the intercom at the beginning of the day.

Now, the shoe is on the other foot, and the schools are preaching sexual liberation and gender fluidity, and its the right-wingers who feel like the schools should stop “indoctrinating our kids”.

Now, part of my culture, my set of beliefs and values, is that parents should be in charge of what their kids are exposed to in school. Even if your beliefs are “multi-cultural”, that’s just another culture, really, that you are trying to pass on to your kids, a belief in multiple cultural values.

So, we should understand that, when kids are in school, they are learning to support the dominant cultural paradigm, which right now is sexually liberated and pro-immigration, to name just two of its tenets.

And, again, you may be fine with that. Maybe that is the culture in which you believe. But you weren’t fine with the indoctrination 30 years ago then, when it was more nationalist, christian and exclusive, and you probably won’t be happy with the type of indoctrination in schools in another 30 years or less, because then it will be some other values and you will be the one on the outside.

I have some friends, very liberal, woke and all, who send their kids to catholic schools or to traditional, christian charter schools. They do this for the discipline, the uniforms, the curriculum, etc, even though they themselves may be “pot-smoking atheists". So their kids are going to school every day and learning about the Immaculate Conception of Mary and the unity of the Holy Trinity and the parting of the Red Sea while the parents are trying to teach them at home about a rational universe that functions on underlying physical laws and about birth control and sexual freedom.

And I have no problem with that. If they want that dichotomy in what their kids are learning. But I know, from talking with them, that they’re conflicted about it. They prefer that their kids to get a certain form of discipline without the religious content but they’re willing to expose their kids to it in order to get those other benefits. Just like a more conservative parent might send their kid to a public school which teaches values contrary to their religion but they really respect the caliber of the teaching staff, so they just swallow their pride and send their kids.

It’s just seems absurd to me, you know. We allegedly have a country in which we are supposed to feel free to choose our own way, have our own beliefs, that was the difference between this country and the old world. In the old World, in places like Ancient Greece, everyone in a community was supposed to believe the same thing.

There were huge religious wars in Europe centuries ago over this same concept, people couldn’t tolerate people with other beliefs in their society, Protestants felt the same way as Catholics after the Reformation and once they broke away they sanitized their local cultures.

But we wanted our country to be different. For everyone to be free to have their own beliefs, their own culture. Not to live in a top-down, ideological, Orwellian structure of dictated morals and beliefs. But in the temples that are our schools we have reverted to European theocracy, to state worship, to obedience to the prevailing philosophies of the time. In the 80s, it was school prayer and American exceptionalism, and if you weren’t on board with that, you were a commie. Now its multiculturalism and woke ideology that rules. Rest assured, if you’re happy now you’ll feel oppressed in another five, ten or twenty years.

But I was going to talk about bullies, right? That was my original purpose, wasn't it? I will. We’re getting there. Let’s talk, first, though, about the way that the very structure of our schools, and the format of our days, form us to become eager defenders of the American Way.

(Music)

A school is awesome. I mean that in the original sense of the word, the sense laden with religious purpose. It is a place that inspires awe, like a cathedral in Europe. This is particularly true for children, even if, as an adult, you don’t see this, don’t feel it. Now, as an adult, when you look at a school, you probably just see some chunkily constructed building, like something from the pages of a textbook at the school of Soviet architecture.

A child, though, comes to that school in fear, the kind of fear we used to imagine would come over us on our way to judgment before God.

Now we would be held accountable. Now someone was going to look directly at us, peer into us, take charge of us and make decisions over which we have no control.

And we go into this huge building, and even if the school is small, its huge for a child, for a five-year-old.

And here, in the school, we will find ourselves in an environment unlike any we have known.

You grew up in a family. Mom held you on the couch as you watched TV. Dad talked with her about things you didn’t understand but you understood, implicitly, that you were a part of this, biologically, socially, intimately, you belonged here with these people, this family, this home, this warmth, with the other kids moving through the room, with the relatives on the phone. They gave you food, they washed your clothes, they played with you. Read you books, maybe, or took you on trips to the supermarket or the clothing store.

But then there comes a day when they bring you to this strange place, this cold building, not a house, not a home, a building, and they leave you there. With strangers. Your family may even laugh a little if you panic, if you cry in fear.

It is a rite of passage.

The Spartans waited until their children were seven years old to rip them away from their mothers’ ams and subject them to reality. We get started at five. Sometimes earlier.

Now, here, in this strange new world, is an environment unlike any we have ever known.

It is full of kids! Kids like you, your age and size. They are everywhere, running around. Some are crying, some are laughing. Many are silent in frightful anticipation.

Some people like to think that this is natural, this environment, that it is healthy for the child to experience this, and to be with masses of his or her peers. But it is in no way natural. Never, before the advent of SCHOOL, all caps, never was it normal for humans to be in peer-groups of people all the same age. And certainly not for children. If you go back to the earliest hunter-gatherers, of which some still remain to be studied, you see children in these primitive bands, but in a spectrum of ages. There is no pack of five year-olds, or ten year olds. Just as there is no pack of 20 year olds. Humans, since time immemorial, have lived and worked among people of a variety of ages.

Go back to the villages and small towns in which your more recent ancestors lived. Kids often ran together, but in groups with a wide range of ages, not just as a pack of 10-year olds.

Even now, take a look around at your workplace, at your job, and think about the people that you encounter. They are not all your exact same age. The only place this kind of grouping occurs, is in schools, the same places that get shot up and blown up and have sex rings with teachers and students and drugs, and you name it.

If an American male is to encounter non-combat violence in his lifetime, it will be in a school the majority of the time.

There is nothing natural about crowding kids, all the same age, into a group.

It still remains to me, though, to show that it is not simply unnatural, but also detrimental.

Now, the child eventually gets over it, that initial fear of entering the school, of being separated from his parents and left with strangers, strangers who, we should understand by now, frequently abuse those children. Well, most of the kids get over it.

We tell ourselves that it’s okay.

And we ignore the numerous children who are clearly scarred by the experience from the beginning, and never learn to adjust to school life.

Early on, we learn to exclude these people as weirdoes.

The rest of us, though, we’ve made the first cut. We’re doing great. We’ve learned to get along, to obey these strange adults given power over us, these teachers. To suddenly have our day divided into temporal portions and physical portions. This is recess, this is reading class, this is math. This is the classroom, this is the playground, this is the library, this is the principal’s office.

Some kids have a hard time making that distinction. They play in the classroom, they talk in the library.

For them, punishment.

And who is rewarded by this school system? Who benefits from this regimentation, this system of alienation? The child who sits still. The child who is quiet. The child who keeps his hands to himself. The child who doesn’t ask to go outside.

We are trained to be docile from day one. And, yes, some of you right now are patting yourselves on the back because you support this or that program that encourages kids to speak up, to be leaders, to question authority. It’s bullshit.

They’re just being trained to exhibit socially acceptable rebellion, nothing more. No one would dare allow them to actually question the very foundations of the school system, not the institution that employs so many of the local community’s populace and brings in government funds to the district.

Blinkers is the term used to describe the blinding devices that horsemen sometimes place around a horse’s eyes. It keeps the animal focused on the track ahead of them and keeps them from being distracted by their surroundings. School, and the entire educational legacy, functions as the blinders for each citizen. It keeps us on track, to contribute to society, to pay our taxes, to accept outrageous bureaucratic budgets and governmental cost overruns with just a shrug. The blinders are on. Don’t mind that stuff at the periphery of our vision.

And don’t listen to the people who call your attention to it.

And these instincts stay with us. For life. Now, it is okay to complain about high drug prices, or the national debt, or high insurance rates. And its even acceptable to promote certain solutions to these problems. But…

You know, in the medical world, there is a terminology for something called treating the symptoms. When someone has a raging infection, we can treat the symptoms. If it causes fever, we can give Tylenol or some such drug. If it causes pain, there are pain killers. But, if the patient is to have a good outcome, the doctor must focus primarily on treating the infection itself. The patient must get antibiotics. The source of the infection must be wiped out.

In our culture, it is only acceptable to treat the symptoms. To lower the national debt or mitigate the impact of high insurance prices or forgive student loans. But its not acceptable to question the national debt itself, to question the value of health insurance system, to question why college suddenly costs so much.

And I can hear the wheels turning in some of your heads as I say this. Even now, you are coming to the defense of at least one of these things, if not all. You’ve already started to explain to yourself why college prices HAVE to be higher, why we can’t get rid of government deficit spending. And God forbid you don’t value the importance of health insurance.

It is not permissible to even suggest that we must wipe out the infection itself, that the entire system is a disease which must be eliminated from our midst.

And so we come to our feet if someone genuinely questions defense policy, or the pharmaceutical industry, or the insurance racket.

Look, twenty-some years ago we all complained about the ever-rising costs of health insurance in this country, in the United States.

I remember getting my first teaching job in the late 90s. Health care insurance came with the job. If you are younger, you may not understand what I mean by this. I don’t mean that a certain amount was subtracted from my paychecks for the health insurance. It came free with the job.

When I went to apply the health insurance to my wife and two kids, I was appalled, appalled I tell you, that I had to pay $70/month for their health care policies.

And so people around the country complained about the ever-rising health care insurance prices.The solution we got: Now its a crime not to have a health insurance policy. But don’t think about it too long.

Don’t question it.

You’re probably not even capable. You’ve been trained to stop thinking about these things when they come up. They function like dogma in a religion: signposts that say, turn back, there be monsters here. Don’t think about these things any more. Open up the latest social media app instead and watch someone twerk for likes.

(Music)

Circling back, I mentioned earlier that, for some people, school seemed like something that had been around forever. A fundamental part of society. I am sure that some of us, when we imagine people in the past, like George Washington or Napoleon or William Shakespeare, we may wonder about their youth and ask what school was like for them, what did they do, what kind of grades did they get?

They didn’t get any grades… because school didn’t exist.

Did the word school exist? Yes. And school, of a sort, certainly existed. The idea of getting together and learning from a teacher existed, certainly. But school, as we know it, did not exist. Sitting in a classroom all day at a desk, being quiet, surrounded by peers of your exact same age, accepting whatever some stranger who was the teacher told you as gospel, this is relatively new.

Even in the early part of the last century, you didn’t see very many massive schools like the one I went to. In 1991, I graduated from a high school with 3,000 students in it. There were some 500 seniors graduating with me. My youngest sons go to a similarly-sized school.

But men and women of prior generations to mine, they often went to the old-fashioned one-room schoolhouses, with kids of all ages grouped together.

William Manchester, a historian, writer and veteran of the war in the Pacific in WWII, he tells us that there were over 140,000 one-room, one-teacher school houses in the 1930s in the US. Most Americans before WWII learned in such environments, even the more accomplished people. Astronauts, scientists, politicians, businessmen. Somehow these people grew up, weathered the depression, fought a world war and built virtually the entire infrastructure of our country, yet they didn’t have the privilege of going to a cookie-cutter, mass-production school with a football team and an oversized bureaucracy that would make East Germany envious.

So, you see, the idea that there are some “good old days” of traditional schooling, back when the kids sat in their desks and didn’t talk back to the teachers and nobody ever shot up the school, this idea is simply false. There never was such a time period because schools, as we know them, they just haven’t been around for that long. They are as new as the violence, drugs and sex that scandalize their history today.

Sure, even given what William Manchester tells us about the prevalence of small schools a century ago, at the beginning of last century, there were some large schools. The trend was beginning then. But right away there was trouble with them

A lot of people think of school massacres on a timeline that goes back to Columbine in 1999. Some slightly more astute folks will remember more obscure shootings from earlier that decade and think that it begins there. But actually, the deadliest attack ever on an American school? It was in 1927, at the Bath Consolidated School in Michigan. Some lunatic set off a bomb in the school and killed a total of 45 people, most of them school children.

You see, among the other terrible things about our schooling system, is it essentially creates a huge target, in each community, for every person that loses their mind and wants the world to know about it. That right there should give us pause the next time we vote on some debt-funded bill to build a huge school in our community. 

But it is not the twisted people on the outside that we should be most worried about when it comes to our kids’ schools. It is the twisted people on the inside of the school system that should have us most worried. Because schools create monsters. They create bullies, they create wimps, and they create manipulators and power mad teachers and administrators, and they create sexual predators and they create legions of teachers and other school staff members who begin their careers with the best of intentions but who quickly become completely burned out, fed up and disillusioned. And then they quit, and take their experience with them, and leave the job to the next unsuspecting dreamer, who will also soon be chewed up by the system and spit out.

And the solution is not another conference about burn out! I am so sick of that solution! The solution is not a pizza party. Even offering better pay and benefits is not going to solve any of these problems. That is just treating the symptoms. The disease, the beast that is the school system, this beast must must die. This beast threatening our community, we’ve been throwing steaks to it for decades now. It’s just getting stronger and more ravenous.

But I promised to talk about bullies. I hope that you can already see though, that bullies are not the problem.

In fact, bullies are as much the victim of the school system as the kids that they beat up.

(Music)

Probably a lot of us know about the perspective of the bully’s victim. We’ve either been victimized in school by the bully or we’ve seen a TV show or a movie about a bully, probably a narrative with some revenge theme. At the end of the film, the victim beats up the bully, or humiliates him, or wins his girl.

But let’s think about the bully’s perspective for a minute. Now, there are always exceptions, and there are a variety of ways to “bully” somebody, but let’s just take the classic bully, the kind that you see in the movies.

Now, the bully is typically not smart. He or she may depend on their victim for grades, to do their homework, write his or her essays in exchange for not being harassed, etc. He’s probably not a jock, either, though some stereotypical portrayals depict him as one. Jocks often have better things to do with their lives than go out of their way, anyway, to push around weaker kids. They’re busy with football practice and with being successful with women. Their opportunities in life also depend on keeping their nose clean at school and they need scholarships and playing time on the field.

I’m not saying those guys never bully anyone but, really, the typical bully that you hear about is neither smart nor athletic. He or she is often a loner, and not doing well in school. In general, to do well in school, either in terms of academics or athletics or what have you, you have to have a good home background. At least a decent home with a certain amount of stability even if it is not a wealthy home.

Our bully is not from that kind of home. No, typically the bullies, both male and female, come from crappy homes, where they either receive little attention or they are beaten or ridiculed. They had no one to read to them to sleep, no one to play games with. At best, the TV raised them. Now, perhaps, it is simply the internet or their phone raising them.

And then the future bully is sent to school.

Now, the primary measure of excellence in school is academics. There are other things, like athletics. But excellence in both these areas, and the approval of your instructors and coaches, requires the kind of home backing that the bully does not have. And, to begin with, probably the bully is just not that smart.

Now, it has become acceptable to ridicule bullies, or their archetypes, anyway, for not being bright, not being accepted. But this really just a case of punching down, a phenomenon I see more and more often it seems like. I mean, is it the bully’s fault that he wasn’t born as bright as some others?

I remember the no child left behind law of some 20 plus years ago. The idea behind this law was to enforce in schools a certain amount of child advancement, demonstrable through standardized tests in school settings. And schools that could not show that that their students were meeting standards were punished financially.

The underlying idea, that all kids would be average or above, is so moronic that I still don’t understand how it was so widely accepted. It is one of those memories that fills me with despair for humanity, sometimes. I mean, the bell curve exists. If 100 people take a test, they can’t all fit into the top 50 slots. They can’t all be average or above average. They can’t. Reality doesn’t work that way.

In any endeavor, half of us are always going to do less well than the other half. We can all get a participation trophy but half of us are always going to be dumber than the other half. But it is only in the school where this kind of intelligence is used as a measure of your quality. In real life, we care about people in our lives, and trust people, without regard for their ability to pass a standardized test. Some of the most important people in my life, the people with the most integrity, the most strength of character, were people whom I could probably run circles around if it came down to solving trigonometry problems. But they are better people than me in so many ways.

It is the school which celebrates or victimizes people based on their academic performance.

So the future bully is already behind in the count when he arrives at school, on that terrifying first day. And now, to make matters worse, maybe the bully just isn’t naturally docile. Maybe he or she isn’t inclined to sit still and be quiet and follow arbitrary orders from strange adults.

You know, like all of our ancestors for millions of years.

So, this is really a no-win situation for the future bully in this example. Not born with a lot of brains, doesn’t come from a good home, and not naturally inclined to be obedient or submissive.

The bully is doomed to fail. And he or she is doomed to fail for 12 years. It’s not like this is just something he can bull his way through, put his head down and grit his teeth. It’s a five year old, for God’s sake, with below average intelligence, who doesn’t have support at home, and yet who is gifted with all the natural inclinations that our ancestors have possessed for thousand or millions of years, the inclination toward movement, toward touching things, the inclination to run, to climb, to fight. These are all natural and good traits, good inclinations that kept us alive for millions of years and now this child is supposed to overcome all this biology, to sit still and to do what he is told.

And so he or she faces 12 years of hell, of suppression, of detention, 12 years of desiring nothing more than escape all day while he is at school. Thrown to the lions, the academic lions, in an environment in which the only things rewarded are the very things which he or she cannot excel at.

And some of you still aren’t listening. It’s so frustrating. You’re thinking to yourself that he can improve, get better at academics, or learn to follow instructions. But, first, he cannot really improve academics. Yes, all people can improve but it is simply a fact that, in this competitive environment in which we have placed out kids, half of them will always be below average. In a graduating class of 500, somebody is #1, and somebody is #500. You can’t escape that. Every year, a certain number of people are born with less than average intelligence. Life will always be harder for them than it may be for you. And we make it harder by prizing the very thing they are weakest in, instead of valuing their love, their dedication, their tenacity, their moral integrity.

And we want them to learn how to follow instructions? To be compliant? Complacent? Is this even an improvement, when we really think about it? Maybe, instead of asking ourselves how to get the bullies to behave, maybe we should be asking ourselves if we are even teaching our kids the right ideas.

Have we really been doing this to our kids for generations now? Separating them from their parents, sending them to strangers, forcing them to compete in an academic version of the Hunger Games? Trapped inside four walls, listening to someone drone on about one topic or another for seven or eight hours a day? Medicating them so that they will sit still and behave?

Maybe we’re medicating the wrong kids. Maybe the ones that like to just sit and listen, sit and listen, maybe they need medicine.

(Music)

You ever notice how, whenever we speak about problems in school, there’s always this one solution that comes up? It’s like a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s probably the same guy that stands up for high insurance premiums at dinner parties that comes up with this one:

The solution is always more school, right?

You ever notice that? We need more school. Longer school days. Extended school year. More time in class. Afterschool study. Summer school. And its actually more insidious than that, because even if you’re against longer school years, they extended the school year anyway, without even telling you.

Let me explain. When I was a kid, we had generous windows of time between classes. You could go to your locker, shoot the breeze with a friend, stop by another classroom, run an errand, etc. At lunchtime, we had time to drive off campus to get some fast food and get back in time for fifth period.

When I became a high school teacher, many years later, the administration noticed that kids were getting into trouble between classes. It was a small school, compared to the one from which I’d graduated, and kids only had five minutes anyway to get between classes. But clearly that was too much time, because some kids were causing problems during those intervals. So the time was shortened to two minutes, which is just insane. I mean, talk about stress. Kids had no time to stay after class and discuss things with the teacher, let alone, oh no, talk with a friend on the way to geometry. God forbid the kids should socialize or act human, right?

With no time to go to their lockers between classes anymore, kids had to march double-time between classrooms with all of their monolithic textbooks in their overworked backpacks.

And remember recess from when you were a kid? That’s gone in many grade schools. Gotta keep those flourishing young minds at their desks.

In some places, the whole idea of kids going off campus in high school is something of a fable from ages past. And the kids are shuttled from one class to the next with all possible haste. And so, all those minutes eliminated from recess and lunch and in-between classes add up to hours and days over the course of a year. The school year got longer and you didn’t even know it.

And, you may even find yourself in knee-jerk agreement with this. After all, you don’t want those kids getting up to no good or hurting or harassing one another, right? So its better to remove all forms of independence and just shuffle them around like pawns on a chessboard, moving like cogs in machine, thoughtlessly, but most importantly…safely.

We love that word. Safe. Safety. Safely. Safe environments. Safe from bullies. Safe from each other. And we are willing to sacrifice every single semblance of independence and freedom in order to preserve our fragile children like someone carrying eggs out of the supermarket on his way to the car.

And, yes, this is understandable. I don’t want anything to happen to my kids, either. I don’t want them bullied.

But is it worth extending their infancy in this way just in order to keep them from getting hurt? Or simply being offended?

But, really, anyway, is the school, in any manifestation, is school really a good idea?

Because the end result of all our efforts to make school safer, is that we are raising our kids, like prisoners, to be prisoners.

Because that’s the goal right? To make them prisoners, just like us. We want them to get a good job. That’s the goal of most schooling, right? To make them like us, but better. Well, we, you and I, we wake up in box, our house or our apartment, our air-conditioned boxes, and then we get into mobile boxes, boxes with wheels, our cars, hopefully they’re air-conditioned too, and we drive for maybe an hour to another box, our workplace. And we stay in that box for 8-10 hours, and then we get back into the mobile boxes that take us back to the first box.

Eventually, its all over, and they put us in box and bury it.

And with our schools, we are training our kids to just repeat that nightmare.

I mean, how many people really enjoy high school, anyway? There is a select bunch, yes, but most kids don’t get to be on the football team or be a pretty cheerleader and go to parties and have the time of their life. Most kids plod their way through high school as the last leg of the slavery that started many years before and they DON’T miss it when they’re out. They might miss certain friends, certain teachers, yeah, sure, but only in the same way that ex-cons might miss certain acquaintances made in prison, or certain prison guards that were kinder than the others. Ask a veteran if he or she misses their buddies from the war and they’ll say yes, but do they miss the shooting or the explosions? Do they miss the long periods of boredom, the dull routines of military life? Just because we meet cool people along the way does not make the suffering worth it.

For what exactly are we preparing kids with this school experience, anyway? Every one always talks about how kids need school for socialization purposes, or to get them ready to work with others. But what job environment is even like school? I’ve already established that the social aspects of our work environments are nothing like school. We work with people of all ages, people with different interests and specialties. For the most part, we don’t just sit in desks and fill out worksheets.

And, when you think about it, which jobs were the worst ones in your life? The ones that were like high school! The jobs that had cliques and rivalries and in-groups and out-groups and all the petty crap that kids inflict on one another, usually with the implicit approval of the school staff.

So, why are we going to school? Why are we sending our kids there? Just because our parents did it to us? Why do we put them through this miserable competition, academic, athletic and romantic competition with a horde of kids their own age?

Do we medicate our kids because of what happens to them in school, or do we medicate them so that they can go to school? Either way, would our kids be healthier without school, without suffering through this incarnation of injustice for 12 years?

(Music)

I haven’t reserved this conclusion for solutions, nor have I saved any for the next episode in this sequence about schooling.

I don’t have any solutions.

The following episodes in this sequence will be about some of the other problems that our modern schools face, such as sexual predation, alcohol and drugs, bloated bureaucracies, and more.

In the very next episode, I want to look most deeply at the obverse side of the bullying coin. Instead of worrying about bullies as a side effect of the school system, what about its main product? The perfectly formed student, who gets good grades and cheers at games and obeys his teachers. Is this a good thing? A human being turning out this way?

I don’t want to end on a note of despair, but I also have no suggestions on how to solve these dilemmas. Now, I am fond of the idea of homeschooling, and have done it with my kids for two years, but I am also a former teacher with a garage full of curriculum and lots of experience, so that’s not necessarily an easy-to-apply solution for the average parent.

I’m not sure what we need but we need one of those out-of-the-box solutions they’re always talking about. To get all of us out of the boxes. Not just the kids, but all of us. Cause we are all, now, by the 21st century, we are all products of these schools, and this mentality,

maybe that’s why we can’t find our way out, like a lot of prisoners that earn their freedom, they get out and then commit a crime and get caught on purpose,

Because we feel safer in our boxes.

(Music)