I recently watched a YouTube video that was a reaction to the great Thomas Sowell talking about the education system. It hit on one of the irrational beliefs that I think we all carry, to some extent, and since I’ve watched multiple videos on the subject and read a book or 2 that was tangentially related to it, I now deem myself one of the most qualified to discuss it.
The video that the YouTubers were reacting to was one in which Sowell goes into his stances on the education system which you can also find, in some capacity, in all of his books. The part that struck me the most, however, was the very brief portion of the video that addressed unruly kids or ‘Classroom Management’ as I’ve come to learn that it is called(via the ‘intro to teaching course’ I took the summer before last before deciding that I didn’t want to do that and, instead, continued floating around in my career wilderness).
In general, Sowell criticizes the refusal to discipline unruly students in the classroom; specifically, by separating them from the rest of the students. I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground by alleging that a common complaint coming from our educators the last couple decades has stemmed from their inability and/or unwillingness to do anything about their problem children (you can debate which one of those it is [inability or unwillingness] with your folks over Easter dinner). Rather than remove disruptive students, we have, instead sought to keep them in the classroom and use highly sophisticated methods of social engineering such as ‘constantly reminding the students of the classroom rules and expectations’ or ‘classroom quite time’ to address these behaviors.
In addition, we’ve created a list of pre-requisites longer than my arm (well, I have long arms, probably longer than your arm) that teachers must complete before they are allowed to actually dole out any discipline. And if a teacher does fill out all the necessary paperwork to administer corrective action, forget the notion of sending the disruptive student to the principle’s office to face punishment. Instead, they are sent to their counselor to have a “deep dive” into why the student is feeling the way they are feeling and how we might be able to help them; after, which, the teacher will receive a report that will include “ways they can improve their classroom for the student.” All of this makes the effort to do something about an unruly student hardly worth it.
The reasons for this dysfunctional relationship between teacher and student are numerous, and there are no shortage of blogs, I’m guessing, on the internet that will provide you those. But one of the simplest reasons is one that Sowell indirectly touches on; the focus should never really be on what the disruptive student ‘deserves’, but rather what the CLASS ‘deserves’. This train of thought we find ourselves in that poopoos the “what’s best for the class sentiment” as simply ‘giving teachers an excuse to punish students’ is, I believe, extremely destructive. Not only does it have the potential to manifest a ‘teacher vs. student’ perception where one might not have otherwise been, but it completely removes “what’s best for the class” as a reason to do anything for a teacher and pretends it doesn’t exist. Is it any wonder that no education is taking place when education is secondary to feelings and appearances? Not to me.
We’ve all just adopted this ridiculous notion that once a kid gets kicked out of class, they are summarily destined to a life of crime and poverty. That if we separate the trouble makers, the trouble makers die. And not just the extreme case of separation. We’ve taken it so far as to not even allow any language at all that may shine a negative light on the student. So anything you say to one, you must say to all. Yikes. So, no ass-chewings and very little consequential punishment is what the disruptors receive. It’d be easy to see where environments like this may actually create more unruly students. And any teacher will tell you, it only takes a couple to derail the entire class.
And why do we all just accept this belief? Why do we all just agree that negatively disciplining a student will end with them in jail? The speed with which we have dispensed with any negative consequences for destructive behavior is mind-boggling. One might be able to make a convincing argument that the capitulation to harmful behavior only serves to fill up our prisons, not empty them. How do we think that we arrived at negative reinforcement as a primary means of discipline in our civilization in the first place? Was it merely due to laziness from past civilizations? Indifference? Self-centeredness? Am I supposed to believe that in the millenia since humans have been on earth, compassion for children only developed in the last 40 years? Or, perhaps, might negative reinforcement be the MOST compassionate method of molding children? Could it be that we learn most, and quickest, from pain and failure? This is more than obvious for adults, no? Or do we just need to re-hash the last 5,000 years of human existence and get a ‘professional’ with letters after his/her name to tell us what history has taught us before we will accept it? And, from what I can tell, this isn’t just a question to be answered in education, but parenting, and criminal justice as well. IDK, I guess that’s the conservative in me talking.
Anyway, the last 4 paragraphs were my long-winded and ham-fisted cliff notes on the Classroom Management issue in education while what I really set out to address was the ideology behind the belief that all teachers should have some type of magic bullets when it comes to making kids behave. We tend to believe that the kids should remain in the classroom and made to behave through some type of “advanced training” for the teachers, I guess. And it’s not just teachers that we believe should be experts on coercion, I first recognized this irrational belief in the political sphere circa 2012.
Around that time, the most common complaint in our public discourse at the time was “partisan politics.” While everything is always awful, at that time, everything was awful because “nobody wants to get anything done” in Washington. “Both sides” are so partisan and congress is the worse thing ever! “There’s no bi-partisanship!” “Where’s the bi-partisanship of old!” “A Do-Nothing Congress, worse than the days of Truman!” Admittedly, I had just begun my foray into politics, so I was not, yet, aware of just how much media controlled the narrative on such issues. However, even today, after having obtained the knowledge on media manipulation myself and the mask being removed on their practices for large swaths of the country, when I see, today, the approval of congress constantly hold at just above the number of dollars in my bank account I think it’s safe to say that perhaps they weren’t lying about that general feeling nearly a decade ago.
And, at the time, it always struck me as odd to attack congress. See, this was the era of ‘comment sections’ on the internet, (at least for me) and what I read then was very similar to the things you hear today. Every poster considered themselves a “moderate” and decried the ability for congress to agree on anything. And so it seemed, to me, that these people were all suggesting that congress was not representing the country that they served. I mean, why complain about Congress for doing what they were sent to do?…. unless they weren’t. We elect the House every 2 years and the Senate every 4, right? So, presumably, they should have a pretty good idea of what their constituencies want. But, clearly, that’s not happening so sayeth the multitudes in the CNN.com comment sections. Apparently, all of these people get elected making certain promises and then change their minds once the evil “lobbyists” show up with their stacks of cash or promises of riches to sway these politicians away from their original promises.
Now, I’m not saying that the above scenario is not, or was not, ever a concern. I could be convinced. But, to me, I wondered if there might be some way to test the theory. It seemed, to me, that what people were crying for was compromise(I think today they call it ‘legislating’? maybe ‘governing’?). I mean, what is the lack of bi-partisanship if not a lack of compromise, right? Lawmakers were unable to reach any compromises and this was very bad in the eyes of the electorate. So, could there be a way to find out just how badly Americans wanted compromise, and what those compromises might be? And could that be done on my laptop from my lazy-boy, while Breaking Bad plays in the background and actually commanding most of my attention? Well, kinda!
The thing about the internet is that thoughts and ideas have a way of permeating through society very quickly. The unique ones, good or bad, are usually signal boosted via the algorithms provided us by our friends in Silicon Valley. And in my brilliant mind, I deduced that, with the number of people that hate congress for their failure to “reach across the aisle,” I would be able to find a smattering of common sense compromises that both sides could agree on, or at least have equally bad feelings of. HA!
2 hours into such an endeavor, you begin to suspect that you might be the most naïve individual on the planet. 2 days into it, you feel as though you need to go back to 6th grade and start life all over again. How could you have ever possibly believed such a thing??
Suffice it to say that the gridlock in Washington was the best of all possibilities that could’ve/should’ve taken place had Congress truly “represented” their constituencies. I need not give you a crash course on the conversational etiquette of the internet, but I think it’s safe to say, based on my half-hearted research, that there was NO proposed compromises available that anyone would like. And, I don’t mean “well that gives me some of what I want and some of what they do” type compromises. Every single issue and proposal was 110 degrees of pure evil, worthy of death by firing squad. It didn’t matter the issue. I remember, at the time, we were all yelling about Immigration, Social Security, Gun Control, Global Warming, and, on the right, The National Debt(hmm).
On every issue, any compromise by the right meant they either wanted dead children, dead grandma, a dead planet, or were racists (not a lot of play by the left on the National Debt articles). And I don’t mean to be the dumbest man on the planet, I knew there would be a lot of screeching on each issue. I just severely underestimated the amount. Not only was I surprised by the huge amount of screeching, but I was equally surprised by just how few bi-partisan suggestions I found. There weren’t, really, many at all.
At the time, the Gang of 8 bill was in discussions and those heading the effort were being excoriated by both sides, obviously online, but also in the media; primarily by the right. I could never understand this at the time (due to my belief that the world began when I did), but it seemed to me that, if this rather simple, common sense, type of legislation couldn’t be agreed upon by virtually anybody, then what hope did we have. Nevertheless, the same names you’d see calling every right winger an istophobe in the comments section of one article would pop up under the latest Congress-bashing article to demand bi-partisanship. And this is where I first asked the question: ‘What in the world causes us to expect our politicians to have some magic pill to get the other side to do what I want?’
Brian Regan had an excellent example of my reaction to this notion in his recent Netflix special. He talks about how he thinks every umpire should be allowed to give 1 shoulder shrug per game. For all the close plays that umps get screamed at for, this was his solution. He gives the sound effects of a guy sliding into home with the ump standing over the catcher to see whether he got the tag on him and after the slide, the umpire just looks up and shrugs his shoulders. He says “I don’t know. Cloud of dust and a heigh-ho, what do you want from me? You think I saw something in that billow you didn’t?”
His point, of course, being “what makes you think I possess some type of magical training that makes me more capable than you to figure this out?”
This is how I imagine politicians to feel when they see these poll numbers or hear people complain about them not getting the other side to do what we want them to do. Like, what do we expect? ‘That person over there wants to kill you because they disagree with you, and you can’t agree on anything with them, right? So you expect me, over here, whom you voted for cuz I said some stuff you agreed with, to get that person and the person they voted for to agree to do what you want to do, and nothing else? Insane. Politicians aren’t social scientists. Which doesn’t matter because even all the social science in the world is mostly incapable of coercing behavior; especially among large groups.
By my estimation, the criticism against congress for not accurately representing its people was dead wrong. Congress was representing the country accurately. Frighteningly accurately, in fact. There may have been a day when Americans were willing to compromise and act in good faith, but by 2012ish, those days were in the past. And they were doing exactly what their constituencies would’ve done; ‘my way or no way’. I still believe this is the case today. Congress is a mirror held up to our country. And we don’t like it. Not because of them, but because of who they reveal us to be. And I do think it’s a bit of a change in us, but also a dissolution of the fake us that existed in the past.
Anyway, I could add another 1000 words on how this sentiment is related to our illogical reverence for the social sciences, but I’ve already over-stayed my welcome.
The point of all my babbling is that it’s easy to observe an illogical expectation that someone is capable of making people do what you want them to do. We expect it. We expect our politicians to get what I want done how we want it; no questions or compromises. And we expect our educators to educated all of our children expertly and equally; without questions or negative reinforcement. We expect that there is some training that all professionals go through that should prepare them to do this. We ignore the fact that, throughout the history of man-kind, there has never been a civilization of people as pliable as we believe people are today. And, even if there were, we don’t possess 1/1000th of the knowledge necessary to take advantage of it the way we imagine that we do. There are reasons that we do things the way we do them. Not knowing what those reasons are, exactly, does not mean they don’t exist, and should illicit caution and uncertainty. Not certainty and rigidity. Even worse, in many cases, we DO know why things are done the way they are, we have no proven alternative, and we insist on abandoning them anyway! (*cough Climate Change)
There are no Magic Pills. Figure it out.
AgingMillenial 