NORMALIZED VIOLENCE AND MALIGNANT NEGLECT IN THE SCHOOLS

The unwillingess to address the downward spiral of educational quality in the classroom and the increasing contagion of violence in school environments, seems to reflect our utilitarian, self-serving neglect of any institutional issues or community concerns that do not compromise market efficiency and prevalent political or pedagogical ideology. Insofar as the usual crop of high school graduates and dropouts seems not to stall productivity in the private sector, and insofar as further meaningful increase in educational investment is not seen to improve economic productivity nor secure political advantage for the power elite, the necessary revaluations of and essential improvements in the educational arena will not be forthcoming. Yet the violence and indignity of American secondary education will continue.

Secondary education in particular will continue to graduate the usual batch of non-problematic students while the problematic students, 30% of the population in conservative estimates, will fall by the wayside, dropping out, or at worse, being victims of terminal student-on- student violence. Administrations will continue to play the role of ‘violence managers’ allowing teen culture to work out many of the conflicts in the schools through a policy of “survival of the fittest” and balance-of-power cliques and gangs. Failing that, they will impose various punitive measures which, though merely repressive, serve the purpose of controlling some of the more unruly and rebellious. It’s a penological approach to institutional education.

The real issue of educating youth about the reality of the world in which they live and suffer is systematically displaced, denied or distorted. Thus students are trained in formal skills of questionable value in the real world beyond the job, and entertained with “social issues” that are whitewashed in censored, sophomoric curricula that are embarrassing at best and insulting at worst. An education that remediates the emotional and social issues they deal with daily is no part of curriculum content. Rather than the content of curricula including the experience of the lives they live, they study life all too abstractly and as something which will be lived in the future. Life issues are studied as if they are external to the events occurring in their own lives. I’m personally no longer really sure whether more violence is done to those students forced out of the system by bullying or boredom or to those who remain, lulled into mindless conformity and social acceptability.

Of course the ‘tragic fruits’ of school violence in general show up in the death statistics which are surely unacceptable. Unfortunately, we do not make the connection between the school culture of violence and the most tragic of its fruits, namely, shootings and stabbings. School shootings are not really the worst of school violence. School shootings are the symptoms of the worst violence that precedes and causes the shootings. The shootings are the consequence of the hidden violence that daily cultivates defensiveness, aggressiveness and finally acting out. The source of acting out is in the violence born of suffering that is normalized as the “gowing pains” of the teen years. Such normalization of pain and violence is itself born of the misdirection of the students pains and problems and the mal-administration of the social ethos of the school in what amounts to a malignant neglect. Such neglect is the presumably benign permissiveness which “lets the kids learn to work it out for themselves” thus excusing the adults from being adults and educators. Such malignant neglect is a betrayal of the children's childhood and a forsaking of adult responsibility to nurture and guide the young.

A recent Oprah program visited a high school in which a group of some 60 students volunteered to discuss and deal with the hostilities and pain of being a high school student. In a group setting, the students described in emotion-filled confessions various forms of violence that suffused the school environment. They shared the anger, hatred and fear that permeated their lives and marginalized what space remained for learning. Oprah's guest hosts who worked with schools to help students disclose and resolve their pain and conflicts showed how with various simple transformative techniques it was possible to reconcile and resolve the hostilities between students and the painful feelings within students. Seemingly, an administration, faculty and staff, apparently operating at a level of maturity not much above that of the students, despite their education and training, were not prepared to detect and deal with their excruciating pain. The Oprah team was, however, able to do so in one short day.

My suspicion that the maturity level of the educators was not sufficiently developed to deal effectively with the students was sparked by recent events near my hometown of North Tonawanda, N.Y. In the neighboring community of Tonawanda, a gang of boys consecrating themselves “The Fresh Boys” gang, have become somewhat of a nuisance as gangs will be. Apparently unable to diffuse the puerile problematic assemblage, the Mayor of Tonawanda recently threatened the boys that they should know that “We own the town. You don’t.” If that isn’t a red cape in front of the bull, I don’t know what is. Kudos go out to the Mayor for having just descended to the level of The Fresh Boys letting them intuitively know that the impotent Mayor and ineffectual school and community are really perplexed and don’t have a clue what to do with them. Apropo a dysfunctional community, the “authorities” of this town threaten and, in effect, bully them in return. So the circle of pain and violence will probably continue.

Rather than the adults in Tonawanda recognizing in the boys behavior a plea for meaning, relationship and leadership, the Mayor reacts with impotent bravado seeing only a threat rather than the opportunity for instructive intervention and the opportunity for teaching and learning. Rather than taking creative action the mayor reacts with the same behavior as the boys. The standard plethora of excuses which are waiting in the wings from the various segments of the community for failing to deal with the gang will not fly. The community needs to acknowledge that the community itself is not working. Resistant, reactive behavior, habitual in nature and based in anger and fear, is hardly creative let alone ameliorative action. The gang of boys is a red flag, a plea for help to grow, mature and participate in some sphere of creativity and self-expression that has not been forthcoming. We all must ask ourselves how the wonderment so easily experienced through the eyes of youth can be allowed to rot into the disillusionment expressible only through rebellion, violence and destruction.

When students form gangs, cliques and marginal identity groups such as “heads,” “Goths,” “trenchcoat mafia,” or are passively marginalized as nerds, geeks, fags, etc., they are seeking ways to fill the void of self-understanding. They seek ways to deal with what they don’t understand or what upsets them emotionally. They seek bridges beyond these social and psychological impasses. The abusive school ethos, this subculture of inciviliity and cruelity, in short, has not provided these bridges, at least not in sufficient number or quality. Surely it is time for a virtual Nietzschean revaluation of all values that have led to this dismal if not nihilistic educational cul de sac. Why allow the schools to continue to be symptoms expressing the refusal of the community to deal with its own immaturity if not inhumanity? Ways are available to deal with hatred, fear, anger and violence. Why allow these blocks to metamorphose into personality deformation and social sclerosis only because the community itself refuses to continue to learn and transform.