No Place for Children

An edited version of this article appeared in the Chicago Reader.
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Prisons are not the ideal venues for education. Therefore, it is not a great idea to turn schools into prisons. As a corollary, treating children as if they were hardened criminals does not imbue them with the joy of learning. If you brutalize students and treat them with contempt, they will not buckle down to their work with renewed vigor and enthusiasm. On the contrary, they will start to react to school the same way that prisoners react to prison. Which is to say, they will want to get. out.

In short, schools should not be prisons. Surely that shouldn’t be controversial. And yet, controversial it is, as Annette Fuentes documents in her dismally depressing book, Lockdown High: When the School House Becomes a Jail House. Since the 1980s, and especially since the Columbine shootings in 1999, the U.S. has experienced a rolling moral panic, sparking increasingly draconian security measures in schools across the country.

Fuentes’ prose is fairly flat, and structurally her book is investigative journalism boilerplate — description of outrageous exemplary incident, generalized problem illuminated by incident, report from convention devoted to evil-doers who profit from generalized problem, highlighting of inspirational activists promulgating inspirational solutions. But the very banality of the form adds to the despair. Metal detectors, random drug testing, SWAT teams busting kids’ heads, zero tolerance, suspensions, racism…it all tromps by in a numbing parade of idiocy and futility. Violent homicides in school are vanishingly rare; study after study shows that kids are less likely to be harmed in school than at home; study after study shows that violence in schools has been falling since the early ‘90s; study after study shows that heightened security measures do little if anything to reduce violence or drug use. And yet, the militarization of schools goes on, oblivious to argument or logic. If you didn’t know better, after reading this book you might come to the conclusion that, as a society, we are looking for an excuse to torture our children.

Indeed, Fuentes provides a certain amount of evidence that schooling has always been about torture. Her first chapter, titled “A Brief History of School Violence,” begins, not with school shootings, but with a discussion of corporal punishment. As she notes:

“as long as there have been public schools…there has been chaose and control, crime and punishment in the classroom…. The rhythm of switch and ferule — even the cat-o’-nine-tails — provided the meter by which the early schoolmaster or –mistress imparted the three Rs and obedience to misbehaving youngsters.” (page 1)

Fuentes adds that such violence involved not only teacher’s beating students, but often students fighting back; older boys tossing the teacher out of the classroom was almost a ritualized right of passage. Thus, from the first, schools in America trafficked in, and taught, violence.

This violence, according to Fuentes, was often entangled with class and racial animosities. She points out that the first compulsory schooling laws in 1852 were aimed at dumping the children of Boston Irish immigrants into reform schools — the connection between prison and school written into law from the very beginning. And of course, in the 60s and later, “school violence” was most often associated with racial tensions around desegregation. Fuentes doesn’t even mention one of the most shocking incidents, the Kanawha County textbook wars of 1974, in which the adoption of controversial reading materials led irate rural West Virginians to bomb school buildings and shoot at school buses.

Fuentes’ aim in highlighting this history is, I think, to show that violence is not in fact on the rise in schools. Kids aren’t worse than they used to be; school aren’t more dangerous than they used to be. The increasingly hysterical approach to security in schools is, therefore, not a response to a real problem, but rather a self-reinforcing exercise in ideological hysteria.

Fuentes hopes that parent activism can help end that hysteria, which in turn will mean an end to the lockdown high phenomena. She points hopefully to examples like Chicago Public School’s decision in 2006 to move away from zero tolerance policies. Chicago, she notes, is “modeling positive change.”

It seems like I’m always hearing that Chicago schools are at the forefront of something or other. As a Chicago father, I suppose this should make me happy. And yet, somehow, my warm fuzzy feeling is limited. And not just because of the incident Fuentes relates about the five-year-old being taken out of a CPS school in handcuffs.

The problem is, the history of discipline and violence which Fuentes discusses does not give me a lot of hope. On the contrary, it leads me to suspect that the lockdown high phenomena is a not an aberration, but a logical extension of longtime public school philosophy. School has always been a prison, though it is, as George Bernard Shaw says, “in some respects more cruel than a prison….. In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don’t understand and don’t care about….” Nor, to update Shaw slightly, are prisoners subjected to unending, compulsive, mindless testing. Fuentes presents evidence that schools are relatively safe places for student’s bodies, but she doesn’t address the issue of what they do to their souls.

I had initially hoped to send my child to CPS because…well, it’s free, mostly, and within convenient walking distance. What dissuaded me was not the story about the five-year-old in handcuffs (which I hadn’t heard) but two other factors. First, most Chicago public schools don’t have recess. Second, when I went online to read about Murray Language Academy, the school my son was thinking of entering, the first thing I saw on the website was that all students (presumably meaning kindergartners too) would have homework every night. This was presented as being a good thing.

I’m not sure that even Fuentes would consider a lack of recess or ubiquitous homework to be aspects of the lockdown high phenomena. But to me it all seems to be of a piece. If you were kind, you could say that public schools have always struggled to balance the desire to control kids with the desire to teach them. If you were more cynical, you might say that the balancing has never been all that difficult, because the desire to teach has always been easy to stifle.

So my seven-year-old does not go to CPS. Instead he goes to a Waldorf private school where they have no metal detectors, no hand-cuffs, no homework, and two recesses a day. I’m lucky to be in a financial position to send him there; obviously, for many people, public schools are the only option. For their sake, we as a society have, as Fuentes indicates, a moral obligation to roll back the worst excesses of lockdown high. Even if we manage to do that, though, our public schools in general, and Chicago schools in particular, will still be no place for children.

6 thoughts on “No Place for Children

  1. (Recycling my earlier comments from when you’d earlier posted a link to this story…)

    Excellent piece on “Lockdown High”; following that theme, might I highly recommend Matt Groening’s 1987 “School is Hell,” where Bongo, the “unruly” misfit student, regularly gets tied up by school authorities, and asks, “Why is school like a prison?”

    Some cartoonistic moaning and Groening:

    http://mharing.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/school-is-hell.jpg

    http://www.futurama-area.de/LiH/OComics/10.gif

    http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_pVCiTA86umk/S3SvKBVhi8I/AAAAAAAADco/aw8TWkvYjZM/s400/life-in-hell.jpg

    On a lighter vein: http://www.djp3.net/codexperductum/2008/01/23/school_is_hell_9_types_of_college_teachers700pix.jpg

    http://signpostings.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/school-is-hell.jpg?w=720&h=784

  2. I grew up in a racially diverse, mostly middle class suburb with a large public housing project on one end. The township as a whole was 50% white, but the public high school was only 30% white, because concerned parents (with means) would yank their kids before they reached HS.

    It really wasn’t a bad school, but it was overcrowded, and there was definitely a control mentality in place. You needed a pass to leave the lunch room. The bathrooms were locked at all times and you needed to show ID and a signed pass to use one. (Thoughout HS, I’d avoid drinking water so I wouldn’t have to ask to leave class use the bathroom, and I always had a headache. “The supreme court finds that students have no constitutional right to use the bathroom during class” was on a plaque hung up in my social studies classroom.) There weren’t any metal detectors, but there was a lot of security, and kids who got into fights were taken away by police.

    After freshman year, a new Principal came in who was less afraid of the student body and for the first time, we had school assemblies and rallies during the school day. Every SINGLE time, there’d be at least one fight, until the novelty of having our schedules disrupted wore off.

    And there was definitely racism. In four years, I don’t think I was ever stopped in the hallway and asked to show my hall pass. My black friends were stopped all the time, even the honors kids.

    Anyway, I just thought I’d weigh in with my personal experience. The thing is, when you relax the restrictions a bit you DO get more trouble, at least in the short term. People can’t believe they are being given freedom, and they don’t know how to handle themselves when no one is monitoring and controlling them. But it passes. A high school “generation” is only four years and HS culture can change completely in just a couple. Having the new Principlal made a huge difference for us.

  3. Stories like that just make me want to bang my head against a wall in frustration…and your high school experience doesn’t even sound all that awful, considering.

    I feel like, or maybe just hope, that someday in the future people will look back on how we treated our young people the way people today look back on child labor.

  4. It really wasn’t too awful! I think there’s less racial tension in Central NJ (where I grew up) compared to, say, Michigan (where I went to school) because all of the “in between” minorities, like Asians and Latinos, even Africans from Africa, who bridge the gap between Black and White.

  5. …For a look at schools in a civilized country, the latest “Smithsonian” magazine has the article. “A+ for Finland”: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html .

    In all fairness, Finland is not a “house divided” in terms of racial and economic polarization.

    And America’s attitude glorifies competitiveness (and means the world must be divided between winners and losers) rather than cooperation; therefore parents want their kids to be winners, and at least subconsciously wishing competing children to lose.

  6. I just found out about this group ALEC, a corporate trade group that writes prefabricated pro-business bills for state legislators to propose. Here’s a section on the “Alec Exposed” site about privatizing education. http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Public_Education

    My caveat would be– I’ll wager Finland is moving in this direction too. This is just what modernity looks like.

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