Schools, Prisons, Mental Institutions (Sometimes, All At Once)

My first teaching experience was in a preschool.

At the same time, I was studying social ecology ( a dressed-up form of sociology, just to make UC Irvine a slightly more unique and impressive school). The school's emphasis was on the relationship between human beings and their environments, both social and physical. I noticed how there were three major organizations that socialized people.

Schools, prisons, and mental institutions. I used to think that it was interesting, if not quaint, how much these three institutions had in common.

The lead teachers and I enjoyed telling little people where to go, what to do, how to behave. We also felt pretty proud of ourselves arbitrating their petty disputes. We felt useful, doing a good thing for those good little people.

Schools, prisons, mental institutions -- state agencies that regulate the behavior of a select group for purposes of socialization.

Granted, minors, micreants, and madmen need direction, or in some cases they need to be sequestered from free people in a free society.

Yet of these three groups, young people have the greatest capacity, greatest incentive to grow into fully-fledged individuals.

Yes, preschoolers need a lot of direction. But where are the parents? They are in a better position to guide their children, rear them into maturity than the state, which has an abysmal track record when it comes to preparing young people for the future.

Sadly, every year public schools become more and more like prisons or mental institutions.

Well, they already are prisons, in a sense. Students are required by law to show up, in rooms that they do not want to be in. If they try to leave, security personnel catch them, write them a truancy ticket, and they have to appear before a judge. I met a number of students in a local high school who had been sent to Los Padrinos for truancy, failure to appear in court, and even for violating probation after a court appearance.

Students are housed arbitrarily by age in bare rooms, many of which are barely furnished, hardly tolerable, not conducive for learning. In many cases students are housed by race, for the government monopoly on education has done more to segregate minorities in low-performing schools than the pre-Civil Right South ever could.

Students are required to conduct menial tasks, then take more work home with them. Where does the encroachment of the state end in these kids' lives?

Naturally, students finds these conditions appalling and maddening. No wonder a number of them rebel. Those students become at-risk, sequestered in "at-risk" classes, forced to endure scripted lessons.

Then there are the "hyperactive" kids (read, bored out of their mind), who get diagnosed as ADHD or schizoid or emotionally disturbed (honestly, what adolescent is not emotionally disturbed? Tough times, the teen years. . .) Those kids get slotted for special ed classes or "learning centers", which are anything but. Stigmatizing and embarrasing, many student either avoid these classes which unfairly label them and indirectly shame them.

Of course, labeling kids leads them to perpetuate the very dysfunction which the public school is trying to rid them of.

Young people do not need to be controlled, as much as they must take control, own the means and ends of what they do, including the consequences. They are not prisoners, they are not mental patients; unfortunately, the public school system has the heinous legacy of turning them into miscreants and madmen.

Who will stop this criminal insanity?!