What's Wrong With This Picture?
(A Non-Invasive Medical Procedure on a Dying Educational System)
John McGondel

The Acute Symptoms:

"What the heck are you people doing at that school?! How come my kid has all this homework? I'm going to call the school board! My taxes pay your salary! You work for ME!"

The Condition.

Unfortunately, these types of phone calls are received a lot more often than most people realize. The person receiving the call is usually a receptionist or front-desk secretary at a public school, and unless s/he is new, s/he has already heard the same type of "concerned-parent outrage" before. Naturally, there are many, indeed countless reasons that would explain why such calls are made. However, this article is going to cut right through to the marrow of the bone and expose what this writer believes to be the major underlying factor which the majority of such phone calls have in common: Poor or non-existent parental responsibility. Although that is a strong statement, this writer believes that the volume of such calls and the magnitude of the student-behavior/student-preparedness problem warrants, indeed requires, a strong statement.

Nobody wants to hear that they might be raising their kid(s) wrong, but it doesn't take a Social Scientist to see that a frighteningly overwhelming amount of today's children exhibit poor and/or ill-mannered behavior patterns. These patterns cannot just begin when the kids go to school and become pupils, they had to have already been instilled, fostered, or at the very least, allowed at their homes. But why? What parent would allow such obviously bad behavior patterns to become ingrained into their child's personality? Can it be that all of the parents/guardians of such ill-mannered and poorly trained kids are bad people? Probably not. So then, again the question must be "Why?"

As with most things in this society, it's usually all about money. Which means it's always somehow about business. The business of education. In reality it should be about the education of business.

The Diagnosis.

This writer believes that the answer to those questions is multi-faceted. For one thing, in today's society, parents are usually forced to work extended hours just to keep a roof over their kids' heads. If there is only one parent, even more hours, which inevitably leads to fatigue and stress. Perhaps they have become trapped and ensnared in a web of financial irresponsibility, which they are desperately trying not to drown in. Perhaps they are just too tired to argue with their kids, and so they just give up and give the kids anything they want. With the astronomical divorce rate these days, there might be a lot of over-compensation to kids by one or the other or even by both parents. Perhaps they are under the impression that sacrificing the all-too necessary quality parenting time with their kids, in order to maintain their material possessions, is a good thing. They may even delude themselves that they are in fact "doing it for the kids." But the results remain the same; kids end up not being well supervised at home.

And what are the results of the lack of parental availability? Some kids become video addicts, some get into inappropriate Internet areas; some are places during the days that their parents have no idea about. Kids are quick to capitalize on an opportunity, and if they perceive a weakness in any area of the person who is responsible for controlling them, they will exploit that weakness to their fullest advantage. They learn that if they whine or cry or scream enough they get what they want. They quite literally wear their parent(s) down. They learn that by saying "I want that! I want that!" enough times, they inevitably receive it. We see this unhealthy type of behavior in public all of the time. Kids yelling at their mother or father in a supermarket. Kids ignoring their parent(s) in public. Parents buying useless toys and too much candy to shut up a screaming child.

The Procedure.

The scenarios depicted above are typical, textbook examples of classic conditioning. After awhile, both the child and the parent become accustomed to the sequential-action-reaction pattern, and by then it is usually too late to correct the problem. And what happens next? The child starts school, and fully expects that the school personnel will treat him/her the same way that his/her parent(s) did. And that is when the phone calls from frustrated and irate parents begin, for as soon as the children realize that the teacher isn't planning on putting up with the children's unacceptable behavior, the children then may quickly progress through three processing steps. First, they are in shocked disbelief; next they try their complete bag of tricks. And when that does not work, they go home and complain.

Home. Now, the parent(s) may already be tired, may have long ago lost control of the child, and may not be able to deal with her/his/their own child. The parent(s) just want some peace, and will do whatever it takes to get the kid to stop complaining. This can only go on for so long until the parent calls the school, all bent out of shape that their kid came home disappointed. At that point, there are dialectical tensions, inner and outer conflicts, and the child is comfortably back in a position of control. Many times a teacher gets pressured to "go easy" on "that" particular kid. Sometimes teachers are fired, or they may quit in exasperation and/or disgust at the administration's lack of support. Perhaps an otherwise unnecessary IEP will be designed.

Rarely, from what I have seen, are the children actually disciplined. Empty threats falling on deaf ears. Detentions after school, where homework can be done. The bus gets missed and mommy or daddy has to personally pick them up and chauffeur them home. Maybe even the luxury of a taxi ride. At worst, a suspension from school, which to kids is a free day off: another unscheduled holiday in the middle of the week. These actions are not discipline. A detention must be a total waste of time for the student. No homework, no television, no computer, no being entertained by any school personnel. It should be something more along the lines of copying a book, by hand, page by page, and then, after it is finished, being told to put it in the trash basket. It has to be something that the person receiving the detention should never, ever want to do again: a complete and total waste of time.

That is not to say that someone shouldn't try to talk to or work with the child to help them to understand that their behavior is unacceptable, of course those things should be done. But not as part of the disciplinary process. Most people, when they first have a child, do not understand that trying to correct an installed bad habit in a child can drain the parent's energy and sap their resolve. By the time most parents, especially the new parents, figure out how bad a problem they have, it is usually beyond the critical threshold for reverse engineering. (That touches on yet another problem in today's society, that of kids raising kids, but that's a topic by itself and is for a different article).

Therefore, the problem, when it's all boiled down, remains "What can be done to minimize the irate phone calls to school personnel?" It's all well and fine to go off and stand on a soapbox with a megaphone and preach about the evils of bad manners and of poor student performance, but what can actually, and practically, be done about it? If someone can come up with a viable and pragmatic answer for that social dilemma, that someone could change the face, framework, and destiny of society itself.

So, down from the soapbox, feet firmly planted on the ground, the following answers to that question are offered:

The Treatment Plan.

Before people get to the age of becoming sexually active and thus potential parents, or at least before they marry or cohabit, they should be taught about what it is like to raise a child. They should be exposed to the reality of child raising, either in school or at some community-based program. Eight and ninth graders should be brought into second graders' classrooms and be able to witness the behavior from the viewpoint of the teacher. Then they each should be offered or exposed to a course such as Child-Psychology, or perhaps Early Childhood Development. Society must teach them the way children grow, and show them what to expect. We, as a society must make up for what extended families provided in past times. High school interns at child-care facilities (closely monitored of course) might be a useful idea. But what about when they start having kids, what then?

There should be support provided by churches, communities, or the federal government, to educate and offer training to expectant or new parents. It would be far less expensive for society to foot such a bill than to suffer the resultant and continuing consequences, such as crime, delinquency, dropoutism, illiteracy, and lack of modern job skills. The programs should not be that difficult to construct, especially when compared with the problems of having to deal with the results of having not dealt with the problem in the first place. It should all about the right kinds of social, moral and ethical conditioning. If the conditioning is done at an early enough stage, the likelihood of the necessity of any severe type of future behavior modification is significantly reduced.

The Recovery Room.

It is expected that there will be some form of outrage at any suggestions that the problems should be exclusively blamed upon parents, and that outrage is justified.

The reason I say it is justified is because I am not claiming that parents are solely responsible for the problems of their kids. In point of fact, if anyone were to blame it would be us, our collective selves, as a society, that is/are to blame. Parents also are products of society, and society exists for every segment of society. In fact, that is what a society is: the various existences of similar and/or dissimilar segmented populations within a geographically defined area. It could be a private society, a local society, a statehood society, a regional society, a national society, or a global society. Or, it could be a tribal village, which may be an example, though primitive by our current standards, of the original and perhaps most functional of societies.

Post-op.

At this point it has hopefully been pointed out that there is a problem, that the problem is undisciplined kids who are ill-prepared for school, and that the reason that they are ill-mannered and academically deficient originates in their home environment, and that the deficient home environments are a by product of a world going too fast, coupled with the failure of society to adjust quickly enough to compensate for the resultant changes. If these observations are taken to be true, then one must concur that society must, if for no other reason than self-interest, accept at least partial responsibility for the present sad state of affairs, and thus also for the future, probably worse, state of affairs. It's always all about money.

And there we have it in a nutshell: The school personnel are getting irate calls largely because we, as a society, have allowed societal-affective environmental conditions to get completely out of hand. When one adds to that the fact that too many kids are many times labeled and or mislabeled as ADD or ADHD, and are then often drugged and shoved into an uncaring system, a system that feeds on the money that it sucks from the governments. Where is the hope? Where are the answers? If a kid(s) isn't/aren't protected by her/his/their parent(s), or by her doctor, or by her school, or by her government, who else is left to protect them? Nobody, that's who, and the kids know this. And it that very knowledge which enables their oppositionally defiant behavior to fester into a boil on the body of society. Which, in turn, leads to a steady decaying of general morale, and a potentially fatalistic, perhaps nihilistic, outlook on life itself. We as a society are manufacturing a generation of self-defeating students who have no reason to trust in or have faith in society or society's ability to protect them.

The Prognosis.

It is time that we as the shapers of future minds, get down to the real business of raising literate, competent, and productive citizens for our society. It has to start sometime, and it is getting late. Every great empire throughout history has fallen. Ours too may fall. But we can at least try to keep it going for as long as possible. Perhaps ours could even be the first empire to not fall. But that won't happen if we do not buckle down, smarten up, and start taking care of our young. If we can manage to do that, the process of educating them will be exponentially more effective. If we cannot do that, education as it should and could be, will become nothing more than a dimly remembered concept. And after that, even the dimly remembered part will fade, and our failure as a society will become final . .

And this writer has said many times: As education goes, so goes society.

Not fixing this problem is societal-suicide. Which means, to any rational person: The problem must be addressed and corrected. A doomed society is just that: Doomed. But society has a chance to choose to not become doomed. Therefore, the final question, to end all questions, the virtual Mother Of All Questions, is: What choices will society make? Only a time machine can answer that question. It will fall to future historians to document these next few critical years.

And only those kids of today will witness the results. And . . .what about their kids? Must it stay as "The business of education is all about money"? Or is society going to wake up and realize that 1, "It's all about the kids, and 2, We must educate business?" For, if we can make that leap, the money problems and the future will self-solve. The question is simply this: Are we as a society going to be delusional and self-defeating, or are we going to be pro-active and self-correcting? Remember that question, because it will probably become answered during your lifetime.