Success & Freedom's Key Component

One would assume that a teacher's job is to not only instill knowledge into the youth they're in charge of, but that they would also impart those bits of wisdom from experience to prepare them for life ahead. This is what makes for a great movie about an outstanding teacher, such as we've seen, or heard about in past years. But is there any of that happening anymore in our public schools today? I wonder.

After four years of serving my country in the military, I decided to to serve future generations by going into the education profession. It was a difficult experience, for the difference between the two experiences was like water and oil. Even though the first was only four years, the second was a little more than seven times that.  There was a general shift of philosophy in education over that longer period as well.

When I first entered the classroom those who had served in the military were considered a positive influence on the children they would educate. Discipline was considered a critical factor for young, developing minds, to be successful in life ahead. However, by the time I retired, the social climate was one which either despised that factor, or did its best to neutralize its impact.

Early on, discipline was mostly under the determination and application of the teacher when being applied. We understood each child directly over the school year and applied what we knew was appropriate for them. Our military experience had taught us that discipline is the key to personal freedom, and we wanted to impart those concepts to our students. However, over the years, I experienced the gradual withdraw of that individual control of applying discipline in our classrooms and a shift to the administrative level.

Then, there was the third element in the equation; the parent who fought our attempts to impart lessons about life. This was at a time when many parents were believing that teachers were, for some strange reason, attempting to undermine their parenting skills. As an example of a low level attempt to deal with advising a student who was unruly, I decided to request that the student's parent come in for a teacher/parent/student conference to discuss the problem. In the process of discussing the problem, the student expressed her frustration that it wasn't fair that there seemed to be a difference for the issue being discussed. In my attempt to explain why this view of the student's was misguided, I began to explain by pointing out that "Life isn't fair." But, before I could further explain why I was saying this, and give an illustrative example, the parent blew up at me for saying such a thing and declared that they were doing their best to teach their child that everything should be fair in life. Naturally, this situation made it even more difficult to impart a concept for the student, when the parent had a completely opposite understanding and wouldn't even allow me to finish up a "life lesson".

It was my assessment that this shift of discipline from teacher to administrator was due to a combination of three things. First the district's growing fear of litigation - parents were becoming more "sue happy" when they disagreed with how their child's consequences were meted out for inappropriate behavior - second, corporal punishment, that is any physical contact - even taking a student by the arm to remove them - was becoming a big "No, no!", (that was considered abuse) and third, there was a growing trend to allow only the school counselor, or administrator in the building, to decide what the student's punishment would be when they weren't even present to witness their behavior and the student often became highly adept at spinning the story to their favor.

Over the years, it became obvious to me that the student who was unwilling to comply with my initial verbal directives to put their behavior in check became bolder once they were aware, and had determined that this new arrangement of secondary consequences usually resulted in less severe outcomes. Now, as I've substituted over the last ten years, I've witnessed many incidences where students are bold to the point of physical violence against their classmates right in front of the substitute. 

Most of the time, these instances are repeated time and time again, with a record by the principal being kept and suspension, or expulsion, is only applied when the particular student has accumulated a sufficient quantity of infractions to warrant it. Meanwhile, other students are the target of unnecessary repeat violence because the teacher is not to interfere for potentially doing something in the process of breaking it up that could get them disciplined as well.

Consequently, we now have youth in public schools who are not learning logical consequences of their actions, but the empowerment they now realize they have by just confronting their teacher and claiming falsehoods about their teacher to get their way. (I will not go into detail here, but when I was told some of the things which were asserted by students from an administrator about me, it was utterly shocking.)

Now, you're probably thinking, well, this is just one teacher's sour grapes, or, this isn't that widespread. Then, I invite you to watch an eight minute video of an N.Y.U. professor who was drummed out of his position because he dared to go against the institution's directive. If his more recent story isn't adequate cause for alarm about what's happening in our schools of higher learning now, then nothing will. Oh, I forgot to mention that he was an avowed leftist/communist! (The Red Pill Expo is put on by the Freedom Force International.)