You think 20% of Americans are fundamentally unsuited to life in society? 1 in 5?
The OP must be fucking joking the military can’t even run itself.
And the OP’s view of the public school system seems to be garnered from some right-wing fantasy.
The main problem with the public school system is that people aren’t willing to pay enough taxes to support their schools and rich neighborhoods’ school districts get too much.
Out of the subset I interact with daily, that’s an accurate estimation IMHO.
First of all, as has been pointed out, wrong movie.
Secondly, it was a damn movie, not real life. In real life, Joe Clark’s methods didn’t accomplish all that much, and the school had to be taken over by the state. Clark improved discipline in the short term - largely by expelling students en masse, which is easy and doesn’t really solve any problems - but test scores did not improve and such improvements as he made didn’t last.
“Durrrrr, treat 'em like soldiers” is a dumb idea. The purpose of school is to educate, not just discipline. Discipline is just one of the many tools needed to ensure learning takes place. Making discipline the ends, instead of a means, means forgetting why you have schools in the first place.
Thing is in some schools you really do have about 1 in 5 kids who are nothing but idiots/jerks/troublemakers and cause massive problems and about the only way to make it so the 4 in 5 can learn is to somehow separate them. You can do it by creating a different school like a magnet system or kick them out (which your not allowed to do until age 21). Another is to basically run the school like a military school with tons of security and staff with strict rules and consequences but there is rarely a budget for that.
by nature or by nurture?
As an adult business owner or patron, you are not expected to have to deal with those who have not learned to be productive members of society.
As a school, you are expected to take people who are not productive members of society and turn them into productive members of society.
How do you know that? Sounds like just a made up number based on watching movies.
wink
Look, every kid deserves to learn. And yes, I’ve been in classrooms where a kid with severe trauma disrupts the class, and it freakin SUCKS, and a lot of learning is lost.
But fantasizing about chasing such kids with sticks, presumably so they can be beaten if they don’t run fast enough? That’s loathsome.
I am all for adequate funding of student support services. Sending soldiers after kids to commit violence is not student support.
I’ve never known confirmation bias to be wrong.
I agree that the way 1980’s Nigerian military responded to a problem was harsh.
My point was that at a certain point one has to do something different and often radical. You might have been in a single classroom with some bad kids but I’ve seen whole schools full of them with an administration that does nothing and the teachers just cannot teach because the place is chaos. The students learn almost nothing and the good ones eventually end up leaving.
Perhaps the administration should be taken out back and beaten with sticks?
Do they also teach the Non-Intercourse Act in history class?
(Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
My old town had an “alternative school” that was really not much more than a warehouse for kids like this. They didn’t take attendance or do lesson plans, and when it moved from a downtown building to an unused elementary school building in a middle-class neighborhood, the neighbors successfully petitioned to have it moved back because of (among other things) all the drug dealers who openly hung around all day. I knew a few people who worked there (they all had their own reasons for choosing to do so) and the one thing they all agreed on was that they believed that the school should have a gynecologist and a urologist on retainer, to sterilize all the students on admission. :eek: This was in a city of 40,000 in rural Illinois, no less.
I told that story to a woman I know who teaches at a regular HS in my area, and she told me that the alt-schools here have stricter rules than the regular schools, so kids won’t want to go there.
Good?
Ima stop you right there. No I haven’t, and no you haven’t. If you think you have, then all I can guarantee is that your students have been in a classroom with an unfit teacher.
They aren’t bad kids.
Look, we’re talking about people too young to make decisions well. We don’t allow them to vote, or to join the military, or to sign contracts, or to drink, because we recognize that they’re not fully responsible for their behavior. It’s incumbent on the adults around them to provide them a context in which they learn how to make good decisions.
AND BEATING THEM WITH STICKS IS NOT THAT GD CONTEXT.
Yes, we need to do something radical. Fortunately, we know some things we can do:
- Make it practically harder for them to access guns, through appropriate firearms legislation.
- Address the kinds of structural inequalities that incentivize violent crime.
- Address ACES, specifically the trauma that comes from living in a high-violence context.
This last one is going to involve school measures (adequately staffing social workers, counselors, and psychologists) and community measures (similar to step 2).
It might not satisfy vengeance fantasies of angry ex-teachers in the way that imagining beating children with sticks would, but it’d got a damn sight further in actually fixing the very real problem.
Not to be nit-picky, but this has been driving me nuts. The capital of Nigeria is Lagos, not Legos. It’s a huge city with a population of around 17 million people, none of whom live in buildings made of interlocking plastic bricks.
Carry on.
Teachers love to bitch–and for some reason, when you are a teacher, non-teachers are endlessly fascinated by stories of horrible children. I don’t know why, but so many people seem to find comfort in lurid tales of Kids These Days. So you get in this terrible feedback cycle where you get all this positive reinforcement for your ranty, hyperbolic stories which non-teachers then use to speak authoritatively about what it’s like in schools these days.
Nigeria’s capitol has been Abuja since 1991.
Let’s return to our regularly scheduled programming.
Why he’d wantthese kids beaten is beyond me…
Uh-oh, nelliebly got the city wrong. That’s a stick-chasing.