School Daze, Plugged In and Zoned Out

By Alan Caruba

The older you get the faster time seems to speed by. One minute you’re talking about the Baby Boom generation, 1946 to 1964, and the next it’s Generation X, 1965-1983. If the Boomers thought the world owed them a living, the Gen X’rs were all about “relationships” and the “environment.”

Before you knew it, it was the Generation Y, often referred to as the Millennials, 1984-2002, that everyone was talking about and trying to sell crap to. The oldest of these are age 26 and the youngest age 8. Most young people think the world exists for them, but Generation Y has more reason to believe this than their parents and grandparents.

Their parents doted upon them, insisting on every safety device known to man be used to protect them from scraped knees or concussions. Television networks have entire channels devoted to them such as Disney, Nickelodeon, or Discovery Kids. Their parents had to get by with MTV. Like their parents, they have been demographically targeted as a consumer group.

The federal government is so concerned for them that it came up with No Child Left Behind. Never mind that most earlier programs like Head Start and other social inventions have a record of failure. Whatever is gained in Head Start is rapidly lost when they enter our dreadful school systems.

I have been reading one of the scariest books (remember books, printed on paper, between two covers?) I have received in a while. It’s Dr. Tim Elmore’s “Generation iY: Our Last Change to Save Their Future.” (www.SaveTheirFutureNow.com).

In February 2010, The Kaiser Family Foundation reported that kids between eight and eighteen were spending seven-and-a-half hours each day in front of a computer screen. This is the MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter generation, sending and receiving an average of 1,742 texts per month!

For all this communication, I suspect they are as clueless as their parents who, after all, probably voted for Barack Obama in the name of “diversity” and “multiculturalism.” Generation iY is even less prepared to be adults than their parents. “These kids have been online since preschool,” writes Dr. Elmore, “and can’t imagine life any other way.”

There is some good news about those born between 1983 and 2003. Early statistics indicate that teen pregnancy rates are down, drug abuse was lower than their parents, violent crime among this age group is its lowest in twenty years, education and civic involvement was at a record high, and as students they are optimistic about their prospects of changing the world.

Most of the news about this newest generation, however, is not good. They are overwhelmed. According to an American College Health Association random sample study released in 2007, 94% reported feeling overwhelmed by their lifestyles; 44% said they felt so depressed it was almost difficult to function; and almost 10% said they had considered suicide in the past year.

Generation Y is, despite the stereotype, quite competitive and wants to be the best, having been told they are the best from their earliest years. Trying to live up to that is very stressful. They are, no surprise, over-connected. They often cope by escaping into the world of online fantasy video games or the social world of texting, Facebook, and Twitter. Or they push themselves to be a “super kid.”

Dr. Elmore says that, either way, they end up with very poor relationship skills and low emotional intelligence. They are short on patience, listening skills, and conflict resolution; all essential if one is to progress toward being an adult.

In the latter years of Generation Y when they are entering the adult world as college students or job-holders, they are also stuck in an adolescence that goes on for too long. They tend to find both challenging in ways earlier generations did not. They often do not make good employees, changing jobs rapidly either because they quit or were fired while in search of a unified sense of self.

It is, I suppose, the lament of every generation that those born after them are inadequate to the task of running the world. Having seven decades under my belt, I tend to look at the generation that came of age in the 1960s, the Baby Boomers, as responsible for a lot of the problems we have today in the nation. The Clintons, for example, are quintessential Boomers.

Whoever thought we would end up with a Democrat-controlled Congress that spent billions of dollars on “stimulus” or “reformed” Medicare without even reading any of the legislation before voting?

Whoever thought we’d end up with a very young, narcissistic President who is so disconnected from the American people that he probably has no idea how quickly they have concluded he is a danger to the future of the nation? Surrounded by academics with no experience in “the real world”, he probably thinks he is the smartest one in the room. He’s not.

Generation X and Generation Y had better “grow up” or they will be the ones to watch America’s economic, military, and cultural dominance disappear in their lifetimes.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Too Much Sex in the Schools

By Alan Caruba

America is a very different place from the one in which I grew up in the 1940s and 50s. Change is to be expected. Technology transforms the way we live, often in ways we do not initially comprehend. Events alter our perceptions, but one thing does not change. It is morality. The rules of good and bad behavior, right and wrong do not change.

It has always been wrong, at least in the Judeo-Christian culture of Western civilization, for an adult to have sex with a child and particularly with one under their supervision. Our government run schools with compulsory attendance put the vast bulk of our children in the care of strangers.

Fifty or more years ago if a teacher was found to be having sex with a student, the entire community was appalled. The offending teacher would be sent to jail. That is less and less the case these days because school administrators are often at pains to sweep such cases under the rug in some fashion or to ignore children courageous enough to complain of inappropriate behavior. Judges too often lean in favor of the offending teacher.

I will not address whether or not there is more sex between students, but there is sufficient data to suggest this too has been a growing problem for many years. In families where both parents work, the child has more unsupervised time, cell phones permit for private communications, and access to pornography is far more available to young people. This affords greater susceptibility to sexual relations with teachers and peers.

Today cases involving teacher-student sex rate a headline, but those headlines have become a continual series of such stories. My impression is that there is too much teacher-student sex in our schools and it does not appear to evoke as much outcry or concern as in former times.

Worthy of an entire separate commentary (or a book!) today’s children and young people have been increasingly sexualized in terms of the popular media, fashion, et cetera.

A recent World Net Daily story caught my eye. On June 4 the headline was “Teacher rapes girl after predator principal snagged.” In Georgetown, Delaware’s Sussex Central High School, a popular teacher was arrested on charges of allegedly having raped a 15-year-old female student. He had just delivered the spring commencement speech. A year earlier, the same school’s principal faced charges for having sex with a 17-year-old female student.

WND’s David Kupelian wrote an extensive article for Whistleblower magazine in March 2006 that examined the “epidemic of teacher-student sex.” The website has pages devoted to how many cases there have been in recent years at http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=39783

People of a conservative point of view tend to be watchful for signs that our society is endangered by failing moral standards, not because we don’t view sex as a natural part of life, but because we know there are rules of behavior a healthy, civil society must apply. Among those rules are those involving protecting youth who are vulnerable if neither parent, nor church, has provided moral boundaries and cautions.

As a good friend points out, it takes parents to raise a child properly, not a “village.”

Schools are part of the “village”, but it is clear they can no longer automatically be trusted to provide protection against sexual predators. And the best protection are parents who explain the rules and why they exist. Parents these days must provide the support and trust a child needs in order to report any sexual advances, inappropriate touching, and similar threats to the child’s present and long term welfare. It’s not a victimless crime.

Along with rape, a crime recognized by every society, there are widespread state laws regarding statutory rape with those deemed too young to make a judgment regarding sex with an older male or female.

The numbers of female teachers accused and arrested for statutory rape has been increasing and, along with male teachers, the need to impose stiff jail sentences and the assurance they never again can teach anywhere needs to be addressed in every town and city in America.

The reality, however, is that our tabloid society has been exploiting cases of teacher-student sex and the message has been that it is not a crime, nor that it endangers and warps the lives of the seduced students despite the defense of “mutual consent”.

We used to be far more watchful and far more outraged. Apparently, we’re not any more.

Editor’s Note: There are two recently published books from Regnery Publishing that concerned parents should read. They are You’re Teaching My Child What? A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How they Can Harm Your Child and 30 Ways in 30 Days to Save Your Family.

Stupefying America

By Alan Caruba

If you have a suspicion that many of your fellow Americans are too stupid to trust with the great affairs of this nation, you might just be right, but you might not know why.

Take a look at the choices television offers. Do you ever wonder why shows featuring stupid people or animated characters are so popular? I cite The Simpsons, Family Guy, Two and a Half Men, My Name is Earl, et al. Why do we enjoy laughing at stupid people? Does it make us feel smarter?

Does the shallowness of so much that passes for entertainment or even passing itself off as educational actually reflect the lives of those watching? The answer is probably yes and they didn’t get that way by accident. The education system of America has been deliberately fashioned to create a docile, easily controlled population. And that means YOU.

There is a book available that explains why “Every single school day in America, 7,000 students drop out, some confused, some angry, but all are brave…What does it say to us that a million and a quarter young people a year don’t want to be in classrooms, don’t want to be there so much they’re willing to endure scorn, insult, and constant discrimination as the price of escape?”

The book is John Taylor Gatto’s “Weapons of Mass Instruction: A School Teacher’s Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling.” ($24.95, New Society Publishers).

“The rigid stupidities of forced schooling, its linear logics, its bell curves, its buzzers and tests and multiple humiliations, its resort to magical spells, fills me with rage these days as an old man,” wrote Gatto, a former acclaimed teacher of the year.

Today’s (and for several generations yesterday’s) schools are factories of boredom. They don’t exist to educate, but to produce students who will obey rules, dutifully move from class to class when the bell rings, and accept nonsense like “fuzzy math” and “global warming.” The No Child Left Behind Act of 2009 includes $500 million for the teaching of ‘Environmental Literacy’ when real literacy rates—the ability to read—have been dropping like a stone in water for decades. They are a national disgrace.

Why can’t our schools teach reading or arithmetic skills when even pre-school toddlers can learn these things if given the opportunity? Why are we spending $10,000 per student, per year, to produce such poor results? Why would anyone willingly spend their youth cooped up in classrooms when they could be out in the “real world” learning real skills of their own choosing, learning from open sources of information?

And why wouldn’t they flee schools where life is dangerous? Since last September, 20 Chicago Public School students have been killed, 18 by gunfire. Last year, 24 of the more than 30 students killed were shot to death. Nationally, homicide is the second leading cause of death for young people ages 10 to 24 in 2004. Elsewhere in the nation bullying is widespread. School in America is too often a very unpleasant experience dominated by boredom.

The American school system as we know it today was imported from Germany in the 1850s. As America’s industrial base boomed in the years following the end of the Civil War, the need was for millions of immigrants to do the often difficult manual work involved in making steel, building railroads, and manufacturing the first automobiles and countless other inventions that burst on the scene. Industrialists, men like Rockefeller and Carnegie, decided that compulsory education was the best way to produce not just a functional work force, but people conditioned to purchase the bounty of new goods.

The bible of the compulsory educational system was Benjamin Bloom’s two-volume “Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.” Gatto describes him as “an academic madman” in whose system “children would be forced to learn ‘proper’ thoughts, feelings, and actions, while ‘improper’ attitudes from home were ‘remediated.’” In other words, schools were to be laboratories of social change designed to serve business and industry.

This has led to schools where students are literally drugged if they show any vitality or curiosity. The more docile are simply on a treadmill, so much human sausage to be processed. Indeed, why should we wonder why drug addiction is such a massive social problem in an America filled with people who were either trained to be cogs in some faceless corporation or told early in life they were failures?

Since you no doubt passed through this process, it may in retrospect become more clear why schools as often fail to educate the students entrusted to them, than not. The excuses for this are many, but the most popular is that less privileged students in urban centers are virtually doomed to failure from birth. This is not true. Given the opportunity to learn in charter or parochial schools, they do as well or better.

The best of our students today are home-schooled. They win the spelling and geography bees. Some of the nation’s great leaders of the past never attended school. They include George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. They self-schooled themselves with great success and they did it early in life, often before they reached their teens.

In modern times, the secrets of the Human Genome Map were cracked by a surfer named Craig Venter and a born-again Christian home-schooler named Frances Collins. Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Airlines and other ventures dropped out of high school. The examples of those who self-schooled themselves to success are numerous and put the lie to the jails, often with on-site police, that we call modern schools.

Our nation’s schools have been failing generations of Americans, particularly since around the 1960s and, despite no mention in the Constitution, education is now totally controlled by the federal government and by the powerful teachers union, the American Education Association.

It is truly no laughing matter when Jay Leno asks simple questions of people in the streets to reveal time and again how little actual knowledge they possess. They are the products of our school system.

The United States is falling behind many other nations in educating its citizens.

Tellingly, China takes schooling and learning seriously. Its students all learn English, knowing they may become part of their nation’s international legion, likely to be the next great world power. While China builds coal-fired plants for energy and locks in deals for oil, our government calls coal “dirty” and refuses to permit exploration of our vast offshore continental shelf for oil and natural gas.

It takes a special kind of stupidity to deny one’s own nation the energy it requires to grow, to force corporations to move overseas, to take control of industries such as banking and automobile manufacturing without having the slightest idea how to run them.

It’s the stupidity that is the result of a nationwide school system that prolongs childhood while making learning an unpleasant chore.

To learn more, read my four part series: http://www.anxietycenter.com/subversion.htm