Some time ago, on a morning talk show, I saw a couple of fathers disagreeing about whether it’s a school’s job to punish kids or the parents’ job. At issue was some school making young graffiti artists remove the “work” they’d “created” in the bathroom.
Really? You need to argue about this?
To find the wisest solution, all we need to do is to look at how schools handled such unpleasantness back in the 1950s – the last decade of sanity in this country. Pupils in Eisenhower’s America didn’t even get away with chewing gum or talking in class. Disrespect could be met with a swat on the bottom. After-school punishments ranged from being forced to sit at your desk reviewing the day’s most boring lesson (pure torture even in the middle of winter) to standing outside, cleaning erasers (by clapping them together, not on the side of the school building). Even passing notes could earn you a trip to the principal’s office and a call home to parents who greeted such misbehavior with grounding or removal of telephone privileges.
Things have obviously changed a lot since then, and not for the better. So why don’t 21st century educators and parents look to the past to figure out what’s gone wrong, and how to make it right again?
I suppose one answer is that it’s not that simple. Our entire culture is collapsing, perhaps beyond repair, starting with the epidemic of broken homes and parents who simply don’t care about their children’s futures.
But isn’t that all the more reason for documenting the past, and coming up with a plan for reconstructing it, while its architects are still around to tell us all about it?
A solid first step would be visiting some nursing-home residents and asking them what it was like to grow up or raise children in the 1940s or 1950s. I can almost guarantee that you’ll have a great time learning about the good old days. And you might just walk away with some ammunition for launching a counter-revolution in your own family or community.
Really? You need to argue about this?
To find the wisest solution, all we need to do is to look at how schools handled such unpleasantness back in the 1950s – the last decade of sanity in this country. Pupils in Eisenhower’s America didn’t even get away with chewing gum or talking in class. Disrespect could be met with a swat on the bottom. After-school punishments ranged from being forced to sit at your desk reviewing the day’s most boring lesson (pure torture even in the middle of winter) to standing outside, cleaning erasers (by clapping them together, not on the side of the school building). Even passing notes could earn you a trip to the principal’s office and a call home to parents who greeted such misbehavior with grounding or removal of telephone privileges.
Things have obviously changed a lot since then, and not for the better. So why don’t 21st century educators and parents look to the past to figure out what’s gone wrong, and how to make it right again?
I suppose one answer is that it’s not that simple. Our entire culture is collapsing, perhaps beyond repair, starting with the epidemic of broken homes and parents who simply don’t care about their children’s futures.
But isn’t that all the more reason for documenting the past, and coming up with a plan for reconstructing it, while its architects are still around to tell us all about it?
A solid first step would be visiting some nursing-home residents and asking them what it was like to grow up or raise children in the 1940s or 1950s. I can almost guarantee that you’ll have a great time learning about the good old days. And you might just walk away with some ammunition for launching a counter-revolution in your own family or community.
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