Where Learning is Optional
I am sure that everyone in America has learned to be deeply afraid and concerned about the safety of anyone connected to the public school system here since we heard about the six year old who shot his teacher in the state of Virginia. I cannot even imagine what it must have been like to have been in that classroom when the shooting took place. I do not blame any teacher for deciding to change careers now with the extreme violence that has been happening in public schools for some time now, but to tell you the truth, I remember a time when many children were very afraid of their teachers, and I personally found myself on the wrong side of their wrath more than once. I was never a child who deliberately broke the rules but there were times when I forgot some of them in elementary school. Being a child, that is just going to happen sometimes and it wasn’t always the case that I was hit and ridiculed and humiliated for making a mistake, but weighed in the balance that sort of reaction was more common than a reminder not to do it again. I was a frequent visitor to the principal’s office in middle school for wearing skirts that were shorter than 2 inches above the knee. (They actually took a ruler and measured.) During those visits we had a principal who was particularly mean spirited and after several incidents of being screamed at and threatened I stopped going there when I was told to and just walked out the back door of the school. At that point I didn’t care what happened if I got caught. I just didn’t want to be in the same room with the principal. He was mean, snotty, and verbally vicious. Oddly enough, I never got in trouble for leaving by the back door. To this day I can’t figure out why they never called my parents. Maybe they didn’t notice that I was gone. Interesting. They sure noticed a lot of other things that had no real importance. Anyway, I certainly remember many terrible teachers and the emotional and physical repercussions of making a minor mistake during my school years. When I finally got out of school, I had nightmares well into adulthood about having to go back to school again. Those dreams could have been a forewarning regarding the behavior of future employers because I have had supervisors who behaved the same way in jobs I have had. The realization upon awakening in the morning that it wasn’t true was a tremendous relief to me. How public schools and teachers have evolved in to what they are like now is amazing to me. I feel badly for the children as well as the teachers who are afraid to go near the kids but I feel very conflicted and confused about how the situation got this way. Public schools appear to be war zones now and I am damn grateful that there are no school aged children in my family. I couldn’t sleep nights if there were for fear of sending them to school in the morning and maybe never seeing them again.
I don’t think that there is any hope for the way things are
in the foreseeable future. I don’t think that there are any rules you can
change or laws that you can pass that will turn things around now. People are
hell bent and determined now to make someone pay for their fear and
unhappiness. This is the case in nearly every facet of life in America.
Everyone talks about it but little is being done about it. The reason that
little is being done about it is because there is no profit in fixing it. Find
a way to make money from correcting the imbalance and you will see things get
done. As far as unruly children are concerned there have been a few attempts to
change behavior patterns with military like reform schools. These schools are
“for profit” by the way. The thinking behind it is to “whip these kids into
shape” but I cannot see that they have improved anything. A teacher in Florida
once told me that every child in his class was either in jail or going to jail.
That was more than a decade ago. I wonder what the situation there is like now?
Those children are adults now, at least those who survived their childhood are.
Troubled people produce troubled children so the cycle of crime and violence
can only multiply.
Can we change people? No, we cannot, but we can promote a
different way of thinking to help them make a change themselves. We aren’t
doing that, though. Here we teach profit and promotion of the self. People
learn more from movies, music, YouTube, and social media than they will ever
learn from school and they can pick and choose from these things what they
think will give them an advantage over others. Gaining ascendancy over your
peers is the highest goal that most people set for themselves now and we have
taught them that because in today’s world few give a damn about anything other
than being better and better off than everyone else. Don’t expect any better
behavior than this as long as all we see around us is how badly we have been
cheated and mistreated by people in power. It is good to know the truth about
what is going on in our world but that knowledge needs to be followed by
information and hard work toward stopping it. That isn’t happening. Telling us
the unvarnished truth in too many cases is only told to incite anger about it.
Well, it worked. We are damned angry. But the social and political structure
here is not set up in a way that we can change it without relying on the very
perpetrators of the injustice to fix it. They aren’t going to. The crimes that
they commit against humanity serve them too well.
People tend to believe that those who are in power would not
be in their position if they were not qualified to be there. That is so far
from the truth as to be laughable now. There is a saying that “scum rises to
the top”. But what can we do about it? Nothing. This is what people are now.
They are inhuman and childish and narcissistic because anyone who has the
funding and the resources to be elected into public office now is already adept
at kissing up and grandstanding to get what they want or they wouldn’t get very
far politically. You don’t get Socialism and human rights advocates out of
people who can be bought. So, is there any hope for us? I would say that there
isn’t unless we draw the Tower card again like we did in 2016. That year
ushered in an administration that took us to the gates of Hell and to the brink
of collapse. That was change of the worst possible kind. In 2024 we need to be
praying that the Tower will blast us back to a place where we can pick up from
the rubble and start again armed with what we now know and how we had better
never forget the lessons that we have learned from the school of hard knocks
that we should have earned a degree in by now. Not everyone will have learned
enough to get a diploma but those of us who have faced our own reckoning and
paid dearly for the lessons we have learned need to stand up and blaze a new trail.
If we cannot or will not do that, our future will remain on its current path
and the body count will be staggering.
