Honor student suspended for buying Skittles

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — An eighth-grade honors student who was suspended for a day, barred from attending an honors dinner and stripped of his title as class vice president after he was caught with contraband candy in school will get his student council post back, school officials said.

More here.

I haven't made one of these education posts in a while, primarily because I've been out of the business for almost four years, and during my last year teaching I pretty much summed up my philosophy in the post PUBLIC EDUCATION DECONSTRUCTED. But these issues are very much worth revisiting from time to time, as the above excerpted article shows.

The bottom line here is that public education's stated mission of student learning is only secondary. Primary is the unwritten and undiscussed mission of indoctrinating students into the American culture of obedience and authority. This isn't some wild-eyed, anarchist view, either: Horace Mann and other nineteenth century education reformers consciously copied the militaristic Prussian system, and sold it to industrial and government leaders as the social remedy which would make docile and obedient workers for the growing US economy out of American children. To this very day, one sees, if one cares to look, rather obvious strains of militarism in schools, including, but not limited to, military base structure, which has principal as commandant, vice principals as lieutenants, classroom teachers as platoon sergeants, and children as foot soldiers.

But where the analogy really hits home is the moment-to-moment reality in the schools' daily existence. It's all driven by rules and procedure, often absurd, sometimes reasonable, but always driving home the message "do as you're told and you will be rewarded; disobey and you will be punished." A kid can easily come out of the school system after twelve years dumber than a stump, as often happens, but all students come out of the system knowing how to follow rules. How to give and take orders, too.

That's because the overwhelming emphasis coming down from educators is about following rules and obeying authority, not about knowledge and inquiry--indeed, inquiry is not very welcome at all in such a system. The great irony is that following orders is utterly counter to the democratic spirit: the artificially constructed American culture of obedience and authority may turn children into docile workers, but it makes them lousy citizens. It also makes them stupid. Knowledge becomes what you're told, not what you've figured out for yourself after deep contemplation.

Anyway, in this situation, incidents like the one mentioned in the article excerpt are bound to happen again and again. Crazy shit like severe sanctions for Skittle possession, or unauthorized strip searches, or suspension for writing essays with sexual or violent content, are just plain inevitable. School culture is all about doing as you're told, and culture teaches far more effectively than any textbook. It is no wonder at all that teachers and administrators often "go too far;" they're pretty much set up by the system to do so.

It's only when outside forces see what's going on that educators momentarily come to their senses. It's like, "oh yeah, I guess that is pretty harsh, but you know, he did break the rules and all, but I guess we can make an exception this one time." In my humble opinion, lots and lots of troubles in the adult world can be laid directly at the doorstep of the schools. Of course Americans are all aggressive idiot lemmings. That's how we've been trained to behave.

Only by tearing down the schools, firing all public education employees, and starting over, completely, will we be able to have a school system that makes learning its greatest priority. What we've got right now is pretty sick and disgusting.

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