The New Dare to Discipline (12 page)

(2) It is difficult for judges to get excited about milder forms of delinquency when they have been dealing with more serious cases involving murder, rape, and robbery. It is unfortunate that the judges are limited in this fashion. A teenager’s first encounter with the law should be so painful that he would not want to make the same mistake again, but our legal apparatus is not designed to accomplish that objective.

The juvenile courts occasionally commit the opposite error of dealing too harshly with a teenager. Such had been the case with Linda, a girl I met late one rainy afternoon. I was working on a report at my desk when I suddenly realized I was not alone. I looked up to see a barefoot, rain-soaked girl in my doorway. She was a pretty adolescent of about fifteen years.

“You can call the police now,” she instructed me.

“Why would I want to call the police?” I asked.

“Because I have run away from ———.” (She named a nearby detention home for delinquent girls.) She said she’d spent the day hiding from the authorities.

She told me her name was Linda, and I asked her to sit down and tell me why she had run away. She started at the beginning, and I later verified the facts to be true. Her mother had been a prostitute who gave no supervision or guidance to her daughter. Linda was even allowed to remain in the bedroom while her mother entertained men. The child was eventually taken away from her mother and made a ward of the court. She was placed in a home for young victims where there was not enough love to go around. Her mother came to see her for a few years, but then ignored her completely.

Linda was so starved for love that she ran away to find her mother. She was immediately returned to the home. A year later she tried to escape again, with the same result. Linda continued to run away, each time becoming more sophisticated in evading the police. The year before my introduction to this girl, she had vanished again, this time being picked up by several boys. They lived together for two weeks and were involved in several misdemeanors and various sexual escapades during that period.

Linda was subsequently arrested and brought before the juvenile court as a delinquent. She was sentenced to the detention center for delinquent girls, surrounded by ten-foot chain link fences. The court considered her to be an unmanageable, incorrigible adolescent, yet this was wrong. Linda was a lonely, love-starved girl who had been cheated by the circumstances of life. She needed someone to care—not someone to punish. Perhaps the judge was too busy to study her background; perhaps he had no alternative facility for Linda. Either way, the needs of this wispy girl remained unmet at this critical time of her life.

Juvenile justice must be designed to be lenient with the child who has been hurt, like Linda, and to sting the child who has challenged authority, like Craig. It is sometimes difficult to recognize the difference.

I selected a class in which three tests were given during the semester with the lowest score being dropped by the professor. I studied hard on the first two exams and earned respectable grades, which permitted me to experiment with the third. When the exam was scheduled, I recorded all the necessary factual information on my tape machine, being careful not to learn the detail as I spoke into the microphone. In all, about sixty minutes of data were packed on one side of an old reel to reel tape. Then I went out and enjoyed myself the night before the test. While my brighter friends were grinding away in the library, I was shooting the breeze in a restaurant with some guys who never studied much anyway. It felt wonderful.

At bedtime that night, I plugged the tape recorder into my clock radio so that my own voice would begin speaking to my unconscious mind at two o’clock in the morning. One hour later, I was awakened by the flopping of the tape at the end of the reel, and I reset the timer for four o’clock. The tape played for another hour and awakened me again at five. The final “hearing” occurred between six and seven. So passed the restless night.

The examination was scheduled for eight o’clock and I was there, yawning and bleary-eyed. The first thing I noted was that the questions on the printed test were not even vaguely familiar to me (always a bad sign). But I was still confident that the information was stored down deep in my brain, somewhere. I turned in the test and stood waiting for a proctor to calculate my score. It only took a few minutes.

There were seventy-three people in the class, and I got the seventy-second-lowest score. I managed to beat the class dummy by one point, but he appealed to the professor over a disputed answer and was granted two additional points. I came in dead last! The only thing I got from that experiment was a terrible night’s sleep and the wrath of a roommate who had lain there in the moonlight learning junk he didn’t want to know.

Many years have passed since those days of my callow youth when I still thought getting something for nothing was possible. I was dead wrong. Everything worth having comes with a price. The natural progression of the universe is movement from order to chaos, not the other way around. The only way to beat that curse is to invest energy into a project or objective. If improvement is to be made in anything,
especially
in the development of mental skills and knowledge, it will be accomplished through blood, sweat, and a few tears. There’s no way around it.

It is my belief that some, but by no means all, professional educators began to lose sight of that need for discipline in learning as we came through the turbulent sixties. They enthusiastically searched for an easier way to teach kids than putting them through the rigors of structured classrooms, examinations, grades, rules, and requirements. Society was changing, authority went out of style, and all the traditional values began to look suspect. Why not throw out convention and try something new? How about—an “open” classroom?

One of the most foolish ideas in the history of education was born. Let me cite excerpts from an article appearing in the
Seattle News Journal,
May 27, 1971, describing an open classroom in its full glory. Before doing so, however, let me emphasize that the excesses of the past are no longer evident in today’s public schools. I’m hearing good things about the Seattle School District, for example, that experimented back in 1971 with the unstructured program described below. If those days have past, then why do we focus on a time when schools went off the deep end? Because we can’t fully understand who we are today without examining where we’ve been. And because we can learn from the excesses of yesterday, when authority and discipline were distrusted. And because the remnants of this free-wheeling philosophy still lurk within our permissive society and the halls of academia.

The article referred to above was called “The School Nobody Talks About”, and was written by James and John Flaherty. As you read the following excerpts, imagine your own child enrolled in a program of this nature.

Not many school districts experimented with programs as extreme as this one, fortunately, but the tenor of the times held authority and discipline in contempt. A depressing example of that changing philosophy was spelled out in a widely published book entitled
Summerhill,
by A. S. Neill, to whom Mr. Bernstein referred. I was required to read this ridiculous book while in graduate school. It contradicted everything I believed about children, and indeed, about life itself. But Neill’s writings and work were given great credibility in educational circles, and many teachers and principals (like Bern-stein) were influenced by his laissez-faire philosophy.

Summerhill in England and Springhill in the U.S. were permissive institutions that conformed to the easy-come, easy-go philosophy of their superintendent, A. S. Neill. Resident students were not required to get out of bed in the morning, attend classes, complete assignments, take baths, or even wear clothes. Rarely in human history have children been given wider latitude.

Let me list the elements of Neill’s philosophy that governed his much-vaunted program and which he recommended with great passion to parents the world over:

1. Adults have no right to insist on obedience from their children. Attempts to make the youngsters obey are merely designed to satisfy the adult’s desire for power. There is no excuse for imposing parental wishes on children. They must be free. The best home situation is one where parents and children are perfect equals. A child should be required to do nothing until he
chooses
to do so. Neill went to great lengths to show the students that he was one of them—not their superior.

2. Children must not be asked to work at all until they reach eighteen years of age. Parents should not even require them to help with small errands or assist with the chores. We insult them by making them do our menial tasks. Neill actually stressed the importance of withholding responsibility from the child.

3. Religion should not be taught to children. The only reason religion exists in society is to release the false guilt it has generated over sexual matters. Our concepts of God, heaven, hell, and sin are based on myths. Enlightened generations of the future will reject traditional religion.

4. Punishment of any kind is strictly forbidden, according to Neill’s philosophy. A parent who spanks his child actually hates him, and his desire to hurt the child results from his own unsatisfied sex life. At Summer-hill, one young student broke seventeen windows without receiving so much as a verbal reprimand.

5. Adolescents should be told sexual promiscuity is not a moral issue at all. At Summerhill, premarital intercourse was not sanctioned only because Neill feared the consequences of public indignation. He and members of his staff sometimes went nude to eliminate sexual curiosity. He predicted that the adolescents of tomorrow would find a more healthy existence through an unrestricted sex life. (What they found was a disease called AIDS and a firsthand knowledge of other sexually transmitted diseases.)

6. No pornographic books or materials should be withheld from the child. Neill indicated that he would buy filthy literature for any of his students who wished to have it. This, he felt, would cure their prurient interests—without harming the child.

7. Children should not be required to say “thank you” or “please” to their parents. Further, they should not even be encouraged to do so.

8. Rewarding a child for good behavior is a degrading and demoralizing practice. It is an unfair form of coercion.

9. Neill considered books to be insignificant in a school. Education should consist largely of work with clay, paint, tools, and various forms of drama. Learning is not without value, but it should come after play.

10. Even if a child fails in school, the matter should never be mentioned by his parents. The child’s activities are strictly his business.

11. Neill’s philosophy, in brief, was as follows: Eliminate all authority; let the child grow without outside interference; don’t instruct him; don’t force anything on him.

If A. S. Neill had been the only lonely proponent of this assault on authority, he would not have been worthy of concern. To the contrary, he represented an extreme example of a view that became very widely accepted in educational circles. Herbert R. Kohn authored
The Open Classroom
and helped give respectability to a somewhat more sane version of the concept in public schools. Believe it or not, this was “cutting edge” stuff for more than a decade. We’ve now had twenty-five years to evaluate the fallout from the lessening of discipline and authority in the classroom. Look at what happened to the generation that was influenced most by it.

They concluded in the late sixties that God was dead, that immorality was the new morality, that disrespect and irreverence were proper, that unpopular laws were to be disobeyed, that violence was an acceptable vehicle for bringing change, (as were their childhood tantrums), that authority was evil, that pleasure was paramount, that older people were not to be trusted, that diligence was distasteful, and that their country was unworthy of allegiance or respect. Every one of those components can be linked to the philosophy taught by A. S. Neill, but also believed by many of his contemporaries. It cost us a generation of our best and brightest, many of whom still suffer from the folly of their youth!

Not only did the misguided philosophy set up the student revolution of the late sixties. It also caused serious damage to our school system and the kids who became the victims of it. I was a young teacher at the time and was shocked to see the lack of order and control in some of my colleagues’ classrooms. The confusion was evident at every grade level. Tiny first graders cowed their harassed teachers as systematically as did the boisterous high school students. In some situations, entire classes became so proficient at disrupting order that they were dreaded and feared by their future teachers. It seemed ridiculous for school officials to tolerate such disobedience when it could have been easily avoided. However, in instances when the educators did exercise firmness, many parents protested and demanded leniency for their children.

I have lived long enough, now, to have followed some of those kids into adult life. I’ve talked to them personally. I’ve read their testimonials. I’ve felt their anger. One of the most poignant statements I’ve seen was written in the “My Turn” section of
Newsweek
magazine, August 30, 1976. The author, Mara Wolynski, was a product of the philosophy I have been describing. Her story, “Confessions of a Misspent Youth,” tells it all.