CONSEQUENCE
Commentary
by Carolyn Bennett
The news
program Democracy Now shines light on some important issues in American life.
Stories about
police violence in schools and the interface of school and law enforcement are
important considerations in the public interest.
But the
latest incidents of clashes (think: USA in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, …)
between American classroom students and police and a deluge of images and retellings, “gone
viral on the Internet”—how often do we hear that phrase”—are dealing not with underlying
causes but effect; fallout not preexisting conditions or situations, prior acts,
neglect, and or a pattern of misplaced priorities and flawed values. 
As someone
who was a teacher for many years, at different levels of U.S. education (and
having seriously studied teaching and learning, school in society, human
development), I know that for a long time, there has been a breakdown in the
character of discipline and respect in American schools, in relations between
teacher and taught, between instructor and administrator, between parents and
educators, professors and entrenched politicized power, between schools and society.
Too many
contemporary teachers, K-12 through higher education, fantasy themselves “friends”
of students. They pander like politicians to no good effect.
Students are
not helped to “mature”, to develop in healthy ways. Often teachers and parents are
not “mature.” Students are not taught how to behave: they are not learning
discipline and respect nor are they given examples of these. They are not learning
to develop their minds, to think, to expand ethically, civilly, intellectually.
Underlying causes, preconditions
first factors
Teachers are not well-trained as educators, neither are administrators; the latter often fail to support teachers, fail to support good teaching and learning. Awards or diplomas in grade school do not encourage development of good character traits or good teaching and learning, though they might support the opposite—lying, cheating and stealing.
Many “teachers”
and administrators are not educators at all. They are business people or
technicians from, as some are fond of saying, the “real world,” some private sector.
A teacher has to be inclined toward lifelong learning but today’s classroom
personnel, schooled “in the real world,” know it all. Children and students in
classrooms K through college subjected to contractors and entrepreneurs
crunching numbers, competing with other numbers crunchers, making up awards, lauding
themselves as “award-winners, and taking home the profits. Education is not
meant to be profit-taking.
This is not
education. There has been a drastic change in the model, in what constitutes “education”
– as the “leading out,” “emerging,” “evolving,” a journey. What we have are underlying,
crippling causes, prior conditions, we refuse to address.
Law Enforcement an Effect of
Breakdown
Because their
mission and motives (as with business’s profit motive) is totally different and
incompatible with human development and schooling, law enforcement personnel have
no business being employed in educational institutions, elementary and
secondary or higher education – private, public or parochial. An educator would
know this.
The placement
of police—people who deal with criminal behavior and criminals, allegations of crimes
and collection of case evidence—in schools is a consequence of a prior
condition resting with school boards’ (uninformed or ill-informed by school
teachers) and municipalities’ flawed decisions, pandering politics, and irresponsibility.
Another factor
in a complexity of failures is training. In the broader sense beyond schools,
whether on streets or anywhere else, police officers and those ranked above
them are poorly trained and poorly supervised; the upper levels of law enforcement,
as is true of municipal officials, are often politicized. At all levels there
is a sense of inattention, carelessness, the unattended, and out of control, the
relinquishing of responsibilities. And instead of fixing underlying problems, each
sector engages in blaming one or another individual or sector. |
T
|
he overarching
condition that contributes to America’s problems, the quality of its human
relationships, individual human failures—in schools and elsewhere—is round-the-clock violence, support of violence, priorities of destruction (in opposition to civility
and dialogue, care, construction, cooperation, uplift, peace, nonviolence)
perpetrated by mass media content, commercial interests promoting consumerism,
and corrupt government officials.
Corrupt
government leadership has effectively destroyed the proper role of government of,
by and for the people – in the interest of the common good. In positions of
power are corruptible people proposing and perpetrating warped priorities –
against the public interest. If “just”
law enforcement existed in America, these people would be brought up on charges
for burglarizing the public trust.
In Democracy
Now’s headlines today, along with stories of police violence in U.S. schools is
the shameful example of corruption-fed chronic waste that destroys America, its
people and society. It also destroys large portions of the rest of the world. Though
many would like to, we cannot realistically separate decisions in U.S. domestic
affairs (neglect of individual and public health, education, welfare, work,
human needs and relations, physical and natural infrastructural needs, neglect
of cities, states and municipalities) from decisions in U.S. foreign affairs
(endlessly arming and bombing the world’s peoples, funding manufacture and
trade in lethal weaponry, creating enemies to arm and bomb, in a endless cycle
of violence and destruction).|
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oday’s headline
reports an endless bleeding of billions for bombs: “The Pentagon (U.S. War Department)
has awarded Northrop Grumman,” world leader in weapons of mass destruction, a
contract likely to rise to nearly 100 BILLION. “More than $20 billion…,” the article
says, and before all is said and done, the total outlay could “be valued at $80
billion and yield 100 new bombers.”
This outrageous
wastefulness in a country where an estimated 1,750,000 people are homeless; 12,
000,000 children languish below the poverty level.
One report
ranks the United States second in ignorance and its quality of education inferior
to many countries Americans disparage as “second world.” The United States of
America moves progressively backward. A study assessing the education systems of
50 countries ranked the United States seventeenth; a year earlier another report
ranked the U.SA fourteenth.
Of course no
one has to read global reports to deduce with a fair amount of certainty that belligerence
and inherent corruption of U.S. leaders correlates directly with the
backwardness of America’s people; and that care and substantive curricular content
in rigorous subjects well taught in schools advances educational equality among
students. No petty rewards, cellular phones or coercion required.
Pertinent links
“U.S. ranked
17th in an assessment of the education systems of 50 countries—behind several
Scandinavian and Asian nations, which claimed the top spots” http://www.ibtimes.com/us-17th-global-education-ranking-finland-south-korea-claim-top-spots-901538
“The U.S.
ranks 14th in education: According to Pearson, the United States has a
“cognitive skills and educational attainment” score of 0.39, which makes the
United States rank fourteenth out of forty countries ranked in that category” https://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/category/education/
“Are the
world’s schools making inequality worse?” William Schmidt, Michigan State
University, September 30, 2015, http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/are-worlds-schools-making-inequality.html
“Northrop
Grumman Wins $20 Billion Contract to Build Bombers,” http://www.democracynow.org/2015/10/28/headlines
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A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora
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