When Safe is Just a Feeling

Two key markers have appeared in what is almost certainly a response to the waves of school shootings that crested first at Columbine High School and then again in New Town, Connecticut, but which have lapped steadily at the national consciousness since that fateful April morning in Littleton, Colorado: 1) We have begun the process of arming our teachers (or, as we shall see in at least one case, they are arming themselves, or at least their vice principal is), and 2) We are beginning to militarize our school police, who, it should be noted, already come equipped with the standard issue Glock sidearm.

As to #1, The Washington Post reports that “The Argyle Independent School District in north Texas has started the 2014-15 school year, as KDAF-TV noted, ‘with guns blazing’ — or, rather, with newly armed teachers who have been given the right to use them ‘to protect our students.’” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) The Post adds that “In fact, nearly 20 states have laws allowing adults to carry licensed guns into schools.” And where schools aren’t proactively arming teachers, individual school personnel may be taking matters into their own hands, as, per Salon, in the case of one California public school administrator:

“Kent Williams is the vice principal of Tevis Junior High School in Bakersfield, California, and ever since he got his concealed-carry permit in 2010, he’s been bringing a handgun with him to work. Until recently, this wasn’t an issue (chiefly because other school administrators didn’t know he was doing it).” (http://www.salon.com/2014/09/10/middle_school_administrator_fights_for_right_to_bring_handgun_to_work/)
The Salon article goes on to explain that while Williams is currently on paid leave while the Panama-Buena Vista Union School District investigates matters (even as Williams’ lawyer threatens a lawsuit if Williams isn’t returned to the job), Williams faces no legal recriminations, with authorities “having concluded that his permit did not have any restrictions.” (ibid)

And regarding #2 above, the militarization of the school police, The Washington Post has also reported that “some school police in Compton will be permitted to carry semiautomatic AR-15 rifles — the same kind of rifle used in a recent Oregon school shooting – in schools… ‘in response to situations that clearly evidence a need or potential need for superior firepower to be used against armed suspects.’” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/08/21/in-compton-school-police-can-use-semiautomatic-weapons/) One can only imagine the potential crossfire, and wonder as to exactly how much better off we will be when our schools are battlefields instead of killing fields, i.e. will the post-battle carnage be any less than post-massacre?

Still, we’re used to cops with guns, and, increasingly, cops with military grade weaponry; the American police state is something of a fait accompli, sold to us as the cost of doing business in the post-9/11 world, and part and parcel of the national security state. No one says “Yes, sir” or “Yes, ma’am” anymore, but we all know how to say “Yes, officer.” But putting guns in the hands of your friendly neighborhood seventh grade social studies teacher, whose private life could heretofore be politely ignored as long as the teacher’s use of social media stayed within certain unspoken boundaries but whose every sick day must now be parsed for hints of distress and/or despair, gives one pause. Does Mr. Johnson have a nasty head cold, or does his recent break up with his fiancée have him reaching nihilistic conclusions about the point of it all such that I think I will just keep the twins home from middle school for the rest of the week? How many of America’s 3.1 million public school teachers could hold it together long enough to e.g. meet the Argyle Independent School District’s requirements to “obtain a license to carry it (the gun), pass a psychological evaluation and get training in how to use the weapon,”(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) but who have absolutely no business packing heat on lunch duty. (Anyone who can effectively run lunch duty will have long since mastered the Jedi Mind Trick, and, it goes without saying, guns are much too “clumsy and random” for Jedis.)

When one reads, again in The Washington Post, that an Idaho State University “instructor carrying a concealed gun accidentally shot himself in the foot in the chemistry lab,” and that “students were in attendance at the time but luckily none of them were hit,”(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) one begins to get a sense of how misguided the effort to protect children by arming their teachers really is. One is immediately reminded of the infamous data, accessible via a quick Google search, that a gun in the house makes homicides 2.7 times more likely. (The pro-gun websites pooh-poohing this data are just as easy to find on Google, but the critiques are robustly parried here: www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-kellermann.htm) And since there’s no reason to think that the schoolhouse is immune to all of the contingencies of the household, as exemplified by the accidental shooting in the Idaho chem lab, making it obvious to any rational observer that we don’t actually know how to make our children safe from school shootings and instead choose to place them at increased risk, then what are we really on about when we arm our teachers?

The answer, praise Jesus (or the Sacred of your chosen tradition ☺), is not that we want to place our children at increased risk, but that this increased risk is a (still deeply troubling) side effect of the adults’ own efforts to feel safe. We are pointed to this conclusion by two further Google-accessed data points. The first of the two involves a classic case of belief’s conquest of the facts on the ground; pace “2.7 times more likely,” “for the first time a majority of Americans say having a gun in the household makes it a safer place to be, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. By a wide 51 to 29 percent margin, more people say a gun in the house makes it safer rather than more dangerous.” (http://www.mediaite.com/online/poll-guns-make-people-who-own-them-feel-really-safe-everyone-else-not-so-much/) In other words, guns make those who possess them feel safer, even as gun ownership increases the risk of gun violence (e.g., “for every time a gun in or around the home was used in self-defense, or in a legally justified shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and eleven attempted or completed homicides. That’s one self-defense shooting for twenty-two accidental, suicidal, or criminal shootings, hardly support for the notion that having a gun handy makes people safer.” (http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/purple-wisconsin/184209741.html))

Our second follow-up data point highlights an inverse relationship between gun owners’ feelings and those of everyone around him: “By a margin of five to one, Americans feel less safe rather than more safe as more people in their community begin to carry guns.” (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/firearms-archives/) Apparently, “2.7 times more likely” means different things to different people. The confusion even extends into the home of the gun owner:

“Drill down on the 75% of the people in gun-owning households who think it makes their house a safer place to be, which leaves 25% who do not. Of those people who live in gun-owning households, 31% do not own a gun themselves. If you make the fair assumption that almost all of the people who actually own the guns think they make their home safer, that leaves almost all of the people who don’t personally own a gun, but live in a household with one, don’t think it makes them safer.” (http://www.mediaite.com/online/poll-guns-make-people-who-own-them-feel-really-safe-everyone-else-not-so-much/)

In sum, school shootings are horrifying, and teachers faced with the possibility that such an event could happen in their school and in their classroom understandably reach for the feeling of safety that comes with a gun, most likely telling themselves that the aura of safety fills the classroom, when in fact they have only ramped up the fear for the children they believe they are protecting. This process, coping with fear, anger, and pain by attempting to block those feelings in ways that amplify those very feelings in others, is, tragically, the common coin of our stunted social realm. It is elemental, to speak in the Christian idiom, to our fallenness. It doesn’t have to involve guns or even physical violence; as part of our everyday human scenery it is called blaming. I do it all the time, especially around the house, no matter that when I am whining yet again about who moved my stuff where I can’t find it almost invariably I discover that I moved my stuff. And even if it wasn’t me, big deal, let’s try for some perspective here.

Since perspective is in such short supply when one is busy blocking out pain by offloading it onto others (see the whining), I have in the last few weeks started a daily practice for some help in this area. Each morning I visit www.random.org to receive a randomized number between 1 and 59, which is how many Lojong slogans there are. These slogans are, according to the dust jacket for Always Maintain a Joyful Mind, the collection which houses all 59 slogans with commentaries by Pema Chodron, “a collection of 59 pith teachings to help… develop wisdom and compassion amid the challenges of daily living.” Random.org promises me that the numbers it provides are truly random, not, for example, like the random function on my old CD player which always cued up the same sequence of songs on Tom Petty’s masterpiece, Into the Great Wide Open. Nevertheless, in the first weeks of my new practice several of the numbers have been repeating, i.e. I am hardheaded and need to hear things more than once before getting the point. (I think the Buddhists call this ego.) Yesterday, I got #34 for at least the third time. It is a pithy prescription for those who would otherwise cope with fear, anger, and pain by attempting to block those feelings in ways that amplify those very feelings in others, i.e. for teachers who would carry guns and for forty-year olds who can’t shut up about who had the audacity to move their cell phone charger cord.

So, for all of us, #34, with Pema Chodron’s commentary in parentheses:

“Don’t transfer the ox’s load to the cow. (Don’t transfer your load to someone else. Take responsibility for what is yours.)”

Against Homework: A Polemic

As a schoolboy I tirelessly resented the intrusion of homework. School had me seven hours a day, my body rigidly confined to a desk, my mind a captive audience to the vagaries of curriculum, the insistence upon behavioral compliance the grinding subtext of every school-bound moment. This strict compliance includes the body, witness my kindergarten teacher placing me in a chair in front of and facing my classmates as I waited for my mother to rescue me with clean clothes after my bladder had not complied. It also includes the social, as evidenced by the fourth grade teacher who enforced complete and total silence in my elementary school cafeteria during lunch, and who made us proud of our subjugation by afterwards congratulating us all over the intercom for our spectacular act of capitulation. But this was never enough. In order to fulfill its overarching mission of subjecting the pupil to the sufficient degree of domination necessary for casting the dye of a conforming worker, school required homework.

Homework accomplishes a necessary step in the molding of the agreeable worker. The assignment of homework, whether completed, ignored, or eaten by the dog, demolishes the barrier between the realm of labor, with school but a proto-workplace, and the private sphere of home and family. With homework, home is metamorphosized into the place where work goes and they have to take it in. After homework, the home becomes little more than a branch office with better office furnishings. Henry Ford famously stated that you could have his Model T in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. Homework says you can do anything you want to do in life, as long as it is a job.

The best pupils, those who please their teachers most, are inevitably those who spend the most time doing homework. By giving their lives over entirely to school they have received everything that prep school has to offer, a preparation for replicating their self-sacrifice on the altar of professional success. Amidst the absence of sturm und drang, the silence, as hallmark of a well-modulated, professionally aspirational student body, shouts one thing: you can only serve one master. Doing all of your homework is the first and foundational act of serving that master for the rest of your life. The master rewards such servitude the only way it can, with some cash and yet more work. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, in their masterwork The Dialectic of Enlightenment, capture this succinctly: “The gradations in the standard of living correspond very precisely to the degree by which classes and individuals inwardly adhere to the system. Managers can be relied on.” The best early outward sign of this inwardly grounded reliability is doing your homework.

And I do mean early. A friend and, yes, co-worker of mine (my life is as dominated by work as the next guy; outside of my wife and family nearly the only people I interact with on any consistent basis are my co-workers) recently told me that her three-year-old daughter’s day care provider was assigning homework. My wife regales me with tales of published studies establishing the complete lack of any academic benefit to such early assignment of homework. But of course, any academic benefit of homework is always completely beside the point. By assigning homework at age three, the day care provider is passing on the only folk wisdom we have left, our societies’ master signifier, symbolically branded onto the forehead of every homeless vagrant cum economic deserter: Get A Job.

So when our childrens’ spines are literally bent by the weight of the homework they must tote home every night in their backpacks, a deforming of the body marking the self-sacrifice of their voyage to Harvard and beyond, a deforming, it goes without saying, preferable to those tattoos and piercings which might forever bar the door to observable managerial reliability, let us be reminded that these contrasting outward markings of, respectively, inauguration into or exclusion from professional status, are both symptoms of the soul-bending force of economic conscription. Let us remember this when we ask our daughters and sons if they have done their homework before they are allowed to go outside and play. But, of course, if they are staying inside to play another six consecutive hours on their Playstations anyway, perhaps the battle is already lost. They might just as well complete yet another pointless worksheet. Is it still too late to talk my wife into reconsidering homeschooling?

To Believe or Not to Believe, That is the Question

Those who would reform American education must beware the difficulty in reforming a system which already performs its true function, maintenance of the socioeconomic hierarchical status quo, perfectly. Would be reformers of urban public education (UPE) might initially take great comfort in the need for their services apparent in bulbous dropout rates and other assorted commonplace city school maladies. But the UPE reformer consigns herself to irrelevance when she mistakes the chaotic malaise of UPE as a sign of dysfunction, when in fact the apparent dysfunction is a symptom of UPE’s true function, the cementing of class immobility. The yet-to-be-seen successful UPE reformer must first take the necessary leap of faith and truly believe that really existing UPE is, against all outward appearances, a smashing success, in that it covertly fulfills its sub rosa, sinister function. Only by recognizing UPE for what it is, an instrument in the never ending story of class struggle, and by letting go of what UPE pretends to be, a flawed but curable system for the delivery of education to the masses, can a would be UPE reformer even begin the daunting task of initiating meaningful transformation. As long as the aspiring UPE reformer clings to her belief in UPE as a charming fixer-upper she will remain an unwitting accomplice in the maintenance of UPE as the guarantor of class immobility, as she will inevitably fail in achieving the impossible task of fixing what ain’t broke.

No one is more important in maintaining our necessary collective belief in the fiction of UPE as fixer-upper than the exceptional UPE alumnus who exhibits class mobility. This individual is shot forth from the belly of the beast like a Heimlich-dislodged chunk of meat, a propulsion necessary for the survival of UPE as currently constituted. If we follow the script we should see in this exceptional individual what is truly possible if only we were all to believe in and support our public schools. Ironically, it is the fact that we all already believe in our public schools, a belief paradoxically strengthened by their constant teetering on the verge of collapse, thereby increasing the intensity of our need to sustain them via our belief, which allows them to continue to function as instrument of oppression for the students condemned to their halls. Is it just coincidence that UPE produces just enough “success stories” to keep us all believing that we are just a reform away from tapping the limitless potential of the millions of children in urban schools, a belief mysteriously resilient to the contradictory fact of life as it is lived on city streets?

As a clinical social worker in a major UPE school system, I show up for work each day in order to help one more child become the exception that proves the rule. In doing so I am effectively attempting to feed the machine with the exceptions necessary to maintain our collective belief in the “potential” of UPE, and by now we all know that in touting someone’s potential we are merely gift-wrapping the reality of his or her current shortcomings. Wrapped up inside the shiny silver packaging of UPE spin is the coal-black heart of economic violence. If I am going to be complicit, as we all are, let me be so from within where at least I can spring a few of the inmates.

So how might the "potentially” successful reformer, one who believes in the true truth of UPE as the eight hundred pound gorilla sitting not in the room but on the backs of UPE’s students, initiate meaningful transformation? First and foremost, she would have to be a good liar; in order to penetrate the inner sanctum of UPE she must cloak herself in a false but outwardly convincing belief in the party line of accelerating student achievement, which if enacted would of course only ever serve to mint a modicum of exceptional individuals. Once ensconced inside the machine she would have to achieve the fantastical outcome of radicalizing millions of currently colonized consciousnesses, an act which looms larger than moving mountains. But Gandhi got the British out of India. And, perhaps more to the point, Dr. King got Jim Crow out of the American south. Of course, they shot Dr. King as soon as he started preaching economic justice. Which, with untold thousands of Americans dying and killing in the global “war on terror”, leaves me wondering what you and I are willing to lay down our lives for? In the meantime, I’ve got some exceptional children who need my clini(radi)cal assistance.