Deducation US

In preparation for seeing Jonathan Kozol and hearing him speak in a couple of days in New York, I’m re-reading Shame of the Nation, a dangerous thing to do as it never fails to make my blood boil. Just in passing, I’d like to know how many of the Presidential candidates have actually read it themselves (not just send a campaign aide to read it and prepare an executive summary). I suspect not one, surely not one of the Republican candidates, all of whom seem not to get it when it comes to education. But how interesting would it be to make them all read it and then respond in detail, in depth. How can anyone read this book and not immediately want to go out and dismantle NCLB? I’d be interested–really!–to see how supporters of the NCLB would respond. What kinds of arguments would they offer up in the face of this powerful book?

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. In the Introduction to the book, describing the elementary school where he had his first full-time teaching job, Kozol writes, “Children who misbehaved were taken to the basement of the school where whippings were administered by an older teacher who employed a rattan whip which he first dipped in vinegar in order to intensify the pain….” (page 3). Now it’s no surprise that corporal punishment has been used extensively throughout history, but, thankfully, more enlightened times have seen the almost total abandonment of the practice in this country. Even though “Every industrialized country in the world now prohibits school corporal punishment, except the U.S. and Australia” and nearly half of all American states still technically allow corporal punishment, a 2003 Position Paper of the Society for Adolescent Medicine notes “… during the past 30 years … a growing outcry [has] emerged condemning such practices [i.e., corporal punishment] with school children as well.” Reports of corporal punishment in our schools have declined.

Specific child abuse definitions vary by state, but certain federal guidelines overarch state policies: the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act defines Child Abuse and Neglect as “[a]ny recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse or exploitation.” It should be clear that schools qualify as “caretakers,” so the only point of dispute would seem to be the “emotional harm” specification. While the theme of Shame of the Nation is not specifically that the NCLB is responsible for all bad things in education today but that for a variety of reasons current educational conditions for minorities have regressed to pre Brown v. Board of Education levels, the NCLB can be seen lurking behind much of the “restoration of apartheid schooling.” And its results–tiny children reduced to to tears, forced extra drills in dumbed-down test exercises taking the place of elementary school recesses, a seething rage against the system or in some cases a complete numbness to the injustices, children taught to hate school, children deprived of the joy and light of the humanities and art and music–seem to me to qualify as “serious emotional harm.” You could make a strong case that the NCLB meets the federal criteria for child abuse.

So, in the face of societal pressures not to beat children any longer, I just wonder if, given the mean-spiritedness of the conservative world-view in general that I’ve noted earlier and its highly visible instantiation in the NCLB, beating children into submission is being sublimated and resurfacing as testing and humiliating them into submission. The NCLB is the new vinegar-dipped whipping cane.