Imagine that you work in an office where some lout across the room chatters incessantly, badmouths other employees, curses and threatens anyone who so much as cast a disapproving look at him, and cannot be removed or fired, no matter how obnoxious he becomes. Nor can you ask for a transfer to another office or quit to find another job. You are stuck in that office with that person or others like him for the next ten years. Imagine further that more attention and benefits are lavished on the troublemakers than on conscientious employees like yourself who do their job without bothering anybody. Unless you had an unusually strong or saintly personality, you’d probably develop a bad case of stress, become demoralized, and lose all interest in your work.
Such a workplace environment, of course, couldn’t exist in the real world. But in the surreal world of public education it’s par for the course. School officials since the 1960’s have taken great pains to protect students from psychological as well as physical harm. They train teachers not to raise their voice in anger, to respect cultural differences, to be sensitive to learning disabilities, and so forth. Yet, they seem blind to the mental anguish they cause by mixing normal and unruly kids together in the same classroom.
The theory behind this long-standing practice is that when unruly kids are integrated with normal kids, they uplift one another. The unruly ones supposedly pick up good habits from the normal ones, and the normal ones, in turn, learn valuable lessons in human relations by serving as tutors and role models for the unruly ones.
But what really happens is that the unruly ones, unable or unwilling to keep up, become more unruly than ever; while the normal ones, unable to concentrate, become demoralized and, over time, dumb down. The more sensitive ones often develop lasting emotional problems.
As a peripatetic substitute teacher in the Alexandria, Virginia public schools, I have worked with and closely observed thousands of students of all ages and cultural backgrounds, and it’s obvious to me that the stress many experience is caused not by the pressures of schoolwork but by the chaos in their classrooms. Years ago corporal punishment was standard practice in public schools. Today the abuse meted out day after day, year after year, by unruly kids on their peers—and on teachers, I might add--is a far more cruel and traumatic form of punishment.
Public school higher-ups, however, are not wont to give up a bad idea. The reason their social engineering doesn’t work, they insist, is that teachers lack the necessary skills to carry it off. So they make teachers attend frequent staff- workshops and meetings on “mainstreaming,” “differentiation,’ “inclusion,” or whatever the latest jargon calls it. The experts brought in to conduct the workshops, though, never stay around to demonstrate their alleged expertise in a real classroom with real students. Once they are done lecturing, they repair to the peace and quiet of their offices.
These experts and those who hire them, I’m sure, work in places where there are no unruly colleagues around to make their lives miserable. Why they persist in denying the same to K-12 students, who, after all, are much more impressionable and vulnerable than adults, is a question begging for a clear answer.