A Shot of Moral in Oppressive Times

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?

Can anything be done to turn this around?

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them?

Yes. It is called the “abuse syndrome.” How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims’ faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker. So the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.

Does knowing the truth of their abuse set people free when they are deep in these abuse syndromes?

No. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing; it can feel shameful — and there is nothing more painful than shame. When one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action, but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one’s humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.

Has such a demoralization happened in the U.S.?

In the United States, 47 million people are without health insurance, and many millions more are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington, D.C., protesting this betrayal.

Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry, yet only a handful of U.S. citizens have protested these circumstances.

Remember the 2000 U.S. presidential election? That’s the one in which Al Gore received 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. That’s also the one that the Florida Supreme Court’s order for a recount of the disputed Florida vote was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a politicized 5-4 decision, of which dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens remarked: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.” Yet, even this provoked few demonstrators.

When people become broken, they cannot act on truths of injustice. Furthermore, when people have become broken, more truths about how they have been victimized can lead to shame about how they have allowed it. And shame, like fear, is one more way we become even more psychologically broken.

U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses: They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don’t act, the weaker we get. And ultimately to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to shut-down mode and use escape strategies such as depression, substance abuse, and other diversions, which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all abuse syndromes.

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

Maybe.

Shortly before the 2000 U.S. presidential election, millions of Americans saw a clip of George W. Bush joking to a wealthy group of people, “What a crowd tonight: the haves and the haves-more. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base.” Yet, even with these kind of inflammatory remarks, the tens of millions of U.S. citizens who had come to despise Bush and his arrogance remained passive in the face of the 2000 non-democratic presidential elections.

Perhaps the “political genius” of the Bush-Cheney regime was in their full realization that Americans were so broken that the regime could get away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?

The U.S. government-corporate partnership has used its share of guns and terror to break Native Americans, labor union organizers, and other dissidents and activists. But today, most U.S. citizens are broken by financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of having no health insurance.

The U.S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 American Sociological Review study (“Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades”) reported that, in 2004, 25 percent of Americans did not have a single confidant. (In 1985, 10 percent of Americans reported not having a single confidant.) Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, describes how social connectedness is disappearing in virtually every aspect of U.S. life. For example, there has been a significant decrease in face-to-face contact with neighbors and friends due to suburbanization, commuting, electronic entertainment, time and money pressures and other variables created by governmental-corporate policies. And union activities and other formal or informal ways that people give each other the support necessary to resist oppression have also decreased.

We are also broken by a corporate-government partnership that has rendered most of us out of control when it comes to the basic necessities of life, including our food supply. And we, like many other people in the world, are broken by socializing institutions that alienate us from our basic humanity. A few examples:

Schools and Universities: Do most schools teach young people to be action-oriented — or to be passive? Do most schools teach young people that they can affect their surroundings — or not to bother? Do schools provide examples of democratic institutions — or examples of authoritarian ones?

A long list of school critics from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Ivan Illich, and John Taylor Gatto have pointed out that a school is nothing less than a miniature society: what young people experience in schools is the chief means of creating our future society. Schools are routinely places where kids — through fear — learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless. These are great ways of breaking someone.

Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials — badges of compliance for corporate employers — in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.

Mental Health Institutions: Aldous Huxley predicted today’s pharmaceutical societyl “[I]t seems to me perfectly in the cards,” he said, “that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude.”

Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable.

Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” and “often argues with adults.” An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance — for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the “disease” goes away.

When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a “passive-aggressive revolution” by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything — this is one reason why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug “treatments” have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution.

Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the “Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy.”

Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don’t know themselves — and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or “museumize” other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.

Commericalism of Damn Near Everything: While spirituality, music, and cinema can be revolutionary forces, the gross commercialization of all of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now, damn near everything – not just organized religion — has become “opiates of the masses.”

The primary societal role of U.S. citizens is no longer that of “citizen” but that of “consumer.” While citizens know that buying and selling within community strengthens that community and that this strengthens democracy, consumers care only about the best deal. While citizens understand that dependency on an impersonal creditor is a kind of slavery, consumers get excited with credit cards that offer a temporarily low APR.

Consumerism breaks people by devaluing human connectedness, socializing self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating people from normal human emotional reactions, and by selling the idea that purchased products — not themselves and their community — are their salvation.

Can anything be done to turn this around?

When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don’t set them free. What sets them free is morale.

What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.

The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized population are mental health professionals — at least those who have not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in. Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image, spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.

Mental health professionals’ focus on symptoms and feelings often create patients who take themselves and their moods far too seriously. In contrast, people talented in the craft of maintaining morale resist this kind of self-absorption. For example, in the question-and-answer session that followed a Noam Chomsky talk (reported in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002), a somewhat demoralized man in the audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a phase of hopelessness. Chomsky responded, “Yeah, every evening . . .”

If you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what’s the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what’s the point? . . . First of all, those predictions don’t mean anything — they’re more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you’re guaranteeing that’ll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget pessimism.”

A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is not taking the advertised reality too seriously. In the early 1960s, when the overwhelming majority in the U.S. supported military intervention in Vietnam, Chomsky was one of a minority of U.S. citizens actively opposing it. Looking back at this era, Chomsky reflected, “When I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that we would ever have any effect. . . So looking back, I think my evaluation of the ‘hope’ was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read.”

An elitist assumption is that people don’t change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. Elitist “helpers” think they have done something useful by informing overweight people that they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric intake and increase exercise. An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale.

This article is reposted from Alternet

The Myth of Adult Power

Adultism teaches us from the youngest years that just because a person is young they must restrain, refrain and kowtow to older people around them. This is a taught relationship that is instilled by parents, reinforced by families and friends, and enforced by preschool and school, all the way through graduation. Customs, culture, tradition and heritage are passed between generations this way; the abuse of this norm is rampant though, with the legacies of corporal punishment, age discrimination and ineffectual parenting and educational techniques choking the joy, freedom and power out of children and youth before they ever have a chance to any to their fullest extent.

My six-year-old daughter is at the point in her life where she is reverential to older children. I have seen the third, forth and fifth graders she sees at her school fascinate her; her reactions to youth older than that as being similar to her reactions to adults. Without bowing in front of anyone, she defers to older kids’ opinions and beliefs oftentimes. I think there is an amount of this that is normal and even good; but somewhere along the way the practice goes awry. We are taught from a very young age that when it comes to age, respect means servility and obedience. There are a few of us who kick that, challenging the status quo with individual and social activism and trying to defeat the oppressive mechanisms throughout our lives. But in reality that is a very small percentage, and even the fighters are still entrapped and enmeshed, slowly perpetuating the negativity that we weren’t aware we were perpetuating in the first place. I don’t want that for my daughter, and I don’t want that for myself; in our society it feels like there is an amount of that that’s inevitable.

The myth of adult power is one that is reinforced throughout society. When I wrote about adultcentrism on Wikipedia a few years ago there were few references to the concept anywhere online. I had to constantly pull information from libraries and Google Books. Now the word is becoming more commonly used, and as I’ve written about before, it needs to go further. The awareness of the ever-present adult-driven decision-making throughout society – in homes, schools, places of worship, community agencies, youth-serving organizations – has led to a stagnation of purpose and belonging, and even a decline. We need young people to claim those spaces, not as their own but as members of the larger communities they belong to. Adultcentrism is the enemy of that concept.

Adultcentism relies on adultocracy – the rulership of adults based simply on age – to enforce it’s power. Adultocracy is expressed most overtly in the publicly elected officials and government supporting their activities; the police and judicial systems in place to enforce laws; and the military and public schools that imply authority and enforce common alignment with social, cultural and economic standards. It also glares in less formal institutions such as families and social structures like friendships. I’ve been in many conversations where people argue adultocracy is the outcome of a capitalist economy, and I don’t disagree with them many days. However, there are times when I believe that the myth of adult power, including adultism, adultcentricism and adultocracy, is perpetuated merely because of the fear of youth, or ephebiphobia.

Whatever the causes may be, I believe that as ethical youth and adults it’s our responsibility to be aware of how we perpetuate the myth of adult power. As an adult living intensely in our society, and with the intention of defeating adultism, I believe I have the ethical duty of sharing responsibility, power, knowledge, opportunity, resources, and anything else I can with young people. What is your charge?

Adam Fletcher is an internationally recognized author, trainer and consultant focused on youth engagement. He works with organizations and schools on developing youth leaders, team building, service-learning, and best practices in youth engagement. He has a passion for empowering young people to succeed and sustaining professionals in their youth engagement practice.

Check out his blog at YoungerWorld

Kids Tasered at School

“Apparently corporal punishment is unfortunately alive and well in the public school system, as this article clearly points out. And the degree of corporal punishment  is getting more wicked.”

One spring day this April, at the Franklin Correctional Institution on Florida’s Highway 67, Sgt. Walter Schmidt pulled out his electronic immobilization device — EID in correctional officer parlance — and zapped two people, who immediately “yelped in pain, fell to the ground and grabbed red burn marks on their arms,” according to the St. Petersburg Times. The two were not inmates at the prison, however. They were students visiting as part of “Take Our Daughters and Sons To Work Day.” The move cost Schmidt his job, despite his claim that he merely intended to demonstrate how the devices worked. He had even asked the children’s parents (who were also employees at the prison) permission first. “When they said ’sure,’ I went ahead and did it,” he told the Times. “It wasn’t intended to be malicious, but educational. The big shock came when I got fired.” Schmidt wasn’t alone in his job-costing blunder. In fact, it came just one day after other children, visiting different prisons were similarly shocked. “A total of 43 children were directly and indirectly shocked by electric stun guns during simultaneous Take Your Sons and Daughters to Work Day events gone wrong at three state prisons last month,” the St. Petersburg Times reported on May 16. “One was a warden’s daughter.” Their ages ranged from 8 to 17. Fourteen of the kids were “directly shocked.” The other 29 were “indirectly exposed when they held hands with a person who was shocked. With the kids circled together, the electricity could flow from one child’s hands to the next.” Walt McNeil, secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections told the Times, “I can’t imagine what these officers were thinking to administer this device to children, nor can I imagine why any parent would allow them to do so. This must not happen again.” The bizarre rash of student electrocutions might have been an aberration on Florida prison grounds, but the guards — three of whom were fired and two of who resigned — might be forgiven for assuming that such devices are somehow safe for kids. Even as news outlets across the country report episode after episode where police officers tase and use stun guns on unlikely people — the pregnant woman at a baptism in Virginia or the 72-year-old woman in a Texas traffic stop — more and more police officers are being given tasers to carry into schools. And not just on college campuses; middle and high schools across the country are inviting Taser-toting cops on school grounds. This comes at a time when Tasers have claimed the lives of hundreds of people, including three teenagers this year. While heightened security might be a necessity in an age where kids smuggle deadly weapons to school, this fact alone should give parents and school officials pause. Even as school administrators and local law enforcement accept and incorporate Tasers as disciplinary measures, deploying them on school grounds is putting students at risk. Is Breaking School Rules a Crime? Last September, police officers in Hawthorne, Calif., tased an autistic 12-year-old boy at his middle school after he became “violent,” launching a misconduct investigation by the police department. In June, at Penn Hills High School in Pennsylvania, a student was tased in the hallway after ignoring a police officer’s orders to put away his cell phone. (“The kid refused to listen,” Penn Hills Police Chief Howard Burton explained, saying the student then “pushed the officer.”) In 2006, an 11th-grader named Angel Debnam was tased at her high school in Bunn, N.C., just outside Raleigh. “Something sticks in you, and it’s like a wire,” Debnam described to local ABC affiliate WTVD. “When I was on the ground crying and shaking, he asked me, ‘Was that enough? Are you calmed down now?’ and he did it again.” In March, the Los Angeles Times reported that “the number of law enforcement agencies that have given Tasers to officers who work on school campuses has grown to well over 4,000,” according to Steve Tuttle, vice president of communications at Taser International. That’s up from 1,700 in 2005. In an e-mail to AlterNet last week, Tuttle said that this estimate remains accurate, noting that it “includes municipal law enforcement agencies that have school resource officers (SROs) for elementary and high schools, as well campus police for colleges and universities.” But Tuttle took issue with the notion that Tasers are used “for unruly students’ as the L.A. Times article inferred.” “They are used to protect students and faculties,” he said, as well as police officers hired to patrol school grounds. Just weeks into the 2009-2010 school year, at least one report has surfaced of a student being tased on school grounds. In Topeka, Kan., a teenager at Capital City School was sent to the hospital after being tased, reportedly after “attacking” a school police officer while a Topeka police officer handcuffed him. (According to local media, the student “was being suspended for violating school rules.”) ‘Our Premier Law Enforcement Electronic Control Device’ Last fall, police officers patrolling Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Fla., joined the ranks of school security officers who carry Tasers. The decision followed years of controversy over the measure, which was announced in 2005. That January, local press reports said the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office had signed a $1.8 million contract with Taser International to buy 1,800 Taser guns for city police officers over the next two years, some of which would be used by school security officers. The timing was at least partly motivated by Superbowl XXXIX, which was held at Jacksonville Municipal Stadium that February. According to the Associated Press, “some school officials [were] surprised by the action, saying they were never told by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office that it planned to issue stun guns to the officers assigned to most middle and high schools.” But plans to deploy the Tasers were put on hold shortly after. In late February 2005, Sheriff John Rutherford imposed a blanket moratorium on Taser use by the JSO after it came under fire for the repeated tasing of a 13-year-old, 65-pound girl who was in handcuffs inside a patrol car. Llahsmin Lynn Kallead had reportedly kicked the inside of the police car when she was shocked multiple times by her arresting officer. “I saw her jump from one side of the police car to the other” from the shock, her mother, Rosie Vaughan, told reporters. “She shook.” It was surely a PR nightmare for Rutherford, who had gone to great lengths to prove the safety and usefulness of the devices, holding town hall meetings across the county on the topic. The stocky 52-year-old had even volunteered to be tased, on camera, to demonstrate. (“Rutherford took a hit in the back and fell to the floor as other officers held his arms,” according to Jacksonville’s News 4. “He bounced back up almost immediately, saying, ‘There you have it.’ “) In a conversation with AlterNet, the sheriff’s office preferred to refer to Tasers by the name the company gives them: “electronic control devices” or ECDs. A JSO employee told AlterNet, “we were, obviously, very thorough and deliberative in making sure that they fit in our use-of-force matrices.” For the JSO, the main value of the Taser is that “it enables the officer to bring someone under control.” This apparently includes students and other hard-to-handle populations. Not only are the devices deployed in all the middle and senior high schools in Jacksonville, according to the sheriff’s office, “we’ve also had many incidents where a mentally impaired person was brought under control through the use of the ECD.” The model used in Jacksonville schools is the TASER X26, which, unlike those used by the detention officer who tased the kids at the prison field trip, can be fired remotely, hitting targets as far as 35 feet away with 50,000 volts of electricity. Taser International describes the X26 model as “our premier law enforcement electronic control device.” A ‘Nonlethal’ Weapon That Has Killed Hundreds In December 2008, Amnesty International released a 130-page report, “Less Than Lethal? The Use of Stun Weapons in U.S. Law Enforcement,” which found that since 2001, 334 people had died after being tased. (This figure is already obsolete.) The vast majority of these deaths were due to cardiac or respiratory arrest. Of the 334 victims, 299 of them were unarmed. The state with the most recorded Taser deaths was California, with 55. Florida ranked second, with 52. The victims were mostly adults, but they also included teenagers, like 17-year-old Darryl Turner, who “collapsed shortly after being shocked for 37 seconds in the chest.” According to the autopsy, a “lethal disturbance” of his heart rhythm was “precipitated by the agitated state and associated stress, as well as the use of the conducted-energy weapon.” According to Amnesty, “the coroner also noted that there were no anatomic findings indicating a pre-existing cardiac abnormality or disease, and no illegal drugs in his system.” The first three reported deaths by Taser in 2009 all involved teenage victims. In January, 17-year-old Derick Jones of Martinsville, Va., died after a police officer responded to a complaint about public urination by chasing him into a house and tasing him when the boy “moved rapidly” toward him. In the spring, two teenage boys in Michigan, 15-year-old Brett Elder and 16-year-old Robert Mitchell, died within weeks of one another after being tased by police officers. In both cases, police accused the teens of resisting arrest. Brett’s father, Eugene Elder, acknowledged that his son, who was days away from his 16th birthday, might have been confrontational. Still, he told the Bay City Times. “There’s no reason to kill my boy.” “[The police] are here to protect us,” Renea Mitchell, Robert’s mother told CNN. “There’s no reason for what they’ve done. There’s no reason, no excuse.” Taser critics have long pointed out that the devices are marketed as nonlethal despite a lack of independent data — and considerable anecdotal evidence to the contrary. According to Amnesty International, “the only medical safety studies prior to the marketing of the Advanced M26 Taser in late 1999 were animal tests conducted for Taser International to see whether the device could cause ventricular fibrillation in a pig and three dogs.” Even those conclusions have been challenged in recent years. In a study carried out by a team of doctors and scientists at Chicago’s Cook County hospital in 2006, 11 unfortunate pigs were shocked with Taser guns — researchers tased them multiple times, in 40-second increments — to devastating effect. “When the jolts ended, every animal was left with heart-rhythm problems, the researchers said. Two of the animals died from cardiac arrest, one three minutes after receiving a shock.” Some have argued that pigs aren’t reliable testing subjects. (“In my modeling, I prefer to use humans,” Dr. Jeffry Ho, an associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Minnesota told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. ) This includes Taser International’s co-founder, Rick Smith, who has argued that pigs weigh less than 100 pounds and “have a very different physiology from humans,” according to CBC News — an argument that would seem to undermine the company’s own research techniques. In March 2005, a report by the (rather bizarrely named) Human Effects Center of Excellence at Brooks Air Force Base, which tests “nonlethal” weapon technology, found “a large margin of safety with the ‘normal X26 operating output’ in the case of large children and adults,” according to Amnesty. The study’s authors, who based their research primarily on data provided to them by Taser International, also reviewed other studies, including “tests investigating the effects of Tasers on the hearts of pigs weighing between 30 and 117 kilograms (66 and 258 pounds).” They found that the more a pig weighed, the less potential risk there was for internal injury. “These tests have been interpreted to conclude that smaller individuals (e.g. children) may be more susceptible to adverse effects from Taser shocks,” according to Amnesty. In 2007, the U.K.’s Defense Scientific Advisory Council Sub-Committee on the Medical Implications of Less-Lethal Weapons (DOMILL) concluded that although there is “very limited information globally on the relative vulnerability of children to Tasers,” existing data suggest that “the safety factor for induction of ventricular fibrillation by Taser discharge in children at the younger (i.e. smaller) range of the pediatric population may be lower compared with that in the adult population.” In other words, the smaller the child, the less voltage it takes to hurt them. “Until more research is undertaken to clarify the vulnerability of children to Taser currents,” the study concluded, “children and persons of small stature should be considered at possible greater risk than adults.” Playing With Fire Reports of children who have died after being tasered may mainly tell the stories of teenagers, but, along with an apparent misunderstanding of the sheer force of Tasers and stun guns (at least if the Take Your Children to Work Day fracas is any indication), the already heavy-handed approach to students as young as 7 in some schools suggests that arming police officers with Tasers might invite dangerous scenarios. Take, for example, police in Avon Park, Fla., who handcuffed and arrested a 7-year-old girl named Desre’e Watson, when she threw a tantrum in her kindergarten class. Or cops in Detroit this past June, who handcuffed a fourth-grade special-ed student to the door of his principal’s office for four hours. If teachers, administrators and police have resorted to such measures to get a handle on unruly children, won’t adding Tasers to the equation up the risk factor? In an era that sees students standing in line to go through metal detectors before homeroom, there’s no question that weapons in school require reliable school security. Arming school security officers with “nonlethal” weapons might seem to be a good solution. That is, if Tasers actually fit the bill.

From Alternet

Ron Miller Keynote at Education Revolution

done

Ron Miller is recognized internationally as one of the major thinkers and activists in the emerging field of holistic education. He has written or edited eight books and authored numerous articles, chapters and book reviews, including What Are Schools For?, Holistic Education in American Culture (Holistic Education Press, 1990), Free Schools, Free People: Education and Democracy After the 1960s (State University of New York Press, 2002), Educational Freedom for a Democratic Society (Resource Center for Redesigning Education, 1995), Creating Learning Communities (Foundation for Educational Renewal, 2000), and, with Riane Eisler, Educating for a Culture of Peace (Heinemann, 2004).

Ron is currently the editor of Education Revolution, The Magazine of Alternative Education, and the education writer for the online journal Global Intelligencer. His latest book is The Self-Organizing Revolution: Common Principles of the Educational Alternatives Movement (Holistic Education Press, 2008).

You can support AERO by purchasing our products (over 200 great education books including many of Ron’s!) online at www.educationrevolution.org/products.html.  Ron’s talk can be purchased at www.educationrevolution.org/aero06miller.html

Also:

Ron’s essay archive is online and free at www.educationrevolution.org/articles.html

Kids Take Charge of School

Self portrait

Photo by Diana Morales-Manley

Fifteen-year-old Diana Morales-Manley struggled with reading when she was a young child. Instead of lowering her grades or holding her back, the Albany Free School let her pursue a budding fascination with photography. “Even though I wasn’t good at reading, I enjoyed looking at photos in books,” she says. She improved her reading by sounding out words in photo captions and looking for context clues in the images.

In seventh grade, she got a first-hand lesson on Hurricane Katrina when she traveled to New Orleans (shown above) and photographed ­people struggling to rebuild and help one ­another. The following year, Morales-Manley used her camera to document a class trip to Puerto Rico that included Deirdre Kelly, the Free School cook pictured on our cover, and studied Spanish and politics with locals who were immersed in a campaign to stop the U.S. military from testing bombs on Vieques Island.

The schools believe kids learn what they need if given time, space, and access to mentors. They might strengthen language skills by staging a play, or get a social studies lesson by apprenticing with an attorney. Or they might organize a regular history class, with exams and homework. Above all, kids learn “how to be in control of their lives and solve their own problems,” says Free School teacher Bhawin Suchak.

From Yes!

Taking Back Your Education

Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it.

Only you can educate you—and you can’t do it by memorizing. You have to find out who you are by experience and by risk-­taking, then pursue your own nature intensely. School routines are set up to discourage you from self-discovery. People who know who they are make trouble for schools.

To know yourself, you have to keep track of your random choices, figure out your patterns, and use this knowledge to dominate your own mind. It’s the only way that free will can grow. If you avoid this, other minds will manipulate and control you lifelong.

One method people use to find out who they are becoming, before others do, is to keep a journal, where they log what attracts their attention, along with some commentary. In this way, you get to listen to ­yourself instead of listening only to others.

Things I Want to Learn

From contributing editor Frances Moore Lappé:
To conceive and  share an “ecology of democracy”—integrating our knowledge of ecology and human nature to ignite more effective hope-in-action.
To tap dance better.
To be in such a place of perpetual gratitude that I can embrace death when it comes.

From board member Puanani Burgess:
How and why shoyu was invented.  The history of food invention and human curiosity.
How the words that I type on this computer get to you.
Is God necessary?

From contributing editor Carol Estes:
To dance the Lindy Hop.
To find my way through the wilderness with map and compass.
A system for managing multiple projects at the same time.
What it’s like to be incredibly fit.

Another path to self-discovery that seems to have atrophied through schooling lies in finding a mentor. People aren’t the only mentors. Books can serve as mentors if you learn to read intensely, with every sense alert to nuances. Books can change your life, as mentors do.

I experienced precious little of such thinking in 30 years of teaching in the public junior high schools of Manhattan’s ultra-progressive Upper West Side. I was by turns amused, disgusted, and disbelieving when confronted with the curriculum—endless drills of fractions and decimals, reading assignments of science fiction, Jack London, and one or two Shakespeare plays for which the language had been simplified. The strategy was to kill time and stave off the worst kinds of boredom that can lead to trouble—the trouble that comes from being made aware that you are trapped in irrelevancy and powerless to escape.
Institutionalized schooling, I gradually realized, is about obedience in exchange for favors and advantages: Sit where I tell you, speak when I allow it, memorize what I’ve told you to memorize. Do these things, and I’ll take care to put you above your classmates.

Wouldn’t you think everyone could figure out that school “achievement tests” measure no achievement that common sense would recognize? The surrender required of students meets the primary duty of bureaucratic establishment: to protect established order.

It wasn’t always this way. Class­ical schooling—the kind I was lucky enough to have growing up—teaches independent thought, appreciation for great works, and an experience of the world not found within the confines of a classroom. It was an education that is missing in public schools today but still exists in many private schools—and can for you and your children, too, if you take time to learn how to learn.

On the Wrong Side of the Tracks

In the fall of 2009, a documentary film will be released by a resident of my hometown of Monongahela, Pennsylvania. Laura Magone’s film, “One Extraordinary Street,” centers on a two-mile-long road that parallels polluted Pigeon Creek. Park Avenue, as it’s called, is on the wrong side of the tracks in this little-known coal-mining burg of 4,500 souls.

So far Park Avenue has produced an Army chief of staff, the founder of the Disney Channel, the inventor of the Nerf football, the only professional baseball player to ever strike out all 27 enemy batsmen in a nine-inning game, a winner of the National Book Award, a respected cardiologist, Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana, and the writer whose words you’re reading.

Did the education Monongahela offered make all these miracles possible? I don’t know. It was an education filled with hands-on experience, including cooking the school meals, serving them individually (not cafe­teria-style) on tablecloths, and cleaning up afterward. Students handled the daily maintenance, including basic repairs. If you weren’t earning money and adding value to the town by the age of seven, you were considered a jerk. I swept out a printing office daily, sold newspapers, shoveled snow, cut grass, and sold lemonade.

Classical schooling isn’t psychologically driven. The ancient Greeks discovered thousands of years ago that rules and ironclad procedures, when taken too seriously, burn out imagination, stifle courage, and wipe the leadership clean of resourcefulness. Greek education was much more like play, with studies undertaken for their own sake, to satisfy curiosity. It assumed that sane children want to grow up and recognized that childhood ends much earlier than modern society typically allows.

We read Caesar’s Gallic Wars—in translation between fifth and seventh grades and, for those who wanted, in Latin in ninth and tenth grades. Caesar was offered to us not as some histor­ical relic but as a workshop in dividing and conquering superior enemies. We read The Odyssey as an aid to thinking about the role of family in a good life, as the beating heart of meaning.

Monongahela’s education integrated students, from first grade on, into the intimate life and culture of the town. Its classrooms were free of the familiar tools of official pedagogy—dumbed-down textbooks, massively irrelevant standardized tests, insanely slowed-down sequences. It was an education rich in relationships, tradition, and respect for the best that’s been written. It was a growing-up that demanded real achievement.

The admissions director at Harvard College told The New York Times a few years ago that Harvard admits only students with a record of distinctive accomplishment. I instantly thought of the Orwellian newspeak at my own Manhattan school where achievement tests were the order of the day. What achievement? Like the noisy royalty who intimidated Alice until her head cleared and she realized they were only a pack of cards, school achievement is just a pack of words.

A Deliberate Saboteur

As a schoolteacher, I was determined to act as a deliberate saboteur, and so for 30 years I woke up committed to making the system hurt in some small way and to changing the destiny of children in my orbit in a large way.

Roadtrip Nation Takes the Route Less Traveled

It all started when four restless college grads realized school hadn’t led them to a career they cared about. One had trained to be a doctor, two to be business consultants, and one had no idea—but all knew there were more possibilities. So they bought a bus and drove around the country, interviewing people whose careers had taken inspiring turns—an environmental activist, a symphony conductor, a fisherman, a cartoonist. Their journey became a documentary film, then a television series, then an organization that sends groups of young people out on the road every year to find out how people choose careers they’re passionate about. Read on…

:: More Radical Acts of Education

Without the eclectic grounding in classical training that I had partially absorbed, neither goal would have been possible. I set out to use the classical emphasis on qualities and specific powers. I collected from every kid a list of three powers they felt they already possessed and three weaknesses they might like to remedy in the course of the school year.

I pledged to them that I’d do my level best inside the limitations the institution imposed to make time, advice, and support available toward everyone’s private goals. There would be group lessons as worthwhile as I could come up with, but my priorities were the opportunities outside the room, outside the school, even outside the city, to strengthen a power or work on a weakness.

I let a 13-year-old boy who dreamed of being a comic-book writer spend a week in the public library—with the assistance of the librarian—to learn the tricks of graphic storytelling. I sent a shy 13-year-old girl in the company of a loudmouth classmate to the state capitol—she to speak to her local legislator, he to teach her how to be fearless. Today, that shy girl is a trial attorney.

If you understand where a kid wants to go—the kid has to understand that first—it isn’t hard to devise exercises, complete with academics, that can take them there.

But school often acts as an obstacle to success. To go from the confinement of early childhood to the confinement of the classroom to the confinement of homework, working to amass a record entitling you to a “good” college, where the radical reduc­tion of your spirit will continue, isn’t likely to build character or prepare you for a good life.

I quit teaching in 1991 and set out to discover where this destructive insti­tution had come from, why it had taken the shape it had, how it managed to beat back its many critics for a century while growing bigger and more intrusive, and what we might do about it.

School does exactly what it was created to do: It solves, or at least mitigates, the problem of a restless, ambitious labor pool, so deadly for capitalist economies; and it confronts democracy’s other deadly problem—that ordinary people might one day learn to un-divide themselves, band together in the common interest, and take control of the institutions that shape their lives.

The present system of institutionalized schooling is a product of two or three centuries of economic and political thinking that spread primarily from a militaristic state in the disunited Germanies known as Prussia. That philosophy destroyed classical training for the common people, reserving it for those who were expected to become leaders. Education, in the words of famous economists (such as William Playfair), captains of industry (Andrew Carnegie), and even a man who would be president (Woodrow Wilson), was a means of keeping the middle and lower classes in line and of keeping the engines of capitalism running.

In a 1909 address to New York City teachers, Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said, “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity to forgo the privilege of a liberal education.”

My job isn’t to indict Woodrow or anyone else, only to show you how inevitable the schools you hate must be in the economy and social order we’re stuck with. Liberal education served the ancient Greeks well until they got too rich to allow it, just as it served America the same way until we got too rich to allow it.

What Can You Do About All This? A lot.

You can make the system an offer it can’t refuse by doing small things, individually.

You can publicly oppose—in writing, in speech, in actions—anything that will perpetuate the institution as it is. The accumulated weight of your resistance and disapproval, together with that of thousands more, will erode the energy of any bureaucracy.

You can calmly refuse to take standardized tests. Follow the lead of Melville’s moral genius in Bartleby, the Scrivener, and ask everyone, politely, to write: “I prefer not to take this test” on the face of the test packet.

You can, of course, homeschool or unschool. You can inform your kids that bad grades won’t hurt them at all in life, if they actually learn to master valuable skills and put them on offer to the world at large. And you can begin to free yourself from the conditioned fear that not being accepted at a “good” college will preclude you from a comfortable life. If the lack of a college degree didn’t stop Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Michael Dell (Dell Computer), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA), Warren Avis (Avis Rent-a-Car), Ted Turner (CNN), and so many others, then it shouldn’t be too hard for you to see that you’ve been bam­boozled, flummoxed, played for a sap by the propaganda mills of schooling. Get rid of your assumptions.

If you are interested in education, I’ve tried to show you a little about how that’s done, and I have faith you can learn the rest on your own. Schooling operates out of an assumption that ordinary people are biologically or psychologically or politically inferior; education assumes that individuals are sovereign spirits. Societies that don’t know that need to be changed or broken.

Once you take responsibility for your own education, you’ll join a growing army of men and women all across America who are waking up to the mismatch schools inflict on the young—a mismatch between what common sense tells you they’ll need to know, and what is actually taught. You’ll have the exquisite luxury of being able to adapt to conditions, to opportunities, to the particular spirits of your kids. With you as educational czar or czarina, feedback becomes your friend and guide.

I’ve traveled 3 million miles to every corner of this country and 12 others, and believe me, people everywhere are gradually waking up and striking out in new directions. Don’t wait for the government to say it’s OK, just come on in—the water’s fine.

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John Taylor Gatto wrote this article for Learn as You Go, the Fall 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Gatto was a New York State Teacher of the Year. An advocate for school reform, Gatto’s books include Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling and Weapons of Mass Instruction.

 

Interested? See the Higher Education Poster for 12 things really educated people know.

From Yes!

“Can’t Wait Until School Ends!”

CARPENTERSVILLE, IL—Local first-grader Connor Bolduc, 6, experienced the first inkling of a coming lifetime of existential dread Monday upon recognizing his cruel destiny to participate in compulsory education for the better part of the next two decades, sources reported.

“I don’t want to go to school,” Bolduc told his parents, the crushing reality of his situation having yet to fully dawn on his naïve consciousness. “I want to play outside with my friends.”

While Bolduc stood waiting for the bus to pick him up on his first day of elementary school, his parents reportedly were able to “see the wheels turning in his little brain” as the child, for the first time in his life, began to understand how dire and hopeless his situation had actually become.

Basic math—which the child has blissfully yet to learn—clearly demonstrates that the number of years before he will be released from the horrifying prison of formal schooling, is more than twice the length of time he has yet existed. According to a conservative estimate of six hours of school five days a week for nine months of the year, Bolduc faces an estimated 14,400 hours trapped in an endless succession of nearly identical, suffocating classrooms.

This nightmarish but undeniably real scenario does not take into account additional time spent on homework, extracurricular responsibilities, or college, sources said.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/6_year_old_stares_down_bottomless,” said the 3-foot-tall tragic figure, who would not have been able, if asked, to contemplate the amount of time between now and summer, let alone the years and years of tedium to follow.

The concept of wasting a majority of daylight hours sitting still in a classroom when he could be riding his bicycle, playing in his tree fort, or lying in the grass looking at bugs—especially considering that he had already wasted two years of his life attending preschool and kindergarten—seemed impossibly unfair to Bolduc. Moreover, sources said, he had no idea how much worse the inescapable truth will turn out to be.

Shortly after his mommy, homemaker Ellen Bolduc, 31, assured him that he would be able to resume playtime “when school lets out,” Connor’s innocent brain only then began to work out the implication of that sentence to its inevitable, soul-crushing conclusion.

When pressed for more detail on the exact timing of that event, Mrs. Bolduc would only reply “soon.” At that point, the normally energetic child grew quiet before asking a follow-up question, “After [younger sister] Maddy’s birthday?” thereby setting the stage for the first of thousands of rushing realizations he will be forced to come to grips with over the course of his subsequent existence.

Madison Ellen Bolduc was born on Sept. 28.

After learning that the first grade will continue for eight excruciating months beyond that date, it was only a matter of time before Bolduc inquired into what grade comes after first grade, and, when told, would probe further into how many grades he will have to complete before allowed to play with his friends.

The answer to that fatal question—12, a number too large for Bolduc to count on the fingers of both hands—will be enough to nearly shatter the boy’s still-forming psyche, said child psychology expert Eli Wasserbaum.

“When you consider that it doesn’t include another four years of secondary education, plus five more years of medical school, if he wants to follow his previously stated goal to grow up to be a doctor like his daddy, this will come as an interminably deep chasm of drudgery and imprisonment to [Connor],” said Wasserbaum. “It’s difficult to know the effect on his psychological well-being when he grasps the full truth: that his education will be followed by approximately four decades of work, bills, and taxes, during which he will also rear his own children to face the same fate, all of which will, of course, be followed by a brief, almost inconsequential retirement, and his inevitable death.”

“Even a 50-year-old adult would have trouble processing such a monstrous notion,” Wasserbaum added. “Oh my God, I’m 50 years old.”

The first of Bolduc’s remaining 2,299 days of school will resume at 8 a.m. tomorrow. On the next 624 Sundays, he will also be forced to attend church.

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