He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
--- Martin Luther King

RETURN
edited 4/20/15

Introduction

My fifth grade experience in Longfellow public school was a joy; a really educational experience.¹ Sixth grade was another story. My sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. P. was much taken by my "artistic ability"One fine day she told me, "You're going to enter the Gimbel's Department Store Art Contest on Healthy Living and win a prize!" I was somewhat flattered and excited at the thought that I would be permitted to while away several weeks of afternoons painting at a poster rather than following along the prescribed curriculum.

I began planning a poster on Healthy Living. What might I do? "Never you mind about that,"said Mrs. P.,"I have an old poster here you can just copy! Look! Isn't it wonderful?"

I was speechless. I was being told to do something that -- even then -- I recognized as deep-down dishonest. But the importunity was not coming, as it usually did, from classmates who were already seeing to my loss of innocence by teaching me -- with full details -- an obscenity a day. No, the temptation was coming from a member of that moral aristocracy, Teachers, who - my parents had drilled into me - were Ones Who Must Be Obeyed, Ones Who Knew Best What Was Good For Me.

I summoned up courage to say that I didn't want to just copy someone else's work. Mrs. P. responded,"I'm very disappointed in you. It's either paint this poster, or do arithmetic drills." So I painted.

With disgust and loathing I finished the poster. It was better than the original. Everyone admired it, especially She Who Had to Be Obeyed, Who Knew Best What Was Good For Me. The poster was hung up in the front of the room for general approbation while awaiting shipment to the exhibition.

I don't know what came over me. A day after finishing it, right after lunch, I walked up to that vile poster and took a dish of black paint and spattered it onto the painting. I trembled, confused with the righteousness of my disobedience.

I hurried back outside believing no one had seen me. I was wrong. Carolyn N. was a witness and ran to tattle to Mrs. P who berated me as soon as I returned to class. She put me on a diet of four-place addition drills with no recess for two weeks. Strangely, she didn't call my parents and inform them of my "misbehavior." Dear, sweet Carolyn, at Mrs. P's behest, cleaned up the poster. It was submitted in my name. It won a prize. When my parents and Mrs. P. accompanied me to the awards ceremonies, they remarked about how indifferent I seemed to the honor.

No Special Fault

The Devil gets up into the belfry by the Vicar's skirts
- T. Fuller, 1732

Clearly, such incidents are not restricted to public schools. I know, for example, of two private schools -- one, of the ancient elite -- where the headmasters sold drugs to the students. Only one headmaster was caught. In general, private education takes a quite different view of wrongdoing, than the view that is promulgated in public schools.²  Private education, thus, is, by its own definitions, not susceptible to the faults attributable to public education.

Even though parochial school kids no longer come home bearing tales of nuns wielding yardsticks in the classroom like Crusaders slaying heathen, I have gotten recent complaints by students in those schools that extended periods of class time before public elections were used to write letters to support political agendas. Students were told to sign their parents' names without asking permission even though the parents of the students might well have opposed or taken no position on the political issue. Corruption of educational mission is not unique to public education.

But public schools do provide unique opportunities for corruption for five interrelated reasons:

a. they are schools of last resort in a compulsory system;

b. this makes them susceptible to constraint by underinformed courts to institute procedures often contrary to good educational practice;

c. special, often ephemeral, interest groups can gain control over school practices by combining vociferousness with legal ingenuity;

d. not only naive idealists, but the weak-minded and pathologically sentimental are seduced into assuming teaching positions which they -- often with good reason -- abandon at the national rate of 13% per year; consequently

e.  surviving educators do not possess sufficient sense of profession to take risks opposing those who efforts in the long run distort and demean the educational mission -- for which no practicable consensus exists -- of the public school.

Educating? Peter

Hate is Love. War is Peace --1984 George Orwell

My memories of my sixth grade artistic award were provoke by my recent re-viewing -- perhaps the tenth -- of the video, Educating Peter³   in a class of graduate students in education. (I watch this video about twice a year.) The plot: An undersocialized, physically abusive White male child suffering Down's syndrome is placed into a third-grade class with an teacher whose sole preparation seems to be in rationalizing why onions are like peaches, if only you taste them the right way.

The teacher, unable to handle Peter even with the help of what appears to be an extra adult, compels her students -- with the complicity of school staff -- to "take ownership of the situation." A few sessions of psychobabblic indoctrination bring the third graders to comprehend the causal complexities of Peter's behavior and their role in provoking it. This means that now it is expected that Peter's behavioral outbursts -- even the violent ones -- will be interdicted by the students  rather than by the teacher.

The teacher -- in an interview -- tells how it is important, in this all White school in Virginia, that her students learn to live with people different than themselves. She tells how by "raising her expectations" -- one imagines her commanding her synapses to fire in unison, her dendrites to do drills -- Peter is brought to make academic progress.

We see students reacting with shock and dismay to Peter's behavior. The adults in the video (and the narrator) assure us that these students are "learning to accept differences." There is no evidence for this remote probability. From the looks of things they could just as well be learning resignation in the face of power, both Peter's power and that of the adults who condone what to them as "normal kids" is forbidden.

The students, choked, kicked, pushed by Peter are encouraged to rationalize, to declare that Peter has become their best friend, that Peter has taught them more than he himself has learned, that this has been just the peachy-keenest of classes. The students blush as they are interviewed, not being able -- unlike the adults who provide them example -- to suppress the natural embarrassment the innocent feel about deliberately mouthing what they believe to be false.

 The film purports to be not taking sides in the controversy about inclusion but merely "telling a story." It is cleverly edited to produce a certain effect. I remember an earlier version which I had seen some years ago. It was different from the version I purchased from Ambrose Video Publishing. A crucial scene has been edited out.

In the early version, the boys are sitting outside in a field. Peter, unprovoked, kicks a boy, call him here, Johnny, square in the middle of the face. Here the cut occurs. Johnny, outraged, jumps on Peter. The teacher intervenes, and remonstrates with Johnny who is moved off to the side. Splice here. Johnny cries to himself, unconsoled by an adult.

In the present version, one sees the kick and then Johnny crying, alone and unconsoled. That he should not be consoled is inexplicable, assuming there are adults present. But knowing he has just been rebuked -- which has been spliced out of the film -- explains the lack of consolation. Johnny's isolation is part of his "punishment" for "fighting" back.

At the end of the year, we find Peter "accepted" into the group, having -- in the words of his teacher -- "fewer outbursts, mostly toward the end of the day."

One of my students remarked that what the third graders had accomplished was akin to changing a dangerous animal into a pet. Peter was exempted from normal discipline, clearly treated to be of diminished responsibility, and given almost bizarrely effusive encouragement and reward for trivial accomplishments. He was "managed."

Immediate Costs and Remote, Improbable Benefits

"My fame will be your consolation." --Richard Wagner (to his betrayed wife)

The students who watched Educating Peter with me were asked to pay attention to four questions: What are the benefits of including Peter in the third grade classroom? Who receives what kind of benefit? What are the costs of including Peter in the third grade classroom? Who pays what kind of cost? What follows below is a chart that summarizes several years of responses from my graduate students.

What Cost "Charity"? What cost "Justice"?

Everyone loves justice in the affairs of another -- Italian Proverb

It is not clear when we examine the chart, whether it gives support or not to inclusion. Many costs and benefits go unperceived, so do not come to be factored into political decisions to support or resist inclusion. But even allowing for a full disclosure of the costs and benefits assigned to each constituency of the school community, the lack of a general implementable consensus as to what the school is about, obscures a clear choice. But clearly, those with power, the principal and the teacher, tend to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs.

Supporters of public education -- among which I count myself -- worry about the persistent and growing interest in vouchers and schooling arrangements that threaten the very existence of public schools. They need only watch Educating Peter to understand where some of that impetus comes from.

Peter's education could be seen as a form of charity bestowed on the less fortunate. But it is a debauched form of "charity" that comes through a compulsory system. Our courts have decided that the practice of inclusion is an improvement on justice. But the lopsided redistribution of scarce schooling resources -- where the needs of some take precedence over the needs of many -- may just bring about every child's educational starvation.

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