Q: I saw on the news a video of some high school JV basketball players in Newark, N.J., who brutally attacked their own coach when he tried to stop them from bullying another teen. The video is sickening and heartbreaking. What, if anything, can schools do to prevent kids from acting this way?
Though it is disturbing, I encourage everyone to watch the video. While the behavior it portrays is in no way typical of most students, it is sadly emblematic of what goes on in some classrooms every day.
According to current educational wisdom, students misbehave primarily because teachers do not try to understand them. Teachers from different classes, races or environments are incapable of properly reaching their students. To compensate, teachers fall back on methods that worsen the divide − like failing students who don’t do their work or punishing those who act out. The wisdom goes that if teachers would drop these archaic and odious methods, do a better job of empathizing with the student’s plight and give rewards instead of penalties, misbehavior would cease.
That is the conventional educational wisdom. It is taken as gospel by academics who engineer educational policy. It is a pile of garbage.
Five seconds of the video makes it obvious that the cause of the violence is not deprivation. It’s indulgence. Those students have not been mistreated or misunderstood by their teachers. They have been misled and mismanaged by a system. They have been coddled when they should have been punished. They have been allowed to misbehave ad nauseam, impeding the learning of classmates with their resource-, energy- and attention-sucking behavior. They have risen to the precise height of our grotesquely low expectations.
Granted, these students have been neglected, but not by teachers. By parents who have − through one dereliction or another − failed to teach them right from wrong. Like Newark parent Mylik Freeman said, “Until they get parents that are going to put their foot down, it’s going to continue happening.”
These parents, however, are finding refuge in an educational system whose approach to student conduct can be summarized in one phrase: “zero personal responsibility.”
By sweeping aside high expectations, the system all but forbids teachers to instill responsibility into the students who most need it. It makes excuses for those who misbehave, blaming their conduct on everything from background to suspension to teachers who “fail to understand” them. It cowers from placing on them even the most basic responsibility of choosing to do what’s right. Instead, it treats these students like destiny itself has willed them to act out, and it is we, the world, who must accommodate them.
I understand that many students are deprived at home. But being overindulged at school only makes everything worse.
Thus the most disturbing thing about the video is that the students show no fear of consequences. They do not have the first thought much less fear − that anything bad is going to happen to them. Kids need consequences. They need boundaries. If you really love children, you don’t deprive them of this.
The video is a metaphor. Watch it again. It starts with a group of kids running to see the conflict. More kids join in and it becomes a veritable lynching. That is a metaphor for what happens in too many classrooms every day: one child’s awful behavior attracts the attention and mimicry of a handful of others like bugs to a fire. Then, if not stopped, the behavior spreads. Whether it circulates to one or a dozen others depends on how many kids in the class haven’t been held accountable for their actions, haven’t been taught to behave by their parents, or totally lack self-control. Finally, instead of a coach, it’s the minds of their innocent classmates and the stamina of their overwhelmed teachers that are relentlessly assaulted.
Ernest Hemingway wrote, "There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self."
The system has not taught this to kids like those in the video. Our system is more obsessed with numerical test scores. Most schools in the country rank every student from best to worst and we preach to kids every day that they must raise their scores to measure up to their peers. They are learning that their score is more noble than their character.
Our duty shouldn’t be to win a race to the top or close an achievement gap. It should be to make every individual child better today than yesterday, in both heart and mind: “Intelligence plus character − that is the goal of true education,” MLK said.
The parents who have cast aside this obligation are being abetted by a broken system.
So we head backward. Not only are scores in decline, but so are behavior, maturity and responsibility. Something has gone dangerously wrong when the behavior of our oldest students is far worse than our youngest.
If we love kids like we’re supposed to, we’ll give them the best chance to rise up on steps of their former selves. We’ll teach them right from wrong. We’ll hold them accountable when they step out of line. And, yes, if necessary, we’ll take them out of the classroom when their actions interfere with the learning − and lives − of others.
