LIFE WITHOUT ORDER

Our educational system has been tending to chaos for some time in the US. Perhaps this is due to the "babies are born geniuses" brigade. Or perhaps this is due to the poor incentives offered to brilliant minds to convince them to become elementary or secondary school teachers. The less-than-brilliant sooner or later become administrators in promotional systems based in seniority. And then there was the brilliant plan to single-stream mentally impaired children and children without home English into mainstream classes. 

Whatever the cause, the public schools in America are broken. That is a consensus view. The outcry from poorer parents with bright children to allow for increased charter schools says it all. What has been the governmental response? Well, the Democrats have just thrown more money into the bottomless well of dysfunction. The Republicans have advocated for social Darwinism in the form of charter school "choice" for those who can make the entrance grade. 

Neither solution is a solution.

How is it that graduates from early 20th Century single-room rural school houses received a better education than urban children today who attend sprawling schools with electronic resources? Those 20th Century students were taught reading and basic arithmetic as foundations for everything else, for one thing. They were not passed along with illiteracy and innumeracy to avoid cries of racial or ethnic discrimination.

The affirmative action for immigrants and poor racial minorities in the early 20th Century was based in elementary schools and high schools which were environments of order, respect for teachers and high performance standards. Those performance standards extended to interpersonal communication and good manners.

As we see with the recovery from the bungled COVID-19 lockdowns, the opening of public schools is advocated by less privileged parents who see them as places to warehouse their children so that those parents can keep up with the materialist economy already leaving them behind.  Malnutrition is cited as a danger of not opening schools. This in a country that liberally distributes food stamps to an obese population. The supposition seems to be that the poor quality of education itself is less important, as long as the kids have someplace to be and parents don't have to go out of their way to feed them or teach them about good manners, self-education, work and domestic responsibilities.

The attraction to chaos for hundreds of thousand, perhaps millions, of young adults in urban America was obvious when the death of George Floyd was used by cunning activists to tear open old racialist wounds. Weeks of meandering protests, largely meaningless in the long term, were populated by out-of-work young adults, not victims of systemic racism, but victims of a government which mishandled its response to a virus. 

The events of this summer have revealed the true lack of personal organization and self-reliance of our young population. How so, you may ask. It is obvious that these throngs of young people preferred to disrupt civil order and risk personal injury rather than use their free time for constructive individual activity. 

These flocks of college graduates, bent on being seen as politically engaged on Facebook, did not go to their city halls and volunteer for programs that would engage and help poor children in violent neighborhoods. They did not join the dedicated few who shopped for and delivered groceries to at-risk disabled people. They were not engaged with political campaigns, being run all over the country in anticipation of this major electoral year. They certainly did not volunteer to help structure the protests by reaching out and cooperating with local police. 

What were they doing? These young adults, stripped of the vocational and social order of offices and bars, massed in a chaotic attempt to find some structure to ease their own anxieties. Their mass tantrum did not achieve that easing. Instead, in many cases, their mass tantrum became a riot. And what was their reaction to their own inability to maintain self-discipline and control? They blamed authority, as most obviously represented by police and national guard. 

But was the authority which had betrayed them the police? Absolutely not. They had been betrayed long before these protests and riots by parents and teachers, who failed to teach them that a successful life is an orderly life of goals, routines, hard work and good manners in all situations.  They had been betrayed by parents who failed to discipline them. They had been betrayed by teachers who coddled them out of fear of administrators who were obsessed with trends and political correctness.