How fucked are Texas schools? This is how fucked.
I know I’ve been using English’s most versatile word a lot in my titles, but there’s no other way to describe this. (Sorry, Mom.)
1) Everyone has heard, I’m sure, about Texas’s shameful right-washing of the history books these past few months, a blow against integrity in education that will ripple outward through the country, due to Texas’s proportionately huge buying power in the textbook industry. Thomas Jefferson is gone, the importance of Latinos in western culture is minimized, et cetera et cetera.
2) Now Temple, Texas, a horrible little highway wallow where I once got a ticket for an out-of-date inspection (on my Dad’s car, no less) is bringing back corporal punishment. Wonderful. Lovely. I’m sure that teenagers these days, with bills to pay, kids to support, drug habits to satisfy, just need a paddling to steer them straight. Christ. I’ve worked for three years in a country where corporal punishment is widely, casually used, and I can testify that it is not only ineffectual, but it encourages misbehavior.
A blow is quick. You go ahead and give your elementary antagonist the finger, or pull her hair, or scream in the hallway or whatever, take your lick, rub the wound, and forget about it as soon as it stops hurting. So the teachers apply worse and worse beatings or humiliations until the kids die. Or simply commit suicide because their teenage brains are not equipped to process such cruelty from authority figures.
Corporal punishment creates a culture that condones pain as an acceptable means of dealing with undesirable behavior, which breeds callousness among the teachers and the students - and the parents. It takes the moral high ground from the authority figures, leaving them their authority not because they are right but simply because they are the authority. I don’t think this is a lesson we want to teach our kids.
(Temple parents, believe it or not, requested the revival of state-sanctioned abuse.)
(Examples of the inefficacy and casualties of the system: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. There’s more, but we don’t have all day.)
So there is the moral argument against corporal punishment and the argument from efficacy. It simply does not work. It is more for the satisfaction of the teacher than the correction of the student. And even there it is subject to diminishing returns. It poses the teachers and students very much in direct opposition; few enough students are able to understand that teachers really do want to help and really are there to help them, that education is not a struggle between authority and individuality or laziness or apathy, but a cooperative effort between teacher and student.
A step backwards for Temple and Temple youth.
3) And this - this is just sickening. Texas suffers from a teacher shortage. Not officially - most schools are able to fill all jobs posted, but aren’t able to post all the jobs they may need; witness swelling class sizes, soccer coaches teaching history. An effective learning environment has fifteen to twenty students. More than that, and the teacher must divide his time and energy and is less effective. Take it from a guy who’s taught classes size four to forty. The average high school class in Texas has about thirty kids, too many to reasonably control. Why can’t they hire enough teachers to get class sizes to manageable levels? Because they’re broke. Everyone is broke these days. Okay then.
But not too broke to build a $60,000,000 football stadium. Let that sink in. Sixty million dollars. That is more money than you or I will ever ever earn in our lifetimes. The economy is spaghettifying in a limitless black hole. Unemployment is through the roof. The history class may have fifty kids in it because they can’t hire another teacher, and the school lunches may be all but carcinogenic because they can’t afford decent food or people to cook it; the schools may go unheated in winter and uncooled in summer, but they by god will have football. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. How the hell am I going to live in this state?