Christopher S. Penn left this really enlightening comment on my recent post, Hopes and Fears, where I elaborated on Dover’s problems.
You can enforce order to some degree by imposing it from the top on a group, and that’s necessary to handle the bad actors. The real question I have is:
Why can’t the students self-police to a degree?
Admittedly, I’m older than you by a generation, 33. When I went to high school, AOL was still a proprietary dial-up network, and the Web didn’t exist yet (that would take another 2 years after I graduated).
However.
Our student body was relatively self-policing against bad actors. Those folks who were ill-behaved did face disciplinary sanction, but more important faced the ostracism of their peers. There was a large majority of students who held a generally accepted behavioral code of sorts, and while it definitely had some wiggle room, for the most part, the student body self-regulated.
Were there fights? Of course. A few, here and there, but nothing as rampant as the picture you’ve painted. Were there disruptive students? Sure, but more often than not, one of the other students would just tell the bad actor to, “sit down, asshole!” – on several occasions.
In the 15 years since I graduated from high school, what’s changed so much that self-policing inside the community has broken down?
I think there are a few differences in the atmosphere of my public school in comparison to yours. A lot of these “bad actors” today don’t need the community-at-large. They have their own support system, a group of friends or gang that supports them. I believe, and this is pure speculation, that many of them have been raised by parents who believe their children can do no wrong – parents who blame teachers or other students for the havoc their own children produce.
Essentially Chris, I think the morality of our nation has changed to the point that parents blame everyone else for their kids’ problems. When kids grow up in that kind of world, they think they can get away with anything.
And so far, they’ve been successful.
Perhaps we’ve all gotten too accustomed to ‘bad behavior,’ if you will. A self-policing student body would be ideal, but simply isn’t a reality in the average school system. Most students are very accepting of bad actors; they enjoy them for a few laughs and don’t realize the deeper consequences of unwelcome behavior.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: during my years in public high school, I remember the routine cafeteria fight. You’d hear about them all the time and occasionally get to witness one or two every few months. They could almost be considered an unwritten, impromptu tradition of sorts. Nobody was really bothered by them, no student that is. Most people found them to be a great diversion from the usual stressors of their day. Yet for heaven’s sake, a fight was going on!
The generation of high school students currently in the system is unfortunately, one largely desensitized by an array of different factors. Disorder is not something students are unfamiliar with today, save a handful of them, of course. Rebellion is glorified along with all of the inherent craziness that comes with it, and that’s really quite a shame.
Christine, you’ve hit it on the head. Like many things, the definition of acceptable behavior starts in childhood and moves up. Change starts from the bottom up.