Welfare Schools and the Criminally Elite, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #365 | @MDWorld
May 26, 2014 Mike Gold 4 Comments
OK. I’m willing to throw in the towel and agree that shooting up your school is the first huge 21st century fad.
As if our schools don’t have it bad enough. Teachers are trapped between an insane political bureaucracy and some violently insane students. I don’t think they could pay me enough to put myself in that position, but they don’t pay teachers enough anyway. I think pretty soon they’re going to start drafting teachers.
But I think I do know whom to blame, and, once again, I’m going to piss off both the right and the left… and, most certainly, parents with access to a modicum of money. Oh, happy, happy, joy, joy!
A report came out about a month ago saying New York City schools are among the worst in the nation (now I’ve pissed off über-defensive New Yorkers, which is a redundancy). A reason cited was the proliferation of magnet schools and other so-called alternative schools draining public schools of the mix of society and experiences. Well, I appreciate that parents associate regular public schools with violence and a lousy education and they want to protect their special snowflakes. And I’ll bet the parents of the kids who go to University of California-Santa Barbara felt the same way… until last Friday night. Will we see brain-damaged losers shoot up Harvard and Yale?
Of course we will. It’s just a matter of time and scheduling.
The problem is that when it comes to education, we’ve established two separate and unequal systems. We’ve got school for kids who have parents who can afford to send them to private or “special” schools (I don’t mean that in the Bill Cosby sense), and the rest are condemned to welfare schools.
Some kids get their privilege by virtue of location. I’m sure a lot of parents in Littleton Colorado, San Jose California, Pearl City Hawaii, Fort Myers Florida, and Newtown Connecticut felt that way, to name but a few locations. And I suspect some of the victims’ families quoted Frank Zappa after-the-fact: “It can’t happen here.”
Public education only works when the public participates. Private and special schools promote elitism, racism, class superiority, and an artificial sense of denial. Some kids who aren’t the cool kids are beginning to return to class with guns, knives, and You Tube confessions. It’s all the rage.
Today, we have welfare schools that are only slightly less safe than the elite schools. We have figured out still another way to divide us into separate classes, and then we get pissed when some kids feel hopelessly left out.
I’m not alone in these feelings, but I think I’m pretty close to alone here. Maybe I’m the vanguard of new educational thinking.
Or maybe, I, too, am getting ready to climb the tower.
Artist credit: Jonah Hill (gamagamaman)
Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.comabove for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.
Rick Oliver
May 26, 2014 - 8:10 am
Well, there are two mostly unrelated issues here: mentally ill mass murderers and equality of opportunity. I’ll pass on the first and focus on the second.
I think as a species we are still essentially tribal. We remain suspicious and fearful of those we perceive as “not like us”, and the easiest ways to identify the outsiders is by the color of their skin, the way they talk, the way they dress, etc.
I am fond of pointing out the success of “social welfare” in northern European countries, but the truth I omit is my strong suspicion that it works there because they have largely homogenous populations. In Norway, the “ethnicity” of over 90% of the population is listed as “Norwegian”. The numbers are similar in all the Scandinavian countries. In Germany, over 80% are listed as “northern European”.
During WWII we rounded up all the people of Japanese descent and stuck them in internment camps, but for some reason we did not feel compelled to round up all the people with German last names, although many had belonged to staunchly pro-German groups before the war.
I think that successful “multi-cultural” societies are, so far, the exception rather than the norm. I was going to suggest Australia, but almost 90% of the population is identified as “Anglo-Celtic”, and their history of treatment of the aborigines is rather sordid.
So, I think that leaves maybe Canada. What makes Canada work? What could we learn from them?
But now I’ll digress and venture into the issue I said I wasn’t going to talk about: deranged loners who go on killing rampages in schools.
When I decided to home school my children for the first few years (and I know you are opposed to this, Mike), people kept asking me about socialization. Won’t the kid be missing out on important socialization experiences? My response was, “Well, I guess, if you consider mostly negative socialization skills to be important.”
I attended all-white public schools in an extremely elite suburb, where there was really no point in sending your kids to a private school, unless you were Catholic and thought a Catholic education was important. And here are the socialization skills I learned: I learned how to join a group of kids who were marginally more similar to me (in a variety of mostly unmeasurable ways) than other kids. I learned to ridicule and shun those that weren’t like us, particularly the geeky smart kids, but also the jocks, since my particular group was the pathetic loser group.
Even among a population of upper middle class white suburban kids, we learned how to join tribes and reject those from other tribes. That’s the socialization I learned in school.
I think that partly this problem stems from the fact that absolutely nothing we did or learned in school had anything to do with cooperating and working with others. You had to get better grades than the kid sitting next to you to get into the better college, so you could get the better job, and take your rightful place in the ranks of the elite. And if you weren’t smart enough or beautiful enough or strong enough, tough shit. You deserve what get because you’re obviously not one of us.
“You look like we do. You talk like we do. But you know how it is. You’re not one of us.” –Peter Gabriel
Vinnie Bartilucci
May 26, 2014 - 1:59 pm
New York radio talk show host (and acolyte of Bob Grant, to give an easy summary of his political leanings) used to say “There’s nothing wrong with the New York school system that a couple hundred thousand new students couldn’t cure”. But that is, of course, a narrow view of the issue.
It’s a snowballing situation. People perceive that the public school system is Not Good Enough for their kids. Maybe it’s the physical quality of the schools, maybe it’s that they want their kid to get a religious aspect of their education, and yes, maybe it’s because too many of the wrong type of people go there. So they leave. And they go to private schools. And the schools get the money to hire the better teachers. And theoretically, the kids are more inspired (by their parents) to do well, because they’re paying Good Money to go there.
So what’s left behind in the public schools are teachers not good enough to get jobs in the public schools (or are still young and idealistic enough to think they can Make A Difference For These Poor Kids) and kids who can’t afford to get out. And yes, some number of those kids are rather disinclined to even go to school, and they require time and resources from the teacher to keep behaved, resulting in less time to spend with the kids who DO want to learn. We can but hope that that amount of time is less than what we’ve been led to believe by endless dramatic presentations about inner city school.
So the schools do less well in educating kids, which only causes more people to feel correct in their opinions of the schools, and more leave for the “superior” private school options.
Like so many social problems, there’s no one solution. It’s not JUST “hire better teachers, and stop paying them like burger flippers” and it’s not JUST “Get the kids motivated” or “Make sure they all have a good meal in them”. It’s a witch’s brew of various ingredients that we’ll likely never got right, because it also varies from one geographical area to another. There’s not as many people in new York or Chicago asking that Creationism be added to the science curriculum as there are down South, for example.
There are still public schools (even in NYC) that are exemplary, and where one can get a good education. But often they’re as hard to get into as any private school, and every so often they are accused of favoritism to one group or another. I recall a school that wanted to open in Chicago, I believe, that wanted to provide quality education for young black males, largely accepted as the most at-risk group. But shortly afterwards the women’s groups complained that women wee being excluded, and this group and that group wanted in as well, and the school just never opened, the organizers just not wanting to put up with the agita.
Personally, if I were able to wish for one thing to change, it would be to quell the growing feeling that intelligence and education are a negative. There’s still too many people who believe that wanting to be intelligent and educated is “selling out”, and too many others who distrust the statements of educated people like scientists. If we could somehow get across the idea that education is a positive, one that’s almost required in modern society if one wants to achieve any modicum of financial security. Maybe that would get more kids inspired to get it, and get more adults to grasp that school is more than a place to house the kids for a few hours a day before they go off to prison.
Whitney
May 26, 2014 - 2:57 pm
Golden Boy –
I wonder how many readers caught your “…climb the tower…” reference. Unless I am wrong, I assume you mean the Texas A&M shooting in 1966. Ironic that now one must ask “To which school mass murder are you referring…?”
Mindy Newell
May 26, 2014 - 4:09 pm
Mike, my son-in-law found the asshole’s “manifesto” on the web and showed it to me. The first paragraph says it all–
His hatred of women because he couldn’t get a date.
Google it.
Mindy Newell
May 26, 2014 - 4:11 pm
Mike, here’s the web address for the manifesto:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/226068735/Manifesto-of-Elliot-Rodger
Mike Gold
May 26, 2014 - 5:01 pm
Rick… The mentally ill issue is a whole ‘nother matter, and it affects the workplace, the military, and our prison system as well as our schools. But you skipped over it, so I will too. It is indeed a completely separate issue.
Socialization isn’t my only concern regarding the elite education systems, and it isn’t even among my top five concerns. There’s a give-and-take among students and teachers, and the more influences and the more variety in backgrounds and circumstances, the more well-rounded the education. As ridiculous as it sounds out of context, I believe you and your fellow New Trier students (as I recall) were indeed burdened by the similarity of privileged upbringing. That’s the drawback inherent in that type of community. But, nonetheless, New Trier produced Physicists Rafael Sorkin and Nobel Prize winner Jack Steinberger, politicians Rahm Emanuel, Charles H. Percy and Donald Rumsfeld, Facebook vice-president Chris Cox, master agent (and inspiration for Ari Gold) Ari Emanuel, Playboy Enterprises (and Playboy Foundation) CEO Christie Hefner, NRA chief Charlton Heston, PBS honcho Sharon Percy Rockefeller, personal hero Mike Bloomfield… and many others. Not a bad track record… and I didn’t even mention Ann-Margaret.
But one good music quote deserves another: “The silicon chip inside her head / Gets switched to overload / And nobody’s gonna go to school today / She’s gonna make them stay at home / And daddy doesn’t understand it / He always said she was good as gold / And he can see no reasons / ‘Cos there are no reasons / What reason do you need to be shown?” – Bob Geldof.
But you knew I was going to go there.
Rick Oliver
May 26, 2014 - 5:50 pm
Mike:
I never said I didn’t get a good education there, but I sure didn’t learn shit about how to play nice and get along with others — and the fact that it was a public school did nothing to prevent it from being exclusive (in both senses of the word) and elite. Public schools are funded primarily by the local area, and the student body comes from the local area. So most public schools are, in a sense, very parochial. And most people who perceive their local school system as being “better than average” would prefer to keep it that way, since they don’t want their tax dollars going to people they perceive as being not like them. That’s part of the “multi-cultural” society issue I was talking about. Or as a Spanish professor I had once said, “America is called the melting pot — but nothing melts!”
Mike Gold
May 26, 2014 - 5:58 pm
Rick – No. America is not a melting pot. But it is one hell of a smorgasbord.
Mike Gold
May 26, 2014 - 6:06 pm
Vinnie – Religious education is swell. I was sentenced to several years of Hebrew School, which I dutifully attended AFTER my regular school hours. I have no problem with that. Religious education INSTEAD of public school breeds bigotry, contempt, and all sorts of anti-science nonsense. You wanna shove creationism down young throats, do so after the kids get a real education. And no, no matter what your personal holy book says, the sun does not revolve around the Earth.
And yes, I’m opposed to a school for young black males only, or young Latino females, or aging left-handed German-speaking midgets. That’s pretty clear from my piece.
Not to be mistaken: I absolutely agree with almost everything you state, particularly the bit about quelling the growing feeling that intelligence and education are a negative, and the religious-inspired negation of science.
Mike Gold
May 26, 2014 - 6:08 pm
Whitney – You’re absolutely on the money. Damn, Whitman’s long been a metaphor. But we can’t remember the name of last month’s killers. That’s almost like calling your DVR a Betamax.
Which raises the question:
Do we teach these scholastic mass murders in our history classes?
Mike Gold
May 26, 2014 - 6:09 pm
Mindy – Yes, women are indeed responsible when they won’t date maniacs. Always remember that… And thanks for the link!
Rick Oliver
May 26, 2014 - 8:55 pm
At least Whitman had an understandable excuse. He had a brain tumor.
Mike Gold
May 26, 2014 - 8:59 pm
Seriously… Do you know if it’s the type of thing we could remove today?
Less seriously… Damn you, Ben Casey!
Rick Oliver
May 27, 2014 - 8:22 am
For all I know, it might have been something they could have removed back then. IIRC, it was only discovered during the autopsy.
Mike Gold
May 27, 2014 - 8:38 am
But can they remove it today?
And did you renew your surgeon’s license?
R. Maheras
May 27, 2014 - 12:46 pm
When I was a kid, I think most people who were certified nutso were institutionalized. Not all, of course, as my neighborhood had a Ms. Thompson who walked up and down the streets talking to people who were not there, and not interacting with the people who WERE there. Of course, when the 1970s rolled around, such institutions were demonized (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, et al), and soon it became extremely difficult to forcibly treat the mentally ill — especially after Reagan cut funding to such institutions during the 1980s. The more nefarious types then used the system in place to keep their freedom even when they posed a possible threat to those around them — something that continues to this very day.
George Haberberger
May 27, 2014 - 1:39 pm
I clicked on the link Mindy provided above and read some of the killer’s “manifesto”.
Wow.
If this guy hadn’t killed people and himself and this was just something somebody posted on the net, it would appear to be an over-the-top parody; an attempt to be funny to the point of absurdity, because no one could really be this self-absorbed.
Yeah, he hated women all right but that seemed to stem from his entirely unrealistic self-image. This guy considered himself someone that should just have everything, and anyone, he wants given to him.
He believed his mother should marry a rich man because he deserved to be part of a rich family. He was invited to a private Katy Perry performance where everyone was richer than him.
“I tried to pretend as if I was part of a wealthy family. I should be. That was the life I was meant to live. I WOULD BE! If only my damnable mother had married into wealth instead of being selfish. If only my failure of a father had made better decisions with his directing career instead wasting his money on that stupid documentary.”
His mother hired a life coach for him to help him get a job. He wrote this:
‘I refused all of the jobs that Tony suggested to me. The problem was that most of the jobs that were available to me at the time were jobs I considered to be beneath me. My mother wanted me to get a simple retail job, and the thought of myself doing that was mortifying. It would be completely against my character. I am an intellectual who is destined for greatness. I would never perform a low-class service job.”
And he was also a racist.
Is this insanity or just megalomania?
Rene
May 27, 2014 - 6:44 pm
Russ –
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS’S NEST was’t as big an exaggeration as people think today. Young people could be (and often were) institutionalized by their families for flimsy reasons as smoking marijuana a few times, being sexually promiscuous (particularly girls), and having “ambiguous” gender mannerisms.
In short, mental institutions were abused by people thinking their kids could be forcibly “cured” of any behaviour that wasn’t what they thought was the accepted social norm. If that isn’t a scary notion, I don’t know what it is.
A famous example is Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, who was committed to a mental institution by his parents for the crime of being introverted and not wanting to become a lawyer or an engineer. Seriously. He escaped 3 times.
Ken Kesey didn’t invent the whole thing. Mental institutions were used as an extreme form of social control, and even scariest, there were parents we really thought they were helping their kids.
Rene
May 27, 2014 - 6:55 pm
George –
Am I a wuss? I am actually afraid of reading this kind of stuff! I do okay reading any kind of scary fiction, but I think I don’t want to take a good peek into a real diseased mind like this guy’s.
But from the snippets I caught in other sites, I think Rodger was a malignant narcissist. They are often mistaken for psychopaths, but I think one of the main differences is that malignant narcissists have a low self-steem deep down, their megalomania is a “cover”. While psychopaths really do believe they’re gods.
Whitney
May 27, 2014 - 11:27 pm
This guy gives the mentally ill a bad name.
Some people choose to be evil. But those who are ill want to be healthy and whole.
Rick Oliver
May 28, 2014 - 2:31 pm
Rene:
The guy was just malignant. Period.