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Children - and Grandchildren - of Special Me
The other day, Margaret Wente did a column on teacher bullying, this time profiling a teacher who spent a month at home falsely accused of forcing a kid to eat a squishy banana. This is very similar to Lou D’Amore’s story. It’s worth reading Margaret’s entire column, because there is more wrong here than just an educational bureaucracy making the bumbling mistakes we have come to expect from bureaucracies. Something is rotten in the state of parenthood as well. The comments to Margaret’s column (266 of them at press time) are even more enlightening. They paint a picture of out-of-control kids whose shenanigans are backed by their parents.
Here’s what one person wrote: “The teacher is frightened of the school board. The school board is frightened of the parents. The parents are frightened of the kids. The kids are frightened of no one!”
What has happened? Why are things so different from when I first taught in the mid-sixties and was expected to strap misbehaving kids?
Here’s my theory, and I’d be interested in hearing from the educators still reading us, if there are any left (bye, Steven, sorry to see you go). Could it be that all the chidlren swaddled in the preserve-their-self-esteem-at-all-costs treatment from the seventies onwards have grown up to become today’s parents – parents with swelled heads about their own self-worth, convinced they’re pretty special themselves and of course with kids who must be even more special?
“Could it be that all the chidlren swaddled in the preserve-their-self-esteem-at-all-costs treatment from the seventies onwards have grown up to become today’s parents – parents with swelled heads about their own self-worth, convinced they’re pretty special themselves and of course with kids who must be even more special?”
Yes! These would also be the parents that principals would LOVE to co-opt to school councils….because they’re easily pacified and kept at arm’s length so as not to get too close to the realities in the classroom.
I also believe that the system breeds it’s own culture of fear all on its own. Look at the number of times parents have been intimidated by “the blob” only to turn and walk away from every being involved in their child’s education again.