Why Does the ACLU Roll Over and Play Dead on Student Rights?
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Good morning class. Welcome back from the summer vacation. Let’s get right down to work so that we don’t waste any time.
Your main assignment for the semester will be a full-length essay on the three questions, “What are freedom, liberty, and justice?”. It must be completed by May 7th. If you fail to turn in a satisfactory essay on time, your grade will automatically drop by one point. If you don’t complete the assignment, you will fail the course. If anyone disrupts the class, they will lose points and parents will be notified. If you do not use an APA format properly, you will lose points. Your writing must be clear and accurate, the essay must be at least twelve pages in length double-spaced, and you must answer the essay questions to my satisfaction. Any questions?
Does that all bring back painful memories and the terror of total failure? Do the requirements seem a little onerous? Does anyone see a gross contradiction in the above scenario? Does it seem at all as if students in that hypothetical class are being asked to define and demonstrate knowledge relative to given terms, while they personally are lacking the very wonderful things those terms define in their daily lives?
Ostensibly, students have been granted meaningful rights in a number of famous cases. Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) is one of the most cited cases, along with Brown v. Board (1954), Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), and Engle v. Vitale (1962) on school prayer.
However, do students truly have any way to feel and conceptualize freedom, liberty, and justice under circumstances where their entire future depends wholly on complete and rigid participation in, and strict compliance with, the exacting requirements of a demanding and subjective teacher and system? The threat of serious consequences, including even a lower grade or failure are implicit, incidentally, traditionally in nearly every class and nearly every school for the dreadful offense of “disrupting the class”.
The ACLU is only one of hundreds or, more likely thousands now, of groups and organizations in the last century which have attempted to address the recurring issue of inadequate student rights. Students themselves have made frequent attempts to obtain more expansive rights, typically with negligible progress.
The problems of student rights have been exacerbated by external pressures and adverse trends in society, politics, the economy, and elsewhere. The more visible offenses negatively impacting students occurring in certain areas and the activist organizations hoping to address the related issues expose the tip of a crushing iceberg of unimaginable proportions.
Magic has Great Appeal to Many of Us
Education has a magical quality in that acquiring intellectual skills and having one’s mind opened to information and to new ideas and studying what has been discovered by others and recorded by others with an historical perspective changes one significantly, ordinarily for the better. Education allows one to understand the world and to progress in it with a better chance of success and survival. Education has worked small and large miracles for many.
Americans believe fervently in education, and education has unquestionably immensely improved our lives. However, we have made the grievous mistake of believing that universal schooling will somehow magically advance the educational status of all the people, generally. We have erroneously and habitually conflated schools with education. This has led directly to the chronic and tragic trampling of children’s spirits and of their constitutional rights as citizens.
Students’ rights and children’s rights petitions and campaigns are all-too familiar themes in the educational/school literature. They chronicle innumerable hopeful struggles which have been logical responses to the astronomical number of excessive uses of authority and regular incidents of abominable abuse in schools and in the eternal pursuit of achieving resolutions for oppression, real or perceived. Students have had some very solid reasons for complaining and feeling put upon within our monolithic systems.
A Google search for student rights initiatives yields all manner of bold statements and broadly defined rights modelled after the order of various similar universal human rights statements coming out of two world wars, which have been produced by a variety of progressive-thinking people hoping for change or obsessed with Utopian optimism. Some statements are ‘pie-in-the-sky’ and some are more down to earth. None are feasible under a compulsory attendance paradigm.
Misguided attempts to control and supervise students and groups of children in institutional settings lead inevitably to negligence and oppression. The authoritarian bureaucracy, to maintain its totalitarian control, must always be categorically (if covertly and deceptively) opposed to expanded rights and autonomy for students. Abuse is baked into this cake.
This reality reflects the casual lack of respect and regard for children as whole human beings and as citizens with dignity, intelligence, and capabilities common in our culture. To say that children suffer age discrimination commonly in schools would be a great understatement. Some adults cannot be trusted with arbitrary authority, including many who have been trained and certified as teachers.
Much of the extreme discomfort that so many students feel and most of the arduous conditions which they experience daily in schools fly under the radar as “normal” and perfectly acceptable efforts to “motivate”, “stimulate”, and “urge”, or to “encourage” students to perform. Badgering and browbeating are second nature for teachers, all whose lengthy school experience included interminable repetitions of that kind of harassment. With this kind of “encouragement”, kids do not need bullies or enemies.
Bullying is the perennial problem which belies the fallacy that has been so successfully promoted for generations. The whole enterprise is thoroughly hierarchical, based on age, status, and forced dependence, often of an infantile character, with arbitrary authority ensconced firmly at the top. This unholy structure is perceived as necessary and even beneficial, despite ponderous evidence to the contrary.
Bullying remains a glaring problem in schools because schools are preoccupied with minutia and specious performance criteria, and they exist for reasons which have little or nothing to do with the true educational development of children. Teachers are placed in a double impossible bind as mentors, instructors, and caretakers, while also required to act as enforcers, monitors, and unyielding disciplinarians. Schools have their own institutional priorities.
Bullies are the victims of badgering and abuse, some of whom are the adults in charge, who in many instances are consistently reflexively transferring their frustrations and rage to those lower on the Totem Pole. Regardless of their knowledge, skill, or professionalism, teachers have minimal say in how or what they will teach.
One of the things that the ACLU has become best known for in their remarkable century-long history is their famous cases, such as those mentioned above, representing students who have been silenced or punished with suspension, expulsion, or various other drastic measures for their personal expression relative to controversial political or social issues. Some “qualified” free speech has been protected to some extent in schools solely because of the willingness and unique ability of the ACLU attorneys to defend students, in court if necessary.
We should celebrate that the right to speak out or to utilize symbols and actions to make a statement in that sacred space has, at specific crucial junctures, been defended. This is not insignificant and it is not something that has come easy. This might even be one of those things of which we could say, “Only in America!” Bravo for the ACLU.
BUT.
But in the larger scope of liberty, freedoms, and justice in the real world, and in the reality of life in the typical traditional and rigidly controlled public school, the rights enjoyed in classes still today by students cannot even be called poor compromises. They are phenomenally weak, limited, and tenuous rights conditioned on approval by authorities. Ironically, they are, in every single instance, a complete capitulation and surrender to the presumptuous claims of credibility and authenticity for the institution.
The rights students have lie within extremely narrow boundaries and have precious little meaning, given the sweeping conditions and restrictions imposed by the institution and its officials and administrators, specifically articulated, and granted by the US Supreme Court, as well as by lower courts. Any and all protests can be quelled using the pretension of protecting “the educational mission” of the school. No justification, empirical or otherwise can be found anywhere for the extreme constriction and meager parameters of these ungenerous rights.
An Artificial World is No Place for Kids
Educators and nearly everyone else will be quick to point out that school is not “the real world”. Students are a special class of citizen needing specific protections, instruction, training, socialization, and monitoring. School is, or is at least purported to be, a place for education and inculcation into our society and into our particular democratically oriented political system. Children are immature, uneducated, and inexperienced. They are dependent, and at times, undisciplined. And therein lies the rub.
Imagine, however, if that is even possible anymore, that a child entering school for the first time would be given the feeling that, instead of being there to discover what the teacher and the school have to teach, the central mission were for the teacher to discover what that child already knows, what he or she thinks and feels, and what he or she would like to learn while there. Can anyone imagine that?
Imagine that upon entering school, instead of feeling that the school offers a cascade of rigid rules, restrictions, prohibitions, requirements, and urgent tasks to be completed, the child were to sense that there is a desire on the part of adults to share in the flow of her life and his experience, and that instead of being loaded up with duties, responsibilities, and endless difficult learning tasks, the purpose is to become acquainted with a diversity of other children, to express one’s thoughts and questions, and to engage in the continuity of one’s own life and the lives of others in a way that is not disruptive to their ability to think or excessively goal-directed. I know. That all sounds so “new age”, permissive, and unstructured. Perhaps that is Your problem.
Imagine how a child’s perception might be more positive and affirming if that child were allowed to recognize that time spent in getting the lay of the land, contemplating what one’s life and what one’s personal mission might be, and what skills and knowledge one might wish to acquire at such a time as when a foundation has been securely laid, were the most important goals, minus excessive stress and coercion. It is our own adult fears and insecurities which cause us to push, prod, and fret about “academic progress”.
Imagine if school were an integral part of the real world, rather than a fabricated iteration of a military academy or a reform school for malcontents and bored scholars. It all starts with the myth that there are “basics” and “fundamentals” which can be distilled out of knowledge and life to be spoon-fed to students, to create a “foundation”. Here is a news flash. The foundation is already there, and it is our job to discover its parameters and allow the child to build on it!
Instead of being the incubator for the fresh and unique perceptions, views, and beliefs which ready students for the benefits and the perks, as well as for the onerous responsibilities of democracy in “the real world”, students discover that schools are the places where freedom, liberty, and justice are only for certain people, and only for when those people conform, comply, and obey. Hypocrisy looms large. Oops.
Democracy remains hypothetical and abstract for most students. They never quite see their own personal obligation to seek valid information and to participate with passion voluntarily in society and in the democratic system. Why would they? The message they receive is that they are incompetent and indolent.
The ACLU may indeed have their heart in the right place. However, they are and have always been missing an extremely crucial point. Freedom, liberty, democracy, justice, and equality, as well as other American values are about much, much more than just a very constrained and conditional gift of very limited free speech, which must first be screened and approved by officials and administrators. For example, we might want to start with habeas corpus.
The false presumption has been that schools can somehow provide what children need and what will be beneficial for them, without consulting them, without considering that they have unarticulated but well-defined opinions and feelings, or without subjecting the administrators and staff to constant scrutiny and accountability standards. It is complete nonsense to conscript children and literally detain them as if they were being enlisted in a military mission and to require by law their physical presence and the confinement of their bodies for hours daily, so that “education” might somehow be impressed and imposed on them, as if it were a material thing or a cure for a medical or mental condition.
According to popular consensus, schools offer and provide education to all. It is imagined that those who do not become educated or whose demonstrated level of education appears to be below par or inadequate have only themselves or their parents to blame. This is pure poppycock.
School is not “the real world”. Children have been consigned to a status which confers misanthropic conditions, arbitrary dependence and subservience, patently prejudicial and stereotypical treatment, and frequently unavoidable indifference by virtue of physical and economic realities. Chronic school failure is accepted as the tolerable cost of mass education. In fact, mass education is an anachronistic pipe dream from two centuries ago.
If one uses the metrics the schools use, namely grades, graduation rates, and even attendance records, the facts reveal a sad picture. Those metrics are much more fiction than fact.
Grades, in addition to being based erroneously in part on behavioral indices, are based on completely subjective evaluations, flawed and largely meaningless testing, and the completion of improvised assignments, tasks or projects, and repetitive busywork exercises. Much schoolwork is centered on abstract material, which lacks interest for normal youths and has little capacity to integrate with and connect to their cognitive processes and experiential history. These faults stem from the obligation assigned to state government to oversee every possible aspect of schooling, solely because of attendance laws.
Certain kinds of violations of basic civil rights stand out and cry out for justice. The incidents and cases of children deprived of fundamental rights which become public or are litigated in courts are frequently egregious and sometimes shocking. Taping a child’s mouth, cutting a child’s hair, using humiliation and isolation techniques, and many other malicious practices we see often in the news and in the record are outrageous and horribly damaging to students.
But the most fundamental and constitutional right, the right to an education that is a bona fide and personally edifying education leading to an enlightened and productive future, rather than a waste of twelve years or, at best, a long stream of indoctrination and conventional programming is the thing which the ACLU has barely ever touched. The extent to which millions of students are deprived of equal opportunities and autonomy in childhood is a major scandal that must be exposed and dealt with appropriately, post haste.
It is astonishing how the American public has not yet reached any meaningful awareness of how badly our schools are performing and how little of empirically documented intellectual development, literacy, competence, knowledge, and social skill students are achieving in the second decade of the 21st century! The studies proving this entail terabytes of documented information, mostly sitting on shelves or in digital formats. Yet when one searches for contradictory research which validates the preposterous claims of educators, one comes up empty.
I have sampled in a single document the massive volume of scientific research and data which reveals this profound deficit. These are citations, excerpts, and quotations from studies, reports, and accounts taken from scholarly journals, many within the educational community itself, and many from a diverse range of disciplines in the field of human behavior which illustrate just how damaging traditional schooling has been and continues to be. I have included my own commentary, only to introduce or explain the individual entries. It has been posted as an entry of my SUBSTACK newsletter for free viewing. It is entitled, “Incontrovertible Evidence of the Abysmal Failure of Compulsory School Attendance Laws: A Compilation from 60 years of focused Study and Observation”.
There is no way to further condense the evidence to a size that would be suitable for a single article such as this. However, just during the time I have been drafting this article, a new study I had not seen before appeared in my inbox, which is from about ten years ago. This study is somewhat of an overview or meta study and summarizes evidence from much research. I include it below only to show (hopefully) that I have not been exaggerating, and my statements are not mere hyperbole or isolated examples. Please consider the following:
From the International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 4, No. 7(1); May 2014: “School-University Partnership for Implementation of Common Core State Standards” by Boudah, D.J., Flint, L.J., Engleman M.D., and Gabbard, D.A.:
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (Institute for Education Sciences, 2013) reported that only 34% of 8th graders tested at or above proficient in reading,
In a survey of over 1500 17-year olds, Hess (2008) found that “Nearly a quarter of those surveyed could not identify Adolf Hitler; 10 percent think he was a munitions manufacturer; fewer than half can place the Civil War in the correct half-century; only 45 percent can identify Oedipus; a third do not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees the freedom of speech and religion; and forty-four percent think The Scarlet Letter was either about a witch trial or a piece of correspondence” (p.1).
Thousands of studies with similar findings can be easily located if one has access to journals. Nothing has changed. I have found many which are or were previously outside the paywalls which currently restrict access to independent researchers, such as myself. Now, thousands more are locked behind unaffordable paywalls annually.
There have been a number of lawsuits in recent years in which students or parents have been the plaintiffs claiming that those students were deprived of an adequate education or an equal opportunity to learn. The evidence in their favor is quite stunning. These are all students with severe deficits, ostensibly through no fault of their own.
However, defining what constitutes an education and spelling out proofs and facts to meet a legal standard is a major hurdle in these cases. The school administrators point to the responsibilities of the parents and social and economic conditions affecting students and the schools. And, of course, the students invariably make wonderful scapegoats, since it can always be claimed that they failed to apply themselves or lacked the necessary capabilities.
There have always been the convenient excuses and lots of finger pointing. Many more such cases like these should be brought and supported. But these kinds of suits will not tip the balance for the majority of students who are miseducated and poorly served.
The school-to-prison pipeline is not a figment of anyone’s imagination, either. It is all too real. However, neither is it an accident, nor merely a significant manifestation of the pervasive inequality in society between races or classes.
Of course, we should be outraged that minorities are more often disadvantaged and pushed to the margins or to their limits in schools. The pathetic reality, however, is that the school-to-prison pipeline only starkly illustrates that the paradigm we have had in place for generations is designed to frustrate, pacify, sort, and harm children and to favor certain groups over others because it is based on inequality, competition, and frivolous measures.
What Rights and Privileges Do Adults Have That Children Do Not Have?
It is commonly believed, and seemingly only logical, that for the sake of their education, and because they are minors, children do not have the same rights and privileges as adults. There is a dangerous fallacy in these assumptions, however.
Obviously, children cannot be allowed to drive cars until they reach a specified age and pass tests proving their competence. We do not allow small children to cross streets and highways without adult assistance. Dozens of other examples could be cited here. What is overlooked and ignored, however, is that children are citizens at birth and enjoy the same fundamental human rights and privileges as adults.
Being forced to spend thousands of hours in a place where a person of any age has not chosen to be and to participate in activities and drills which one has not chosen to take part in of one’s own volition is a de facto violation of civil rights, not to mention of one’s dignity and integrity. Children are not our property to mold and dominate.
There simply is no justification for the endless hours of precious time during which children are trapped in classrooms with strict restrictions on their movement, being deprived of adequate deep-breathing and exercise, and being made to feel ashamed, guilty, or incompetent if they lack enthusiasm or discipline enough to satisfy the whims or contrived ambitions and specious achievements of adults whose agenda is to produce a particular kind of scholar modelled after themselves.
Government funded free public schooling is indeed a necessity and a civil right. However, using the blunt force of attendance laws to force child citizens to avail themselves of that public service denies them of the potential personal benefits in a preponderance of the cases.
Forcing a child to become educated is an absurdity. Regardless of how one defines education, it is clear to anyone who knows the first thing about children, human psychology, cognition, and the learning process, as well as the well-established history of schooling, that coercion and education are antithetical.
Using compulsion, manipulation, and control to convey information, to teach, to motivate anyone of any age to accrue knowledge, and to acquire skills invariably defeats the purpose and results in resistance or indifference. The results are something that is not recognizable as education, virtually instantaneously. Compulsion begets an obsession with accountability, compliance, and standardization, which always morph quickly into behavioral modification and indoctrination.
Who will inform the ACLU that they have barely even scratched the surface? Who can tell them that every child in every public school has been insulted and subjected to indignities, to a hostile environment, and to inimical miseducation, wasting phenomenal potential and precious time? My letters to their offices have gone unanswered.
ACLU attorneys certainly do know a thing or two about the rights of citizens. They have valiantly and diligently fought for the essential civil rights of adult citizens for approximately a century. As stated earlier, children born in the US have full citizenship from birth.
In the absence of a crime committed by any child, it is patently unconstitutional to compel children to endure conditions which are not in the daily course of their lives personally satisfying, comfort-able, demonstrably beneficial in the present, legitimately voluntary, and unconditionally equally administered to all. There can be no circumstance under which the state can predict and guarantee that a child will be edified, educated, or enlightened via mandated attendance in any institution for most of their developmental period. To pretend otherwise is the height of arrogance and foolishness.
Where is the first lawyer who will fight, not for some hypothetical and theoretical political concept, such as anti-government “libertarianism”, but for beleaguered students deserving freedom, liberty, autonomy, and justice? Who will appear as the Clarence Darrow of the 21st century? Nothing less than democracy itself hangs in the balance.