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Another brick in the wall

More social engineering invades the school curriculum, leaving the original purpose of education even further behind

by Karin Litzcke
The Republic

Don’t do this, kids. photo: Paxton Downard

The City of Vancouver has a new anti-graffiti strategy that includes an education program to be delivered to schoolchildren. This plan is in keeping with a growing propensity among people who want to effect societal change to wangle their way into schools to deliver their message directly to the next generation.

Environmentalism, feminism, racism, heterosexism, animal rightism, vegetarianism, media activism, oceanism–oh my, it's a long list. And now, add anti-graffiti-ism. In one case, it is dedicated social activists, in the other case, earnest civic leaders, but they share this misbegotten belief that the right way to effect social change is to place the weighty burden of change on the as-yet slim-boned shoulders of our offspring.

Our kids are disturbed and frightened by the graffiti they see, and don't understand why the adults in charge can't fix it. The last thing they need is to be told that it is up to them to fix it. Besides it being unfair and immature for adults to burden children with such an assignment, taking these messages into the schools is both illogical and ineffective.

It is illogical because the problems that are meant to be addressed through these programs are not being created by the kids currently in schools. It is ineffective because the education program constitutes a mixed message to children: it says, These problems aren't important enough for us adults to deal with. We aren't going to create a graffiti-free environment for you, nor are we going to find and prosecute people who over-fish the oceans or idle their cars in the ferry line-up. But we do want you to dedicate your lives to fixing this problem.

Going into the schools with well-intentioned social education programs, then, represents the absconding of our own responsibilities as adults. It says that we're going to skip doing our work and leave it for the next shift.

It took less than 24 hours after the murder of a gay man in Stanley Park last year for the talk to start about the urgency of getting into the schools to reduce homophobia. If there ever was a complex problem, homophobia is it. There are no simple answers, for we are dealing with human behaviours that have complex biological, physiological, sociological, historical, and religious roots in understanding both homosexuality itself and the reaction of heterosexuals to homosexuality.

For this generation of adults to take this problem to children constitutes an abdication of our own responsibilities as adults to grapple with our own problems, as well as a form of lying to our children, for the programs and books designed to foster better relations between hetero- and homosexuals are simplistic at best and dishonest at worst.

Actually it is even worse than dishonest; it is a form of experimentation, for we have no idea how an academic and manipulative introduction to different sexual styles will affect the development of children's sexual identities.

If the problem is in the adult community, it needs to be addressed there. If we address it effectively here–say, by targeting enforcement resources to detecting, prosecuting, and seriously punishing gay-bashing crimes–then the children who are in school today will grow up in an environment where, for example, gay-bashing is simply not tolerated, and will adjust their own outlooks accordingly.

We fear the impact of bigoted parents, and feel we must counteract this in the schools, but in the same way that a child whose father consistently exceeds the speed limit may grow up to be a driver who respects the law, the bigoted parent cannot block out the collective norms of the community from their child forever.

The point is to use such adult tools as the law to challenge bigots directly, rather than putting the child in a position where we ask the child to challenge their bigoted parent.

There is yet another reason to stop using the schools as a vehicle for achieving social change, which is that schools already have a purpose, and the social change agenda is interrupting that purpose to the detriment of the children and, ironically, society as a whole. Bluntly put, if you spend all of children's school time educating them about not doing graffiti, you might not get around to teaching them what they're actually going to school for.

Judging by the results we're seeing in education at present, we may have already started to spend too much time on social issues relative to the amount spent on schooling. By any measure, there is a daunting level of failure in schools (at every grade level, from kindergarten to grade twelve) to effectively teach what society's future citizens will need in order to function as effective citizens: reading, writing, and math.

Sometimes in our activist fervour we fail to realize how important these tedious old skills are to achieving the lofty goals we have in mind. We are so excited about saving oceans and rivers, for example, that we don't want to spend time teaching reading and math anymore; we want to get on with saving oceans and rivers. But we forget: our kids will have to be able to figure out things like the rate of water flow in rivers and fish population fluctuations, in order to save oceans and rivers.

Literacy and numeracy, then, are essential to the achievement of the social change agenda. But if we allow the social change agenda to displace the achievement of literacy and numeracy, we undermine the social change campaigns themselves and the very fabric of civil society.

A judge in California recently was baffled by three young offenders who repeatedly graced his courtroom. They had been into prison and through every program offered there, and still could not escape their propensity for crime. He had them tested, finally, for any sign of literacy, and indeed it turned out they could not read. Reflecting other studies done on literacy in prison populations, two of them could not read at all, and one could just make a credible stab at it.

The judge now routinely sentences young offenders to learn to read, and this approach has apparently reduced the recidivism rate dramatically. A similar approach might well reduce graffiti. My guess is that improving our success at teaching kids in schools reading, writing, and math (and, ideally, also a few other subjects, such as music, physical education, and geography) would do far more to achieve the social changes we so earnestly believe in than all the programs to which our youth have so far been subjected.

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