While reading through Haley Strack’s report on violence in middle schools — in this most recent scenario, the violence manifests as a trans-identifying boy viciously beating girls — one almost certainly asks the empty room and the cat in the hall, “Where is the administration? Why has nothing been done?”
After all, professional consequences and police action after an event that produces physical harm are accepted outcomes for most adults. But when observing K–12 education, we forget ourselves and the vagaries of adolescence and have implemented programs that are, on one hand, too strict (zero-tolerance policies) and, on the other, too lenient (restorative practices).
We have contrary impulses — that we can expect a tempestuous population to adhere to absolutes while we reinforce that standard with an arbitrary system that favors those who mimic reform for the pleasure of their supervisors. When rendered into black scratch marks on a school district’s by-laws, these contradictions say much more about the group imposing the rules than they do the subjects. When a trans student harms other students, for instance, administrators are forced to a) abide by the zero tolerance or b) plead the facts — in essence, asking the victims to pretend that the assault was something other than an assault so the admin can continue with their inclusive pieties instead of doing the hard work of removing a destructive child from the school.
The progressive’s sin, above all, is that he wishes humans to be something other than what they are. And he often argues from this false premise that the institutions must be undone for man to change — for is not man but a product of the factory that is his surroundings? (The traditionalist similarly forgets his history as he suggests that man is incapable of reformation.)
Chesterton wrote of that particular debate in As I Was Saying:
At the one extreme there was the blustering, not to say blundering, type of Tory who answered almost any proposal for the improvement of social law and custom by shouting at the reformer: “You can’t change human nature.” If, for instance, a reformer proposed to resist the concentration of capital in combines and corners, the dear old gentleman would declare that nothing could stop the growth of monopolies and money-rings, because we could not alter human nature. This only serves to prove that he was himself singularly ignorant of human nature, if only because he was singularly ignorant of human history.
. . .
On the other side, and at the other extreme, is the eager evolutionist or progressive who cries aloud: “But we can alter human nature. We have altered human nature.” I happened to meet a young man of this type recently, a rising and promising man of letters, who used almost exactly these words, and followed them by the (to me) still more intriguing words: “In the past, people used to burn witches, to own slaves, to persecute heretics, and all the rest. Don’t you admit that human nature must have changed?” To which I answered: “No; it has not changed; it has only been changeable.” That is, the young gentleman ignored exactly what the old gentleman ignored: that there is all the difference in the world between a man liking different things, like a man, and the man ceasing to be like a man.
We are normal men, but not innocent men.
If you’ll bear with me for a hacked-together metaphor, quality assurance (QA) is a discipline that argues, that, through the considered application of protocols, businesses can improve processes, thereby maximizing productivity and safety while reducing wasted time and money. Anytime a certified forklift operator flips a shelving unit or a CEO attends a promotional conference, there’s a chance that a QA engineer will be hovering over the shoulder of a wage earner. More often than not, the engineer has at least the start of a good suggestion. He strolls back to his air-conditioned desk and hammers away.
After a few weeks, the engineer (or public-speaking proxy) presents a 43-step process for how the forklift operator ought to mount and maneuver his machine. The board members nods at one another as the report makes its way around the table because the document promises reduced downtime and limited liability; Lean Six Sigma is name-dropped. Out on the floor, the forklift operator follows the procedure for exactly the length of time that the engineer is in sight, and then he adds the document to the graveyard of similar “genius” processes preserved in the breakroom under the sink. The operator knows that the speed of his work is vital for making his quota, and that what the engineer suggests will do nothing but cost him (so he thinks). Further, to be told by an office-dweller, after a few hours of cursory observation, how best to do his job is anathema (the ego growls).
The moral: Rules must account for contradictory incentives and human nature. In QA, the engineer must consider the operator’s incentives when reimagining his role, and, in education, we cannot pretend that all breaches are equal or that “restorative practices” will fix a malicious kid – but they’re perfectly fine for most students.
While the discussion about school discipline (the lack, rather) has a new aspect in the trans craze, the reality that there are underdeveloped human beings crammed in rooms and hallways with one another and getting into spats is nothing new — Cain and Abel are precedents.
From Archie‘s Bull Moose using Reggie as a fence-post driver, to the John Hughes portfolio, and Christmas Story‘s Scut Farkus, brutality in the schoolyard and hallways is the reality of education. Further, in the culture, we acknowledge this fact. School sports teams are little more than the studied application of violence for a satisfactory outcome. The programs provide a form that accommodates aggressiveness and leads it toward productive ends — all normal and good moral development. Plenty of feisty kids have found happy homes as gunners on the special teams unit under the Friday-night lights.
But ask any teacher, and she’ll be able to tell you about a handful of supremely unregenerate students who could not be fixed. No matter how much patience and perseverance was offered by the staff, the student was irredeemable. These are the students for whom zero tolerance was developed, and it’s the false promise of restorative practices that are keeping kids who need individual, specialized education in public schools. A sociopath gains nothing from having his victim heard alongside him — it’s just another opportunity for abuse. The progressive wants to develop a protocol to reprogram and better him, but those rare kids are more cracked than a counselor can manage at once-per-week meetings. Meanwhile, all the week long, he has been intimidating kids and monopolizing the teaching staff’s time.
Whether in policy-making or education, one can observe progressives trying to build a tower with what they imagine are bricks and mortar, completely oblivious that they’re working with dirt-smeared potatoes in a vacuum devoid of morality’s gravity. Like Lewis’s dwarfs at the table, the progressive has convinced himself of the existence of a man utterly alien from those he stands among. When the project fails, he will blame the system and conspiracies instead of accepting there may have been a flaw in the project’s source material (man).