Why is it that the US has six times as many kids on Ritalin as any other country?Explain.

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Processing of Prisoners and Students

From Title: The War on Kids

At a minimum security prison for adult offenders, an officer walks through the process of entering the prison. This is compared to a similar process at a high school complete with metal detectors, security cameras, and a locked library.

APA Citation. The war on kids [Video file]. (2009). In Films On Demand. Retrieved May 22, 2015, from https://digital.films.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?aid=7967&xtid=47843

Video Transcript:

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And so, the very evil children took the dog out to play in the park. Then they took him home and refused to set him on fire. They were evil, evil, evil children, and they refused to do as they were told. They would say, why should we leave the elderly woman in the middle of the expressway, fuck you, we’re not doing it.

Then they would go downstairs and prepare the Molotov cocktails, knowing full well that when they were finished, there was no way in hell they were going to blow up the neighbor’s barn. They were evil, evil, evil children. All their lives people expected them to do bad, they almost never delivered.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We go to school several hours a day. It’s time to learn and it’s time to play. Going to school.

Whoo hoo, going to school.

Is really cool.

Whoo hoo, school is cool.

Lots of other kids are there with me. We’re like a great big family. School is cool.

Starting to learn everything I need, like how to add, how to write and read. Going to school.

Whoo hoo, going to school.

Is really cool.

Whoo hoo, school is cool.

I take my turn and learn to wait, get there on time and don’t be late, school is cool. Sometimes we may disagree, but we can get along anyway. Work problems out patiently and we learn about teamwork every single day. We work it out. Follow the rules, and we’ll all have fun. We think our teacher is number one. Going to school.

Whoo hoo, going to school.

Is really cool.

Whoo hoo, school is cool.

Although I sure like everything, I think my favorite time is when we sing. School is cool.

These are America’s future citizens, the boys and girls to whom we must look for leadership in our postwar democracy. These are America’s hope for the future.

Zero tolerance started off as something related to the drug war. It actually started related to the drug war, and this need to make sure that guns were not coming in to schools. And our country started moving to clamp down on children. And there was this fear of children, and there were some sociologists that came up with the term, super predators.

And the super predator generation needed to be controlled. They needed to be treated like criminals before they actually became criminals. And so as a result of that, zero tolerance started off as weapons. It actually started off with firearms and then became weapons. So that meant the butter knife in school.

Then after the butter knife, it became violence. And violence means varying things depending on the school district. After that, it became really discretionary subjective things.

Twirling Tweety reflects Ashley Smith’s love of the Looney Tune character. But that love got her into hot water at school when she brought a Tweety Bird keychain to class. Garrett Middle School in Cobb County has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to chains.

When I was a kid, they would send you to the principal if you did something wrong and the principal would do something to maybe make you stay after school, or maybe he’d suspend you for a couple days. These days it doesn’t seem like principals have discretion anymore. They’re just made to follow a formula.

If you have a gun on campus, you’re expelled for the rest of the year, or for the rest of your life or something. And that makes sense, if you actually have a gun on campus. But what they’re calling weapons are things like a little cuticle remover on a keychain or nail clipper, or a little key fob that’s in the shape of a gun. They’re calling this a weapon. And because it’s a weapon, you’re expelled.

There’s is a story about a 10-year-old, I think, in Florida who, around the zero tolerance policies, stole $2 from one of his classmates, and he was charged with a felony. He was put in jail for two weeks. And eventually, he was tried for, in addition, armed assault. This is like a 10-year-old.

And I think that when it comes to children and children’s rights, you begin to get a sense of the utter institutional vengeance, the way in which a kind of hatred and vengeance towards youth has materialized in the most unfortunate ways. It’s actually now legislated into laws designed to punish you for infractions that are actually trivial.

Also schools are referring students directly to the police. They’re adding enforcement officers on their campuses who are intervening a set of principals, and arresting kids and taking them away for often minor kinds of violations. What was once a minor pushing and shoving match, now it’s an assault, possibly a felony assault.

So just over, and over, and over, these layers are mounting up, and we’re seeing far more students winding up in our juvenile justice systems. And plus, remember, if you’re guilty of a felony in many states, you lose the right to vote. So on and on, these policies of harsh discipline are contributing not only to the incarceration of youth, but their removal from being active participants in our democracy. So our democratic values are really what are at stake here.

It wasn’t bad grades or bad behavior, but a bag of candy that landed this eighth grade honor student in some pretty hot water.

You heard right. Her 8-year-old son, Christopher, was suspended for playing with his chicken strip at lunch, because the school says he was acting as if it was a gun and pretended to shoot a teacher.

I don’t think a chicken strip is a reason to suspend a child.

A stick figure shooting a gun. New Jersey School says this violates a zero tolerance policy on guns.

You see the district now says Austin held the tiny G. I . Joe gun up to another student’s head and threatened to shoot him.

A couple of days later, Austin was suspended.

School officials say the fifth grader was brown-bagging it, and brought a piece of steak for her lunch. But she also brought a steak knife to cut it. That’s when deputies were called.

Officials say that sniffing a magic marker something like this, could lead to negative drug behavior. And they say that’s what led them to the suspension.

We’ve handled hundreds of cases. And just some of our cases, which a child gargles Scope after lunch, a fourth grader, and the child is suspended for several days for violating a zero tolerance policy against drugs. And all it was, was Scope. Midol, girls having Midol in their purse and students having Alka Seltzer.

A child draws a gun at school, and just joking around, showing another student, he’s suspended from school. A young girl, very astute, passes a nail file across the aisle to another student who wants to clean her fingernails. She’s thrown out of school for a year and three months.

Four boys in the playground are playing cops and robbers, kindergartners, they’re thrown out of school for violating a zero tolerance weapons policy. And they’re playing with their fingers. A young fourth grader– this was a case we had, who threatened to shoot a girl across the room with a spit wad. And he was suspended from school for violating a zero tolerance policy against weapons. A spit wad.

But the interesting thing in that case is that, that night the police actually came by and visited the family. And actually, the police knocked on the door and said they were investigating the shooting. This is with a spit wad.

If you look at the baby boom ideal, the older generation ideal as it’s now being expressed, it is we should have the younger generation, especially in public institutions, should all be dressed alike. They should all conform all the time to rules, because zero tolerance means that we’ll kick them out if they don’t. Ideally, they should be out of sight all the time.

We look at it, going to school as these kids’ jobs. And you need to get used to it right now. We tell them all the time, if you went dressed like that to a job, you wouldn’t have a prayer. Kids just need to understand we just need to put values back in society, and I think that would solve a lot of the problems.

We have to have this constant monitoring and supervision system to ensure that there’s never any bad behavior whatsoever. I mean, we will not tolerate the idea– and again, this is our ideal, the thing that we’re trying to achieve, of a teenager ever having a single drop of alcohol, ever trying a cigarette, ever having any kind of drugs, ever having any kind of sex. All these things zero, zero tolerance. I’m not sure what age we think they should be doing these things.

We certainly tolerate a lot of this behavior in ourselves. But it’s this idea of absolutist conformity, 100% of the time, to rules, to arbitrary rules that are one size fits all. One kind of behavior, one kind of dress, one kind of abstinence from everything. That really is basically our definition of adolescence today is abstain from everything always.

And then you see these rules that are now being enacted where certain fractions that in the past, you would have sent the kid to the guidance teacher, and it would’ve been dealt with in many ways, in kind of an obvious way. You slap a kid on the wrist, don’t do it again, we’ll call your parents. Now kids are being put in police cars, handcuffed and dragged out of school, photographed, finger printed.

Well, I know as a parent, I would always like to see the school system err on the side of caution. These are not things that cannot be worked out afterwards. I mean, we all under the 14th Amendment, have the right to due process. We don’t squelch those rights in the school system. Students still have the right to due process.

Or a child gets brought in to the principal’s office, let’s say he got into a fight. So what happens is, the principal ask the questions. The principal asks the student to write up a statement, and the principal then hands that off to the police officer. And the police officer, then hands it over to the court, and the statement gets used against the child.

Tell us who was with you? Just exactly what happened? You’ll get off much easier.

You know, is they’re in a school environment, wants to be helpful to the principal, wants to get rid of the situation, and opens up to the principal. You’re supposed to trust your principal, right? Open up to the principal, and then the principal hands over the statement to the police. So your right to a Miranda Warning, even though the principal knows he’s going to turn you over to the police, you don’t have any Miranda rights.

Because the kid’s 14, they have no rights, no nothing. And they’re sitting in the office getting lectured by a police officer, because of something they might be thinking. Something that would be intolerable for an adult, theoretically, for an adult to tolerate getting questioned by the police.

Our kids get questioned all the time. They don’t get a lawyer. They don’t get a warning. The parents don’t get called, say, can we question the kid? They just get pulled in and questioned.

In Virginia, a 13-year-old, he had a friend who was suicidal, a female. He took a knife that she brought to school. He thought she was going to kill herself with it. He put it in his locker. He went and told the school officials. They sent him by himself to get the knife. They didn’t think he was a threat. He brought the knife back and they threw him out of school for half a year for violating a weapons policy of the school’s, zero tolerance.

The school board in that case commended him for what he did, but they still suspended him. Now see, that’s why they end up in court. And the only way you can get redress is in a courtroom. There’s absolutely no other way, because the schools don’t listen. The parents that we defend, the students, they’ve gone to the parents, they’ve gone to the principal, they’ve gone to the teachers, and they can’t get a remedy.

That kind of unyielding authoritarian approach is alienating students, not only from their schools, but also, I think, from the concept of being part of a democracy. They are not getting the message that being part of society is something that includes them, that respects them. And so that disrespect of their voice, their concerns, their interest, gets translated in the school discipline policies.

The great casualty of all this stuff from zero tolerance to the war on drugs, or whatever you want to call it, what we see happening, is that everything that great Americans have fought for for the last 200 plus years, in terms of our freedoms, is going to be lost.

There’s really no research to support zero tolerance policies. Nothing that shows it makes anybody safer. There’s no research to show the kids are benefiting. In fact, just the opposite when it comes to achievement. There’s a new data from Russ Skiba at the Indiana Policy Institute showing that there’s a high correlation between low achievement and the high use of suspension.

I know a lot of my friends that cry themselves to sleep from this, that wish they were dead. And it’s appalling, like, it’ll make you sick to your stomach to know everything that’s going on, and the experiences that people have gone through in here. And these are people, especially people that you trust, that are supposed to be there to help you, and they’re just trying to get rid of you.

What we’ve turned the schools into is, basically, the extensions of the police force. And they’re not really schools anymore. They are starting to resemble more and more prison-like complexes where you have police walking the halls these days, and drug-sniffing dogs walking the hallways.

What’s the lesson here. The lesson is that the most cherished institution that we have, or we have had in the past, one that speaks in the most direct way to how a society wants to invest in the future by virtue of how it feels about youth, now all of a sudden, models a prison.

This is our main entry building. We have the main control center that processes everyone through the institution. They’re in charge of all the doors, cameras. Everything that happens in the facility goes through the control center. This is the entry officer with the entry desk here. Everyone that comes in the institution has to process through this entry desk. So I’ll go ahead and process through.

We have buckets here for the personal property, so we just take everything off. All jewelry has to come off. Everything out of all pockets has to come out, so the officer can check all the property. Once you have everything out, then you go step through the metal detector. If it goes off like that, you don’t pass, then you have to make sure your pockets are removed.

This is a wonderful security force. They do a great job of making sure that we’re safe in the building. Again, everyone that comes in has to check in with them, and then they tell them which part of the building to go through. We do have a metal detector to ensure safety. Every student that enters the building comes in through a metal detector in various points of the building. There’s no other way to get in, unless you pass through. So it’s a little tedious, but once the kids get used to it, the line moves a little bit quicker.

One of the things we also have here. Any time you have a door that’s a secured side port door, we have a camera focused on the door. That way whenever staff want to access in to the area, the control center officers can look in the camera and see exactly who’s there. So we know exactly who’s going in and out of doors, and we’re not just letting anyone access any part of the institution at any time. So that’s one of the very important security features we have here is our camera system and is utilized very often on a day-to-day basis.

Do you have cameras? You have security cameras?

Yes, we have security cameras through, I would say, 90% of the building. There are some areas that aren’t covered by the cameras. Yeah, we try to make sure we know what’s going on in the building, especially, in the hallways. Again, if we see kids in the hallway in an area they’re not supposed to be, the department chairpersons and the vice principals in security come quickly.

This is our library. We have a full time librarian that’s here. We also have a full law library in back. The law library is for the inmates use to check on case law or administrative regulations so they know exactly what the rules and regulations are. The inmate can use the book and then he returns it to the law library.

I’m going to go around to the library now. No, it’s locked from the inside.

Very nice size library. I mean, I don’t know. Do you need to go in here?

One of the other things we do in here is let the inmates express themselves. And we have some inmates that are very good painters, so they’ve done murals like you see here on the wall. They also paint throughout the institution year-round, so all the walls are freshly painted.

Ceiling tiles. Now again, it’s I don’t know, what the design pattern was, but the tiles, what happens is, there’s a lot of piping and stuff in there. And when there’s a leak or something, the water pools up there and some of the tiles fall. They used to have a net that was going up and across.

This is one of our general classrooms. This classroom here is used for reading and teaching reading skills, writing, grammar, English. And as you can see, it’s just like a normal classroom, so we actually employ teachers to come in and teach.

This is a locker room for some of the sports teams also. I think the soccer team is there depending on the season. If it’s soccer season, the soccer team has it. If it’s baseball, then the baseball team hangs out in there. This is probably one of the larger classrooms. There may be one or two that are bigger.

This is part of the business department.

You know it’s the old model. We have trouble in the lunchroom, so we don’t have lunch anymore. That doesn’t kind of make sense. You’ve got to find out why you’re having trouble, what you have to do to make it better. How do you get the kids and teachers to participate? How do you get families to support it? I’m not telling you it’s easy, but I would really rather retire, which I could do at my age, than work in a school that was modeled after being a prison.

I hate that everyone associates Columbine with the worst school shooting ever. And that everything that has to do with school is associated with people got shot here.

That’s another thing, I don’t think we should get in trouble for what we wear. It’s a statement of what we like, of what we believe in, so why should you get in trouble for that? It makes no sense.

I got a little bit mad when they said you couldn’t come inside. Why can’t they come inside, there’s cameras all over the school anyway.

I think there’s like 37 cameras total. That though, that they admit.

Oh my God, the gym, you walk out and there’s a camera here looking at you, so you turn around and there’s a camera looking at you that way. It freaks me out. Doesn’t that freak you out?

No, dude, they’re worthless. My friend Sam got her purse stolen, and they reviewed the tape and they didn’t know who did it.

It’s because the camera’s spinning. And it’s just made to put fear in the lives of teenage kids.

I really believe that most of our students, most of our students, feel safer with resource officers there. They feel safer with the monitors knowing that if some irrational person walks off the street with the intent to do bodily harm to them, or their friends, that there’s probably someone watching a monitor.

They can see it much quicker, and prevent that thing from happening, or at least slowing it down to where you don’t have another Columbine situation. You can’t guarantee that monitors will do that, but I think that they feel safer by having them there, because they aren’t involved in any illegal activity. And they don’t worry about monitors watching. They feel safer with them.

It’s kind of creepy. So everyone’s like, yeah, we’re in jail. I just sit here and do my work. Everyone is worried that, if you do anything that looks remotely like a drug deal or something, that you’re going to get in a lot of trouble. So everybody’s like staying as far away from cameras as they possibly can.

And I don’t even look up in the hallways. Because I don’t like knowing. It’s kind of weird knowing that people just watch you walk around the halls. OK. It’s really creepy, actually, because it’s like someone watching you in your house because you’re there so often. They don’t really prevent anything. They just take pictures of it. They just show what happened. They can’t really prevent anything at all.

Jefferson County 911.

Yes, I am a teacher at Columbine High School. There is a student here with a gun. He has shot out a window. I don’t know what’s in my shoulder. If it was just a [INAUDIBLE], or what.

Has anybody been injured, ma’am?

Yes. And the school is in a panic. And I’m in the library. I’ve got students down– under the tables, kids. Heads under the table. Kids are screaming. And the teachers are trying to take control of things. We need police here.

OK. We’re getting them there.

The cameras started out being in the hallways, for your safety in case there’s a fight, then we can know, or whatever. Now they’re outside. Now there on the buses. There everywhere. You can’t hide. And I remember I used to read about prisoners of war and the stuff people would go through.

They’d be captured by the North Vietnamese, or whatever. And the thing that drove them crazy– the physical torture was awful, the deprivation, the loneliness. But the theme that kind of ran through, what was so awful about being a prisoner, was never knowing when you’re going to be observed. So it drove them crazy. And I think it’s never knowing when that little pssht in the door is going to open up. And someone’s going to watch you and shut it. And that’s what it’s like for our kids.

The kids want to be safe. And it’s really made a difference. We made a decision early on that we’re going to make a decision for the kids who really want to learn, and want to do the right thing. And if you don’t want to be in that group, then you may have some problems. But we haven’t had any opposition whatsoever.

We spent a lot of money on cameras just as security. Anything that goes on, we’re seeing a car pull up or anything, we got ways to monitor that all the time. And we’ve got [INAUDIBLE] where we can get your license plate. We can pull it right up and see what color your eyes are, all over our campus, which is great.

Most of the places that I used to go to, the opening question that parents would have, or teachers, would be related to safety. It was peculiar to me, because of the work that I was doing. I was looking at curriculum and instruction. Nobody asked me about content, curriculum, instruction. They asked me, will my kid be safe? Is it easy to get to? So I think that’s a terrible stain on America. We should have a country where people are worried about being safe in schools? There’s something wrong with that.

Some of the studies indicate probably 70% of the parents are afraid of another Columbine incident. And there’s a genuine fear that that could happen again. And you look at the vulnerability that we have, certainly. Look at the vulnerability of City Hall. We don’t have metal detectors. We don’t have security checking everybody that comes in. We’re certainly vulnerable, but how much and how far do you go to prepare?

Media hysteria really created this groundswell of support for zero tolerance. And folks being scared that it can happen in their school. And so now we have police officers in every school. He’s now there to be law enforcement. He’s there to lock up kids. And when you go into juvenile courtroom, and sit there, and see 11-year-olds and 12-year-olds coming in in orange jumpsuits shackled at their ankles and at their wrists, and they have not committed a violent crime, but they’re being treated that way, it’s shocking. And we really need to step back and think about what we’re doing to this generation of kids.

Stratford High School became an international high school in just a few minutes. It was on TV stations all across the world. There’s no doubt in my mind that the intentions of the action that day were pure. And by that, I mean, school officials and police officials had ample reason to suspect that there was illegal drug activity.

There was drug activity taking place at that particular time of the morning at that particular location in that school. They had documentation that was a normal occurrence there, and so there was a plan devised, in fact, to try to apprehend those responsible for that.

Well, the raid takes place in the main hallway at the school, and this is where the one surveillance camera is filming. The police swarmed in, now, from the bottom of the screen, and then jump on top of kids. It’s pretty violent.

Hands on your head. Lay down. Put your hands on your head. Secure. Hands on your head. I don’t want to hear no talk.

Within mere seconds they had the hallway secured. Kids who didn’t immediately comply were told to get on the ground, and get on the ground repeatedly. If they did get on the ground, they were put in those flexicuffs.

Cops telling you to get on the ground, meanwhile they have their guns pointed the entire time. Ferocious canines, like a video straight out of Birmingham or Selma. It was absolutely horrendous. And you really get that image of how frightened these students must have been. It’s harrowing. I can’t imagine how these students felt about it at the time.

Now how that was conducted, I’ve been on national television, and said I’m sorry that it happened that way. That was the most unusual to take place in a school building. And I’ve never seen anything like that before or since. I don’t think we will. So I’m sorry that it happened that way, but I think what this does point out, that people are trying to figure out how do you stop this terrible disease of drug addiction? And how do you stop it and try to keep one more student from getting involved in it? And that was why I say the intentions were pure. It was trying to stop that.

The problem with what happened in Goose Creek, or the use of drug sniffing dogs in school in general, is A, it creates a police state atmosphere in the school, no matter how cute and cuddly those dogs may be. And second, it teaches kids the wrong lesson. It teaches them that you are guilty until you are proven innocent.

We are going to assume that all of you have drugs, and therefore, we have to bring in these drug-sniffing dogs. Instead of requiring schools to have reasonable suspicion that a particular student has broken school rules, or broken the law, and then engage in that sort of intrusive search.

Get in the center now. [INAUDIBLE].

And there’s a third thing, by the way, that’s wrong with these drug-sniffing dogs, and that is, they have a really high false-positive rate. So often the dogs will alert, and then a student is subjected to very intrusive search. Somebody’s going through their backpack, they have to empty their pockets, their car is searched, when, in fact, the dog alerted to the kids Bologna sandwich.

Say yes to your life. And when it comes to drugs and alcohol, just say no.

Almost anything that you hear is unreal about drugs, in terms of who’s using drugs, who’s abusing drugs, where the problem is, and what ought to be done about it.

Parents refuse to think that it was their kid’s choice. It’s peer pressure. It’s always the other kid’s fault. And it’s usually not, because people aren’t going to be like, you have to try it, because if you don’t want to, they’re like, all right, nice, then work for me. They’re not going to force you to do something like that, because they just aren’t. They don’t understand the way things really are.

Emergency cases from illegal drugs, heroin, cocaine, meth, all of them, is people over the age of 30. And nobody will discuss this particular issue, because it’s a taboo topic. It is not permissible to discuss drug abuse as a middle aged problem. So we have this unreal discussion of the group that’s really abusing drugs the least, which are teenagers and young adults being held up as the problem.

There’s like two or three different drug groups, because there’s D.A.R.E. Then there’s these one people that give you wristbands that have monkeys on them, but I don’t remember who they are. Because it just says, don’t monkey around with drugs on the wristband, and you got like candy if you kept it on all week.

So people would hook it to their belt loops and stuff, because who’s really going to wear it? We just want the candy. No one really pays attention to it. It’s very, yay, we don’t have to class. So I think that’s the only reason people like when they come. Is because people can just kind of I don’t have to take my test today, and I don’t have to turn in my stuff. I have an extra day to do homework. And that’s all we’re really thinking about when that happens. And it’s, basically, just a day to goof around.

The D.A.R.E. Program has been shown time and time again to not work. It doesn’t actually reduce the use of drugs amongst the kids who go through the D.A.R.E. Program. And it doesn’t actually cause kids to have attitudes towards drugs that are say, more negative than kids who don’t go through the program at all.

They’re always very, very off with their terms. Like drinking stuff? Everyone calls it alcohol. That’s just all it’s called, and they come up with like 20 different things you can call it. What are they talking about? And then all we think about is what they called it, and how stupid they sound and we’re obviously not going to listen to them. There’s people that try too hard to be adults, and then people that try too hard to communicate to the kids. It doesn’t work.

Hey, everyone. I’m [INAUDIBLE], you’re D.A.R.E. safety buddy. I’m going to take you on an exciting journey through the world of safety. I’m going to be your guide as you learn the lessons of how to be safe, drug-free and violence free. Right on.

I think we have to change the entire education paradigm, where kids aren’t just like in D.A.R.E. and Just Say No. Seeing 30 second spots on TV, which studies are proving now, get them to think more about drugs, and think about how they feel, whether it’s positively or negatively. But increasingly, kids have a pretty positive view of marijuana given that none of their friends have ever OD’d on it ever.

These illegal drugs are always bad for you. They can get you into big trouble, get you sick, or even kill you, kill you, kill you.

Teach kids those lifelong learning skills that will actually enable them to make independent choices, instead of just going, just say no, just say no.

Kids need to feel safe, not only from other students, but they need to feel safe from the administration and from teachers. And often that’s not the case. Teachers are allowed to bully kids. Administrators are allowed to bully kids.

There are some sadistic people out there. There are administrators, and there are the specialists that they just seem to enjoy hurting people. And it seems to attract a certain kind of person that maybe was powerless for a long time in their life.

Well, it’s interesting in schools, you generally end up having about 5% of a group, teachers, responsible for about 90% of the discipline referrals. And what I always found interesting is that the kids always were the ones that were punished. It was always the children’s fault.

It was always this blame the student mentality that they seemed to have. It’s always the student’s fault. It’s the student’s fault. Look, there are adults running the school, not the students. It’s the adults that are in charge, not the students. So why is it the student’s fault?

So we were talking about truancies, and why students don’t want to come to school. That if they’re are 16 years old, and they’re truant, should we expel them? And this, that and the other. And they’re talking about these students are drain on resources. They want to come to school. And at that point, I finally had had enough of this blame the student mentality. And I asked, I said, could someone please tell me has anyone ever delved into the reasons why these children don’t want to come to school?

It was total silence.

What I see is human suffering in front of me every day. 100 kids a day. Out of a 100 kids a day, for 60, it’s pretty miserable. It’s a pretty miserable experience every single day. Being herded around like sheep, being judged by your peers, being called a faggot by people, getting beaten up, low level harassment by adults, getting screamed at, sitting in horrible rooms, being physically exhausted, eating horrible food, being treated like an animal.

Can I have your attention please? Before we start today, I would like to go over three rules for this class. If you follow them we will all have a lot of fun. If you do not follow them, there will be consequences.

Wooo.

One of the great honorable professions of all time is teaching. One of the great tragedies that occurred in America was about 60 years ago when the National Education Association, which was then truly a professional association, like doctors, and lawyers, and accountants, they decided that it was in their best interest to become an industrial style union. And they, essentially, really obliterated the quality of teachers in the United States. It’s a significant deterioration of the quality of people in public schools teaching today than there were 50 years ago.

That’s what teachers need to be. They need to love kids. They need to love teaching kids. Too many teachers nowadays are just concerned with having authority over people. They want to become a teacher, because they know they control you for the time that you’re in there. That’s what most of them want.

I was hoping we could have fun this year, and I think that we still can. But only after you learn to follow all of my rules. And you will follow all of my rules.

I often see this bumper sticker, if you can read this, thank a teacher. And I often thought, well, what about having a counter-bumper sticker that would say, if you hate math, thank a teacher. If you think you’re stupid, thank a teacher.

But school doesn’t want to do that, because the school refuses to admit that they even do that, that that’s a side effect for a lot of people. They just ignore it but, of course, if they’re successful, then you hear about all of successes. But all the people that have turned their anger against themselves, or against the school, there just, oh, it’s not our problem, that’s yours. But if your a success, it’s because of the school.

The truth is that most teachers today went to colleges that were not competitive, and even there, did not do very well.

There are school systems that are taking CEOs out of private industry, and people believing that schools are a business, so they need someone a business sense. Most business are trying to produce a product that’s exactly the same with certain tolerances. I mean it looks exactly like, if they are building Ford pickups, they want them all to look just about alike, maybe a little different paint on them. And a human being is not that way.

They don’t know how to help people. They expect way too much, because they think everyone is the same. They expect us to all learn the same. And if you’re the one person that learns different in that class, they expect you to just deal with it. We’re not going to change how we teach for you.

And furthermore, your disciplined if you don’t accept the punishments of low grades, or of a teacher shouting, or standing in the corner or whatever, if you don’t accept this discipline, your systematically humiliated and mocked. And your parents are brought in, and they get a taste of the life, too.

Parents, actually, have been taught to believe that if the child’s misbehaving, it’s not a discipline problem, it’s about a chemical problem. The child has learned to read. It’s not a teaching problem. It’s again, about a chemical problem, maybe even a genetic problem.

Yeah, that’s what I see in the school. If you can’t sit down in that chair and keep your mouth shut, it has nothing to do with the fact that this is developmentally inappropriate for children to be expected to do, it’s this child has got something wrong with him or her. And if this child can’t sit still and seem motivated to these boring force-fed tasks, we need to drug him or her, because there’s something wrong with them.

They’re often our best and brightest kids. They’re our most energetic kids, our most rebellious kids, our most exciting kids. The kids who may someday really transform the world and bring new and better things into the world.

Well, those kids are always somewhat difficult. I mean, by definition they’re going to be a little more difficult, require more attention, and more guidance, and more love maybe than some other children. Well these are the kids now that get diagnosed, and they’re the kids who get drugged.

I have kids that will come to school some days and just be staring at the ground. I mean, like someone took out the front part of their brain. And almost drooling, kids just passed out, and I’ll ask them, what’s going on, man, what’s up with you? They say, well, I changed meds. I got new meds. I’m adjusting to this.

Why is it that the US has six times as many kids on Ritalin as any other country? Because this is the most profitable country to sell your drugs. Ritalin was originally made by a Swiss company. They couldn’t get the Swiss to put their kids on it.

99 times out of 100, it’s not a kid who’s having a problem learning. They typically are bright kids, not necessarily, but typically bright kids that were medicating. They are definitely energetic kids. Kids that question, kids that argue with teachers. Big no, no, don’t argue with teachers, don’t argue with the source of wisdom, don’t argue with administrators. And we are lobotomizing these kids.

The markup is here. And I heard paper about a year ago, that in all of France, there were only 8,000 kids on Ritalin and similar substances. In Lansing, Michigan, I’m sure we have many more than 8,000 kids on it. It’s been an enormous marketing coop.

I think the question you have to ask, though, is this really four million kids that we’re talking about? If you’re talking about a temporary condition, or a very small number of people, you might be able to make a case, but not four million. Four million children and teenagers do not need Ritalin. They don’t need these psychiatric drugs that we’re seeing, and again, we have to ask, why the United States? Why do we account for 90% of all Ritalin prescriptions in the world?

There’s virtually hardly any independent voice in regard to the effects of psychiatric medication. It’s the voice of the industry that you hear no matter who’s speaking.

There has been an enormous increase in marketing. We have direct TV advertising. We have the drug companies spend over $10,000 per doctor in the United States to push their products.

The only thing a psychoactive agent can do to a child’s brain is disrupt it. That’s why we’re against having kids drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes. It’s why we have very strict punishments for selling illegal drugs to children, because we have a sense that there’s something that should be inviolable about the growth and development of the child’s brain.

We put toxins into their brains at extraordinarily high concentrations in the name of psychiatric treatment. So that our children’s brains literally grow up adapting to a bath of toxicity. Now often, the initial psychiatric drug is the beginning of a lifelong dependence on psychiatric drugs, which I will never become free.

What the medications typically do for almost everything, whether it’s ADHD, or depression, or schizophrenia, is they improve the symptoms in the short run, and they make the patients more likely to be chronically disabled.

And that’s the method of addiction, and that’s why we are actually bringing up our kids to be psychiatric or street drug addicts when we give them these kinds of drugs as children. When you disrupt the brain in children, they become more apathetic, they become more docile, and they are more controllable for awhile.

Invariably, however, then their brain starts to fight back against the drugs. And often, if not really most of the time, the children become much worse. Because now their brain isn’t functioning as well. They have less discipline. They have less self-control and less in touch with their feelings. They care less about other human beings, all the things that happen to people on drugs.

I think the most obvious effect is that zombie-like state that children get in when they start taking a stimulant. One of the things that I notice, is that over the summer, a lot of parents take their children off the stimulant, and over the summer I feel like the children come back. They’re in my office, and they’re happy, they’re giggly, they want to play, they’re playful, they smile.

And then in September, they come into my office and their affect is flat. They don’t want to do anything. They’re apathetic. Hey, you want to go out and shoot some hoops? No. I just immediately notice the child is taken out of them. It’s like the spark’s turned off.

Some children can handle those conditions, and they’re the kids that teachers like. They’re the teacher’s pets. They are the quiet, subdued, compliant children. Those are the children that they hold all the other children up as a standard of how you’re supposed to act.

Harvey is the happiest boy in school. He likes to visit with his friends, and say, hello, to everybody he passes. The other children, and the teachers, too, like Harvey, because being cheerful helps to make everyone feel better.

I’m actually not ADD. They thought I was, because I’m just a little bit crazy, but I’m not. All it did was kind of get me high, I guess. It didn’t really help. It’s supposed to help me, but I feel normal without it. And I don’t know, it’s not very good.

The stimulants cause depression, they cause anxiety, they cause obsessive compulsive disorder, they stunt growth. Do not let the doctors lie about this. NIMH has just done a big study. They for four, five years withheld the data, and finally they let the data slip out in their latest study, that the children are having loss of height and weight, not just weight.

Now, how does this occur? The stimulants disrupt growth hormone rhythms. Growth hormone doesn’t just control height and weight, it controls the entire growth of the body. Hardly anyone addresses that, so we’re disrupting the growth of all the organs of the body, including the brain by giving stimulants to our kids.

Stimulants flood the brain with dopamine, and if you keep doing that over time, the brain is going to stop producing that, because it’s trying to compensate for all this flood of dopamine. So what happens is, the brain stops producing it, and you become depressed. So that’s another effect is these children start showing signs of depression.

One of my friends, his mom caught him doing drugs once. And then his grades were really bad, so she assumed that there had to be something wrong with him. And so they did a bunch of tests on him, and diagnosed him with ADD and put him on Ritalin, and now he’s like, extremely skinny. And he doesn’t eat right. He throws up, and it’s just totally screwed him up, and his grades are even worse.

The kids never learn better. They kind of scrawl their names. They get halfway through assignments, and they lose their energy from it. And these are kids that used to be vivacious and energetic, and bouncing off the walls, and used to have tons of opinions. Now they just sit there and stare at the floor. So who’s problem is getting solved there?

They can start showing signs of psychosis, or nervous tics, or Tourettes-like tics where they’re constantly touching their face, or moving their face. I worked with one little boy once that he became so consumed in nervous tics, that he couldn’t even go out in public without people staring at him.

And sometimes these tics become permanent. I remember very handsome college student who came to me and his face was switching. He’d been off Ritalin for years and years. He had a permanent twitch from these drugs.

Kids have to be put on more and more medication, because of the side effects of the medication, and they’re thinking it’s the child’s mental illness. And the parents are not educated. The parents go to these doctors, and these psychiatrists, and pediatricians, thinking they’re getting expert information. And really what they’re getting, is information that’s just been handed down by the pharmaceutical companies and groups like CHADD, which is a parent’s organization to support the diagnosis of ADHD, they promote this ADHD fiasco.

Well, there’s an enormous irony that we went from having a national campaign of just saying no to drugs, to a national campaign of just say yes to the very same drugs, when prescribed by physician. It’s as if they writing of the prescription somehow changes the basic quality and impact of the drug when it does not.

We now have follow-up studies showing that the routine use of Ritalin causes an increased use of cocaine and cigarettes in young adulthood.

For the sake of our children, I implore each of you to be unyielding and inflexible in your opposition to drugs.

The definition of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is really a collection of behaviors that annoy teachers and require attention. This is from the Official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It’s put out by the American Psychiatric Association. It is the source of the diagnosis for ADHD.

Number one symptom is often fidgets with hands or feet, or squirms in seat. The second one is, often leaves seat in classroom. The third one is, often runs about or climbs obsessively. Often blurts out answers before questions have been completed. Often has difficulty awaiting turn. Often fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork. Often has difficulty sustaining attention in tasks or play activities. Often doesn’t seem to listen when spoken to directly. Often loses things necessary for tasks or activities, e.g. toys, school assignments, pencils, books.

These are diagnoses to control classrooms. So literally, educators, psychologists, psychiatrists, got together, and they developed a concept that behaviors that require attention in the classroom shouldn’t be given attention, the children should be labeled. All the teacher knows is that one out of her 30 kids is doing this, and two out of 30 is doing that.

And how she’s been taught in a seminar, which she doesn’t know was presented by a drug company sponsored doctor, and tells her that that’s not her fault. She’s not got to learn how to get everybody’s attention, she’s got a diagnosis she can work with instead.

You can understand a teacher, in a class of increasingly crowded classes today that we have 30 or 40, that they don’t want to pay attention to one kid or two kids that are causing a lot of problems. So schools are a big recommender of psychiatric drugs for kids, and sometimes will not even let kids come to school unless they’re put on some kind of medication.

Boys and girls, how would you like to show some of the ways we know of being quiet?

Yes.

All right. Bring your chairs up.

Oh, moving chairs will certainly be noisy. Well, there is a quiet way to move chairs, isn’t there? There wasn’t much noise at all. No one was disturbed.

This little paragraph tells us that we’ve forsaken our kids. That we will subject them to boring, repetitive, monotonous– this is their words– repetitive, monotonous situations by diagnosing and drugging them. And we won’t provide them close supervision, appropriate rewards for behavior, novelty, or even, quote, interesting activities.

What kind of disease? You think multiple sclerosis goes away when you have an interesting activity? You think your brain tumor goes away when you’re in a novel situation? This is not a disease. This is a condition of teachers, parents and psychiatrists more than it is a condition of our children. This diagnosis tells you much more about us than about the children.

I don’t know what the hell it’s doing to their brains, but it is making a formerly questioning child turn into a completely complicit child. And that’s quite a trick to do to the human brain. I don’t know how it works, but it works.

And remember, there’s a country called England. They’re hardly a third world country. They have banned the use of these drugs with kids and adolescents for two reasons. The first is, that they’re not very effective with kids. There’s never been any evidence that they work with kids. That hasn’t prevented us from putting 10s of thousands of kids on these drugs, because the drug companies have basically lied to doctors. Number two, they dramatically increase suicide and murder.

A disturbing new study out today shows our sharp jump in the number of young Americans committing suicide. Almost 2000 young people age 19 and under killed themselves in 2004. That’s an increase of more than 18% in the rate of teen suicide from the year before.

Well, when you cause brain dysfunction in a human being, it often leads to suicidal or violent behavior. We now know from clinical trials, and the FDA has admitted, that the anti-depressants cause suicidal behavior in children. I’ve been saying it for 10 years. The FDA has finally acknowledged it this year.

But the same process also produces violence. Suicide and violence are cut from same cloth, and they both come from causing brain dysfunction and disinhibition, and a lack of self-control in kids. And Eric Harris, probably the leader of the shootings at Columbine, was definitely taking Luvox. I was a medical expert in two cases in Columbine, so I’ve had access to data. And it is very clear that on autopsy, Eric Harris had an effective level of Luvox in his blood.

Now, if you just look at the label for Luvox, which is an adult antidepressant that got marketed to children for obsessive compulsive disorder, but it’s, basically, an adult antidepressant. And if you look at the label for Luvox it tells you that in their small study of children, 4% of them became manic on this drug. And mania is this potentially violent, out of control behavior.

And I know that Eric Harris developed a severe disorder. His violent, hateful, destructive attitudes while taking this drug. That is very clear from his history, and it’s clear that he took the drug probably on the very day he committed these acts, because he had a significant level in his bloodstream, and the drug has a half life of only about a day, less than a day.

A disturbing number of recent young shooters were either on antidepressants or were withdrawing from antidepressants. 12-year-old Christopher Pittman on Luvox and withdrawing from Paxil when he killed his paternal grandparents.

14-year-old also Elizabeth Bush on Prozac when she blasted away at fellow students in Williamsburg, Pennsylvania, wounding one. 18-year-old Jason Hoffman on Effexor or Celexa when he opened fire at his California high school wounding five.

15-year-old Sean Cooper on a mix of antidepressants when he shot at students at his Idaho high school. 15-year-old T. J. Solomon, also on a mix of antidepressants when he aimed his shotgun at classmates in Conyers, Georgia, wounding six. And 17-year-old Eric Harris on Luvox when he and his partner, Dylan Klebold, killed 12 classmates and a teacher at Columbine.

Education is under siege. It’s under siege. It’s under siege by the marketeers. It’s under siege by the corporations. It’s under siege by the evangelicals, who want to promote abstinence and want to eliminate sex education. I mean it’s under siege by conservatives who really believe that the ultimate test of learning is testing.

It’s under siege in ways that suggest that teachers are being incredibly de-skilled, because all they learn about now is learning how to teach for the test. It’s under siege and the support services are being eliminated. And it’s under siege, in a sense, that it’s no longer seen as really fundamental to a democracy itself. I mean, it’s actually seen as an excess.

If students go to school in an atmosphere in which the school officials get to control what they read, what they say, and what they can put in their school newspaper, they’re going to grow up thinking, well gee, that’s the way it is. And when they become adults and government tries to control what they read, what they say, or what they put in their newspaper, they’re going to shrug their shoulders and say, well, that’s the way it is. And that’s how we lose our freedom.

This institution wasn’t created to make sure that every child reaches his full potential, learns as much as there is to learn. Quite the opposite. It was created to get people to stop thinking, frankly. We’re supposed to control their thoughts. A prison doesn’t even do that. In a prison, you’re constricted to a room, and you’re constricted in all sorts of ways, but no one’s telling you what to think.

Nothing seems OK anymore. If you’re in school, if you’re in summer, you’re like, oh man, you’re like so free, and you’re happy, and everything’s fine. And then you go to school, and nothing is good anymore. You feel like there’s no reason to live for it.

Public schooling is the antithesis to democracy. We live in a democratic society. Our society is built on freedoms and personal liberties. And yet, it’s like we take our children, and we lock them up in a prison for 13 years of their life. And we regiment every aspect of their physical body, their emotions, their social contacts, and most importantly, their minds. What they can and can’t learn, and how they will learn it.

And then when they’re 18 years old, and we open the key, and we release them into society, suddenly, they’re now supposed to know how to think for themselves and be self-starting, innovative, creative, imaginative individuals, who are supposed to take part in a democratic process. It’s impossible. It’d be like sending the kids over to a fascist nation for 13 years, and having them come back and explain what democracy’s all about.

And yet, that’s what we do each and every generation since compulsory schooling was instituted in the 1800s.

My curriculum comes from the state, that what is taught is decided at the state level now. That was different 20 years ago, 25 years ago, when I was a kid, but now it’s decided by the state. And in there, you will not find anything that is critical of governments, of institutions, and I teach history.

If you wanted to simplistically say, what is the one purpose of schooling? It’s to psychologically indoctrinate people into their proper social class, their proper relation to authority. They’re laboratories of psychological indoctrination. Everything else is trivial.

There was no research study that said compulsory schooling works. That putting all the kids the same age, in the same classroom, at the same time, and teaching the same thing, from the same teacher, is the best way to learn. There’s no research that supports that, but we just threw it in 1850. We say, yeah, that’s it. And then we’re living with that. That’s become the norm.

No, the norm should be what– how did Shakespeare learn? Well, some people, oh, well, he went to school. He went to school 12 weeks out of the year.

You would never think of criticizing the basic institution itself, who just keeps churning out 10s of thousands of kids who can barely scrawl out their own name. I’ve got 100 kids a day. If I spent five minutes with every kid, that’s 500 minutes. I don’t have that many minutes at school. It’s built into the structure of the school to not spend quality time with the kids.

Whoever managed this in its various manifestations, this system, had a target in mind, and the target was to infantilize the mass mind, to condition it, to indoctrinate it, but basically, to condition it to take orders in a docile fashion. Or, if an individual felt rebellious, he or she would lack the information and the practice to effectively be rebellious.

The school day actually starts when the alarm rings in the morning, because the child’s day is actually consumed the minute they wake up, because they’ve got to get ready for school. And usually that whole routine is a nightmare for a lot of parents, because they are trying to get the kid up. The kid doesn’t want to get up. They’re not motivated. Who would want to get up and go to prison?

Parents, trying to get everything going, sometimes there’s other kids, there’s chaos, parents have got to get to work. School’s just a big babysitting factory.

I hate Thursdays. They’re the hardest day to wake up ever. Mondays are pretty bad, too. Wednesdays are annoying, because you want it to be Thursday, so tomorrow’s Friday. Fridays are hard, because you’ve got tests and stuff. But at least you get to sleep in the next few days.

A child gets to school, maybe parents have had a fight, maybe the child’s been abused all morning, maybe they’ve been screamed and yelled at. Maybe the routine was so distasteful, that they’re entering school possibly already having a bad day. And they get there, and there might be some designated time the kids can socialize.

And then when the bell rings, especially, in high school ages, kids are not on time, they’re sanctioned for it. They can get detentions. They can get a demerit, whatever it’s called. They’re immediately forced to sit in their little designated chairs, and basically, sit down and shut up.

There is absolutely no justification for the sequence of subjects in any school in the country. There is no justification. And by following one by another, you confuse people and bewilder them. All that’s left behind, is the need to do well on the test.

So let’s, for the sake of argument say, that you are finally caught up in the wonder, the glamour of quadratic equations, a bell rings, everyone clears out. The teacher says come on, you’ll be late for your next class. You say, I’m lost in the magic of quadratic equations. I want to finish this. You can’t finish. Why not?

I don’t know why not, because you have to go and think poetically. And then, when you’re lost in the rapture of an Italian sonnet, and just about to come up with that tricky missing rhyme, the bell rings and somebody says, you have to go, take off your clothes, and run around a filthy gymnasium and have people scream at you.

If you wanted to invent a mechanism to drive people insane, I mean, literally insane so they don’t follow their own best interests, so their own good common sense, that’s the system you would invent.

How late are we?

About five minutes late.

Sorry.

You internalize something about this process of the bell rings, you do math. The bell rings, and you do English. You internalize this lesson that I won’t learn anything unless it’s taught to me. We’re seeing that people are graduating from school. They’re certified as educated. They have five years of French, for instance, or three years of trig, and stuff like that, and they can’t speak French. They can’t do trig and so, therefore, education is not the same as learning.

They’re taught to hate reading by being forced to read stuff that they don’t want to constantly. It’s really rare for a kid in school to be able to choose a book that they want to read and read it. And occasionally, you get punished for doing that.

If you luck out, and you get a teacher that lets you choose what you want to read, you’re going to have to dissect it, you’re going to have to write about it, you’re going to have to parse it out. The joy is going to be killed.

We’re going to itemize this experience. We’re going to divide this book up, and we’re going to make you hate it, this book you love. By the time you’re done with it, and by the time I’ve given you all these assignments about how to analyze, you’re going to hate this book.

Good people wait for a teacher to tell them want to do. They don’t read Moby-Dick as they wish to. They wait for a teacher to tell them what to read, when to read it, what it means, and then they’re assigned questions to answer that control the range of what you can think about in Moby-Dick. It’s not the way big minds are created.

I’m going to tell you what to write about. Again, the knowledge comes from somewhere else. The motivation comes from somewhere else. I’m going to tell you what to write about, and tell you how long it’s going to be.

I’m going to tell you what kind of cursive writing it should be in. I’m going to tell you your writing’s bad, your spelling’s bad. I’m going to judge you every step of the way. And then I’m going to get upset, because you don’t want to write. Why don’t you want to write? What’s the matter? You know, it’s not so hard, it’s OK to worry. Just write.

If you have to sit there six hours of school, at least make it fun. You ask if you can go to the bathroom, for God’s sake, and they just say, no.

The overwhelming amount of mail that I get, email I get, is from parents and children desperate to get some help with school teachers who are not letting their children use the toilet when they need to. Either their restricting it, or they are punishing children for using the toilet, or they’re rewarding children who don’t use the toilet, or they are out right torturing children.

What adult would tolerate that? What adult would tolerate at work being told you cannot go to the bathroom? You’d immediately have a lawsuit on your hands. Like, Nabisco. Nabisco actually had some lawsuits against it, because it was not letting factory workers use the bathroom. And that immediately stopped when they brought a lawsuit against it.

It’s lucky that you would even go to class. Who wants to go to go to that every day, waking up at 6:00 in the morning going to something you hate?

Would you go to an office or a club full of gloom? Would you willingly go to a place day after day that depressed you? That made you feel unwelcome, because there wasn’t room for you? Certainly not. Then we shouldn’t expect our children to either.

Get them in the room. Get them into the room. Don’t let them out in the halls. No free time, no free time, no time to themselves. No time to develop relationships with each other. No time to have conversations. So they get hustled to the rooms. Teachers are waving signs, get to class, and get out of the hall, getting yelled at. And they’re getting screamed at.

And I mean, screamed at by hall monitors and school officials. And all the teachers are ordered to be in the halls during these passing times. So they’re getting screamed at to go to class. You get in class, boom, door shut, quiet, halls are empty. Got to have a hall pass to leave. If you don’t have that hall pass, you’re going to be in trouble.

So then you’ve got about 50 minutes, direct instruction, sitting in a chair, surrounded by your peers. And ding-dong, on to the next class. So you’re in social studies, history, let’s say, ding-dong, drama. Hustle across the school with all your stuff, bounce off of a million people, and now you’re in drama.

50 minutes later, ding-dong, on to the next one. You’ve got four minutes, and you’ve got to get across the school that’s about a quarter of a mile long. Got to hustle to the next one. So you go through this until lunch. Finally, lunch, thank God, lunch.

Talk about your school phobia, some kids don’t want to go to school. Is this a new element? Not new, it’s been around about 10 years now. School phobia, well, we talk about prison phobia or concentration camp phobia. Who wants to go to a place where your thoughts and actions are controlled all day?

Get down, sit down, eat your food quickly, eat, eat, eat. I mean, they are getting hustled. People, again, people are yelling at them. People are hurrying them, like basic training in the military. Eat, eat, eat, and so you’re eating really quickly, because they know they have a half hour.

And if it takes them 15 minutes to eat, they only get 15 minutes in the yard, the exercise yard, the recess area, such as it is. And so the kids just pour the food down their gullet as quickly as possible so they can get outside and hang out with friends. So maybe they’ve been at school for four hours at this point, and now they’ve got 15 minutes of freedom outside to do whatever they want.

Only we’ve taken away most of recreation out there. Taken away anything that could hurt them. There’s no benches, no where to sit. There’s a couple of basketball hoops, a lot of packed dirt, concrete, kids standing around. But if you’re lucky, you get 15 minute of that. And then we line up, military style, get walked back to class and then you’re back in 50 minutes of instruction. Ring the bell, 50 minutes at somewhere else, ring the bell, 50 minutes at somewhere else, and then you go home.

Children don’t have any say in being able to debate the validity of the curriculum. They can’t say, you know what teacher? I heard otherwise, or this is my opinion, or this is my thought, or wait a minute, I read a book that told me something different. If you do that, I’ll see you after school mister. Your name’s on the board. One more outburst like that and your mine after school today.

My favorite phrase is because I said so. What kind of answer is that? That’s not any reinforcement there. That’s like, do it or else.

So anywhere from about maybe 8 o’clock to 5 o’clock or 6 o’clock at night, the kid’s brain and physical body is owned by the school, is owned by the institution. If they’re not at school, they’re at home doing homework from school if they care at all about their grades and stuff. And then boom, you collapse, you’re exhausted, you’re a 14-year-old, so now you watch TV like any sane normal person would do to try to relax.

I think that what’s important to understand is that parents will completely overlook the conditions their children are in seven or eight hours a day. I think parents forget how much of their child’s life each day, each week, is literally stolen from them by this institution. And then, after being in school for seven hours a day, these same children are expected to go home, on their own time now, and do homework.

I think most parents are familiar with the frustration and exhaustion that are attendant on homework. The family wars, the nagging, the conflict, the fact that kids don’t have enough time to do stuff they care about. And most disturbingly, the fact that kids may lose interest in learning itself, and come to see it as a chore, along with the homework that they despise and just want to get through.

But most parents assume it’s all worth it. They assume that it helps kids learn better, raises achievement, teaches them good study skills, and that’s why they put up with it and don’t complain. What I found in researching the homework myth is, it’s mostly pain with no gain.

I found three things in particular. One, no study has ever found any academic benefit to doing homework before high school, none. In fact, there’s not even a correlation between achievement, even by standardized measures and doing homework, or doing more homework.

Second, even at high school, there is a weak correlation between test scores and homework, but there’s no proof that the homework caused the higher test scores. And, in fact, even the correlation falls apart when you use more sophisticated statistical techniques.

And third, the idea that there are non-academic advantages that homework builds character, promotes self discipline, teaches kids good work habits, is essentially an urban myth.

Don’t get me wrong, Marian’s a wonderful kid. But she seems awfully quiet lately. I think she studies too much. I can remember kids like that back in school. And it seems to me they were always the ones who didn’t seem quite to fit in with the others.

I’m a strong believer in homework. I’m only a strong believer in homework where homework reinforces the learning that happened that day. If homework is not correlated directly to the learning, and the accomplished learning of that day, then it’s a waste of time.

Mother, may I be excused? I have some homework to do. Yes, but take your dishes to the sink and save me some work.

I think in kindergarten, you could certainly have homework if you are applying what you’ve learned, and you’re reinforcing what you’ve learned.

What is homework? We do work at school, not at home. That’s simple. I can’t even stand doing homework anymore. I do a little bit of it, and then don’t even complete it. And I’m like, screw this, then I turn it in, because it’s so hard and time consuming. It’s annoying.

You know, kids hate homework by and large. There are exceptions with an assignment here and there, or a child here and there. But most kids, at best, see it as something to be gotten out of the way as fast as possible. But the adults tend to shrug their shoulders, and say, well, of course, the kids hate it. That doesn’t matter. Why would their preferences count?

And when you stop and think about it, the assumption that homework is going to help, regardless of how the kids feel is, basically, a way of saying that kids are like vending machines, where you put more homework in and you get more achievement out. That’s a painfully naive view of how learning happens, and a painfully disrespectful way to treat children.

Kids are burnt out on having their minds force-fed facts all the time, and being told what they have to do, and what they should be doing. And never having it asked of them, what are your opinions, what are your curiosities, what are your hopes, dreams, needs, wants?

You hear the word socialization used frequently. That’s what schools do best. They socialize children. No, they don’t. You learn to talk to a fragment of people your own age. You learn to envy, resent, and fear people older than you. And you learn to have contempt for people younger than you. They hardly exist.

This is what I hate most about school. Preps and jocks.

Preps aren’t that bad.

Preps aren’t as bad as the jocks, but they’re bad. They own the school. Teachers purposely give the jocks better grades so that they can keep playing their sports. Or whatever it is, so they can keep this school spirited.

Look at the camera or something, Austin.

Sorry. And it’s just stupid, because if one group of people open a school, then how is that ever going to be a quality at all? Because, the jocks hate everybody but the preps, and the cheerleaders.

The cheerleaders. I can’t stand the cheerleaders.

Because of the oppressive setting of school, children are forced to go underground and form social units or clicks in order to gain some level of power in their lives, and power over the oppressive situation. So what that sets up is a severe lack of tolerance for anybody who doesn’t wear the right clothes, have the right hairstyle, have the right gadgets.

You have some children that just naturally are popular, for whatever reason, either they have got exceptionally good looks, or their parents are in high positions, or they’re rich. And then you have some children that, for whatever reason, they just, no matter where they go, they’re considered the losers. It could be because of their appearance. It could be a number of other things. And then there are kids in the middle who might always struggle to fit in somewhere, in some group, and they have to work really hard to do that.

Popularity, what is it made of? How does a person get to be popular with lots of people, and have a few close friends, too? Let’s watch and see what makes people like one person and not another.

Hey, Jerry, there’s that new girl in our math class.

Oh, yes. Her name’s Caroline Ames. She’s a swell kid.

Why? Do you know her?

Not very well. I wish I did. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about her you like.

Well, she always looks nice to start with.

Yeah, especially when you compare her with some of the weird characters in this place.

That’s what the socialization consists of. It consists of some children getting daily harassed, and harassed, and harassed, to the point where they are feeling suicidal and homicidal. And it seems to them that the only way to get through the day may be through violence.

That’s socialization in schools. Socialization in schools is, if you don’t have the right product name on your clothes. If you’re not wearing the right clothes the right way, you’re a loser. So children are supposed to, technically, be in school to learn, but really in order to keep your head above the water socially, you literally have to put out so much mental energy into looking cool, being cool, at all times if you want to fit in. If not, if you’re a loser in school, your life is hell. You won’t make it.

It is fundamentally built into the system, to the structure, to have kids fail. Fail in terms of learning things, fail in terms of becoming a whole person. It’s built into the system, so to say, how do you improve that? You can’t improve it. It doesn’t want to improve.

Just like our parents complained, and the parents before them complained, teenagers act odd. But imagine teenagers at high school acting so strangely that the Center for Disease Control is called in. And what they found was incredible mass twitching. It acts like a teen repellent. The mosquito produces a high frequency, highly annoying.

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