by J. Thorn
Friday, the night before the big day, I had already set out my clothes: undoubtedly nice athletic shorts, tube socks with multiple colored bands at the top, and an iron-on decal shirt from The Empire Strikes Back. I apologize for arousing the ladies with that description.
Dan called after dinner, choosing not to come across the street to talk: a bad sign. My dad handed me the phone, and I am sure he saw my jaw drop. Dan had decided to go with another group, and he made the number even, so I was to “find someone else to go with.”
We must pause here to understand the calamity. As a twelve-year-old, nothing could have been more devastating. Today I look back at this and chuckle, given that Dan started going bald at seventeen (served him right). The social shitstorm brought me to the edge of a mental breakdown.
I cannot remember what happened. Seriously. I know that I ended up going to the picnic with another group and that this was the unofficial end of my friendship with Dan, but that is about all I remember. I guess years of alcohol abuse and my memories of Susan’s blond tresses lying on my shoulder have erased that May Saturday in 1983 from my memory.
***
Let me tell you what my parents did not do. They did not march across the street and demand to talk to Dan’s mom, or her lesbian partner, bless her heart (NOT lipstick lesbian). They did not call the school and demand that Miss Stover step in and find me another Kennywood partner. They did not call whatever faceless administrator ran our junior high school at the time and demand that their son’s feelings be repaired. My parents did not demand that anyone else step in and socially engineer my Kennywood experience. I am not suggesting that my parents were masters at raising kids. In fact, I am the oldest and often provided the learning curve for my two younger siblings. I’ve got the scars to prove it. However, they talked to me about what I could do and about future decisions involving the loyalty of Dan Slaney.
***
The standard operating procedure, especially in independent schools, is generally called “social engineering.” The term itself has such a negative connotation that most educators will immediately deny they do any such thing. In reality, they do it constantly. Schools put other labels on the experience, such as “ethics,” “advisory programs,” or “character education,” but they are nothing but slightly ambiguous, fuzzy-feeling wrappers for social engineering (like adult contemporary music without the music).
The idea is noble even though the practice is flawed. The reason for the programs is the perceived rise of bullying and violence in schools. I would argue that the media has heightened awareness through intense saturation of rare instances, but bullying is not much worse than it has been for previous generations. (I say this with absolutely no scientific data to back it up. You are reading the wrong book if you want studies done by professional researchers.) In a New York Times article on character education, a middle school principal by the name of Michael McDermott says, “ . . . But you can’t have kids saving Darfur and isolating a peer in the lunchroom. It all has to go together.” While this is true, I am not sure you can ever ensure that no student is ever isolated. Some people like to be alone. Empathy is not taught. Empathy is modeled.
In the same New York Times article, Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, said that teaching empathy can seem “artificial or hokey” to some students. Most students recognize what the adults want to hear and then proceed to spoon feed it to them.
If you cannot teach empathy, kindness, and respect for each other, are we losing our children to a world of violence and self-interest? Possibly, but not for the reasons you might think.
***
Before reading the next section, please place your mobile phone on the table or on the seat next to you.
I can surmise that you either (1) did as I asked or (2) realized your phone is still on the hood of the car underneath a bag of groceries. The point is that you have one and you expect everyone else to have one as well. These days, it is absolutely expected that every citizen in the United States, including children over the age of six months, has a mobile phone. For years friends of mine have enjoyed ditching the landline in their homes and hanging the latest iPhonerazortouch from their belts like the shrunken head of a conquered foe.
In early 2009 an uninsured driver (asshole) broadsided me at the crossroads of a busy intersection. Without a mobile phone, I walked into the gas station and asked where the pay phone might be. You would have thought I had asked to use their telegraph. Pay phones do not exist any longer because we have been led to believe everyone owns a cell.
We had one rotary phone in our kitchen when I was growing up. This was the 1970s, not the 1930s, so quit rolling your eyes. If that phone rang between five and seven in the evening, my father would lose his mind. He would stand up from the dinner table and remove the phone from the cradle, yank the coiled cord as far down the hall as possible, and explain to the telemarketer or distant aunt how rude it was to call people during the dinner hour. The rest of the meal consisted of dad mumbling under his breath about ripping the thing off the wall.
Today my father is in his sixties and has a cell phone clipped to his belt. He will answer that fucking thing anytime, anywhere. He works in construction, and I have seen him answer his cell phone with one arm while at the top of a thirty-foot ladder and hanging on to a gutter with the other hand. What scares me is that you may not find this all that unusual.
We have become a society of hyper-individualists. You are most important. If you want a fascinating read, check out Generation Me, by Jean Twinge. She does a comprehensive and incredible breakdown of this from the inside, as she was born in the 1970s. Twinge argues that Generation Me lives by a strict, individualistic code. It is not intentionally selfish, and they are not spoiled but are results of societal parenting choices that began in the 1970s. We feel so empowered by ourselves that we must carry a device that allows us to communicate with any other hyper-important individual at any time, no matter the altitude.
“Big deal,” you say. “Mobile phones provide a convenience and safety we’ve never had before.”
True, but like every advancement in human history (I know about every event that has ever occurred because I am a historian), it comes with a price. Rampant hyper-individualism destroys empathy. It must. Empathy is the ability to put one in the situation of another, to attempt to feel what another is feeling. That cannot exist with hyper-individualism, which declares that you are the center of the universe and the most important thing ever. Start listening and you will hear it everywhere. Phrases abound such as, “You’ve got to love yourself before you can love someone else,” or, “You have to look out for yourself,” or, “Do what makes you feel good.” All of these illustrate the emphasis on the individual. To have empathy, to care about the feelings of others, you must sometimes say and do things that are not in your own best interest, hence the rub.
If you take a closer look at advisory programs, character education curricula, or the like, you realize that young minds of Generation Me, taught from birth that they are unique, special, and the most important thing in the universe, find the “instruction” of empathy completely vapid and useless. The media, their parents, their coaches, and their peers all place the highest value on individualism, and then for forty minutes every other week they spend time talking about exclusivity and the feelings of others. This is like having Barry Bonds teaching a class on herbal supplements. We created the emphasis on a home-run record, an individual achievement. We put the men chasing these records in the spotlight. We hold out the promise of endorsements and mansions and mistresses, and then we tear them down when they use any means to achieve it. I am not advocating for steroid use or cheating, but that is the often-overlooked consequence of hyper-individualism because it benefits the individual without regard to the impact on others.
So how do you teach kids to be empathetic, good people, caring towards others?
You can’t.
Of the three million years (closer to six thousand years for the born-again Christians keeping score) humans have lived on the Earth, educators have used the classroom model for two hundred years, or 0.0066 percent of the time we have existed. For thousands of generations, parents passed along life’s most vital secrets to their offspring with nary a worksheet, term paper, or text message. And yet we think that the most important and efficient means of transferring skills and history to the next generation is in a room with a teacher.
My next proposition could sound so foolish that you might just believe it. Good character is not taught, it is modeled. If you look through the research, you will find that the single most effective parenting skill, and therefore teaching skill, is modeling. Parents recognize the inverse of this as the “do what I say, not what I do” principle. If you smoke, your children have a very high probability of becoming smokers because you are one. You can explain the risks, the health concerns, show them the pictures of your cousin’s throat hole. But if you smoke, they will smoke. This simple principal works in every facet of education. If parents do not read, kids will not read. If parents use violence in the home, kids will be violent. Be a bigot, raise a bigot. You must be what you want your children to be.
So many educators complain about the proliferation of mobile phones in schools. The electronics distract from learning, shorten attention spans, cause global warming, make your toilet leak, and more. Starting in middle school and through higher education, teachers fight a losing battle against the all-pervasive device. However, those same teachers complain about it with a black box on their hip, do the BlackBerry prayer, or run from a faculty meeting to take a call. I have watched administrators checking email on a BlackBerry in front of the student body. I have seen faculty walking through the halls while holding personal conversations on their cell phones.
If you can help it, please do not call my dad during the day, as he is probably on a roof or in the middle of rewiring a house.
***
Lonely teachers have a new hobby, and I call it “kid gossip.” It is a lovely byproduct of social engineering.
“Good morning, Mrs. Jones, Principal. How may I help you?”
“Hi, it’s Janice, Bobby’s mom? He came home very upset, and I think we need to talk.”
“Sure, what’s the problem?”
“Well, Bobby said that there are kids wearing sweater vests.”
Pause.
“Sweater vests?”
“Yes, sweater vests. Apparently, kids are telling each other to wear sweater vests to school, but they aren’t letting everyone know. They didn’t tell Bobby, and now he’s quite upset about being sweater vestless.”
“That’s the kind of exclusive behavior we cannot have at our school. I will get to the bottom of this.”
Mrs. Jones then proceeds to gather the faculty around the water cooler to brainstorm ways of infiltrating the gang of sweater-vest ruffians and stomping out the exclusive behavior. Mrs. Jones bustles through the hallway, shaking her head and taking notes on a legal pad.
This serves several purposes. It allows Mrs. Jones to inflate her sense of importance and sets her on a task that she thinks can only be tackled by an administrator (bullshit). This sense of self-importance can be annoying, but it’s harmless. However, Sweatervestgate has negative consequences as well. The process of investigation labels behavior by a group of friends as “exclusive,” disposed to resist the admission of outsiders to association. In other words, friends. The kids have good friends. At some point in the recent past, this became exclusive behavior on par with bullying.
The Social Engineer in your child’s school believes, with a golden heart, that all children must be friends. They must hold each other’s hands and sing happily around the campfire. If you show preference towards another student or group, you have, by definition, excluded everyone else.
What the folks in charge do not understand is that childhood itself is a paradox. Children are not trying to destroy each other through sleeveless plaid cotton. In a way, they are saying to each other, “I want to be different than everyone else, and you should be different with me.” They do not have the courage to stand alone as a true individual, but they yearn to stand apart from the pack.
At lunch, faculty meetings, and recess, the Social Engineers engage in kid gossip. The focus moves from issues of academics or growth to issues of “who is secretly disliking who” and how we can put a stop to that. Keeping in line with the heavy-handed approach of the Social Engineer, schools institute events such as the “mix-it-up lunch.” This gem of social construction forces kids to sit at a table of random peers during one of the only times in their day that is not structured. The theory is that the children will realize how much they love each other and no longer engage in exclusive behavior or other trends of friendship. Imagine a ride you have taken on a subway or bus, and now imagine eating lunch with those strangers and being forced into conversation with them. Fun!
Schools, the media, our culture, and the lure of the salaries of professional athletes send the message that you have to “stand out from the crowd” or “be yourself” or “blaze your own trail” or “wear your own sweater vest.” And then, in almost the same breath, we tell them that they cannot be exclusive, that it is not morally proper to be closer to some than to others. If you still have doubts about the role of the individual within our culture, consider The Decision made by LeBron James with the help of the global sports media. It could not have been more about him.
***
In eighth grade I left Catholic school and entered the dangerous and brutal halls of the local junior high school. In Catholic school, the seventh- and eighth-grade classes totaled thirty kids. We all knew each other very well, which made school dances as much fun as spying on your sister when she was in the bathroom.
Coming to a public junior high with over fifteen hundred students was as much of a culture shock as seeing Culture Club on MTV for the first time. I can still hear the electronic chime that signaled I had 3.5 minutes to get from my present classroom to the next, which happened to be about a continent away. The structure was built in the 1950s prior to the architectural concept of stairs.
Probably the most awkward phase of my life in the new junior high was the school dances. Kids with acne, parachute pants, and shirts with many zippers (no sweater vests, thank God) entered the gym. The seventh-grade boys lined the wall on one side, while the seventh-grade girls lined the wall on the other. In the middle of the floor, the eighth-graders moved in clumsy circles, dancing like department-store mannequins. Entering the school in eighth grade, I lacked the experience of seventh grade and had no clue where to put my hands on a girl’s hips, or what that tingly sensation meant when I did.
I quickly became friends with Sean Lipchick, a semi-crazed pervert who I think is sitting in jail for manslaughter. (I cannot verify this, but I am not making it up, either.) When the lights went down in the gym and the music started, we would sneak through the pulsing mass of pubescent odor (smells like teen spirit) and grab a handful of any girl’s ass that happened to be within striking distance. Most times we got away with it, leaving the girl with a frown on her face as she pulled her leg warmers up in disgust. On rare occasions, we would be seen. And on one very hilarious evening, Steve took a punch to the nose.
Steve and I, and others like us, worked hard not to fit. We enjoyed our exclusivity. We reveled in being outsiders. At the time, I thought we were cool. In retrospect we were as dorky as everyone else, bent on being unique with as many people as possible.
I am really sorry, Kathy McKracken. I was the one who grabbed your ass during the spring dance in 1985. Two years later I had my friend deliver anonymous love poetry to your locker while we both sat in psychology class. I apologize for my exclusive behavior. My crush was just on you.
I Can’t Get No Respect
The Buick’s rear tires tore through the grass, spewing a haze of brown dirt into the air. It hung on to the humid mist of
the August night. Evan’s tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth while the Marlboro Red smoldered from the other.
“Dude ain’t givin’ up,” he said.
I held on to the dash as my fingers felt the sticky residue of dried Coke and fast food deposits. I turned over my left shoulder to look at Kevin and Mike in the backseat. They reached for the stained seatbelts, and the whites of their eyes stuck out against the muddy brown interior.
Evan swung the car to the right, and the rear end of the Buick fishtailed between a stop sign and a fire hydrant. The front wheels struck the top of the curb and launched us into minor orbit before the shocks came down hard and rattled our teeth.
“He’s still there,” shouted Kevin as his hand massaged the handle on the door.
Mike shook his head and kicked at the empty beer bottles clanging at his feet. The headlights hit the rear-view mirror and pierced my chest with an accusing light. I slid down in the seat and pushed hard on the floorboards, anticipating the inevitable rolling of The Beast.
“She’ll get us out,” he said.
The bald front tires spun on the eastbound side of College Park Drive and catapulted us towards the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. I felt the massive V8 engine pulling with a thunderous roar from under the hood.
I looked back at Mike and Kevin again. Kevin shook his head, and I remember wondering what he meant. Was he trying to tell me Evan was not going to stop at the intersection? Was he shaking his head in disgust, accepting the fact that we were going to end up wrapped around a tree? Was he telling me that we needed to beat the shit out of Evan if we lived through the night?
I had only a fraction of a second to whip my head from the view of the passenger side window, across the dash, and beyond a giggling Evan. The industrial copper glow of the street light painted his face in a maniacal smile. As the Buick slid within inches of a parked car, Evan reached over and turned the shitty cassette deck up as loud as it would go.
