ASTAC,
My experience talking with teachers, especially in the public schools, is that in many areas their job is becoming well-nigh impossible. Children are increasingly being raised in single-parent households, where there has been no coherent morality or ethical instruction for generations. Discipline in these households, when it occurs at all, is arbitrary and is dished out on a "you've made mommy mad" basis. Everyone in the household grows up learning that the only rule is to be utterly autonomous, selfish, and self-absorbed. Under those circumstances, the family which is the primary building block of a society, ceases to be a family at all and simply becomes a breeding-ground for lawless barbarians. "Pirates and Prostitutes" as a friend of mine commented. The long term social cost is reflected in the fact that the vast majority of new members of the US prison population were raised by single mothers. (Interestingly in the big "no-duh" category, taxpayers paid for research that concluded: "Each year spent without a dad in the home increases the odds of future incarceration by about 5%. ")
So how do you teach someone who wont sit down, has never been uniformly disciplined, has never seen a society function on anything except a "grab what you can basis,"who psychologically speaking, simply "acts out" on every impulse with no inner restraints, and who has no ethics at all, especially when you are legally prohibited from doing anything but the most flaccid discipline or simply kicking them out?
Educators can't do the job of parents and they certainly can't do it and try to educate as well, so everyone in the classroom suffers because of the presence of "little barbarians" like the one in the video.
As to where to run? ASTAC, there is nowhere, no more frontiers, or new places to start another "shining city on a hill." We can't become neo-puritans and simply move to new colonies and craft a better society. Either we reform this one, or we go the way of every society that has become utterly decadent.
- SEAGOON
