The Little Things Tell The Story

It’s often the little things that explain the Big Picture better than any scholarly analysis. And it is symptoms that identify diseases. The illness in question today is the degeneration of European civilization.

Over the weekend, we attended a party for a soccer team comprised of elementary school children. The running and screaming of these kids through a banquet hall through much of the gathering was remarkable in the lack of any parental control. There were no remonstrations, indeed no attempts whatsoever to restrain this behavior.

What has happened to us in the last generation? In my time, no child would ever be allowed to run amok like this. Punishment would be immediate and corporal, although our mothers and fathers would never have found themselves in this situation in the first place.

They knew how to train their children to behave. Misbehavior simply wasn’t tolerated. They didn’t want to be our pals; they were our parents and thus our adult supervisors. Whether we liked it or not, our childish inclination toward tumultuous behavior was squelched whenever it erupted in the slightest. This sort of discipline is obviously necessary to maintain order. It is the heart of societal coherence.

Now, the kids, in a sense, rule. Parents throw up their hands and say there’s nothing they can do about it, that their children ignore their shouted orders and go about their mischief no matter what. Rudeness is rewarded. A remarkable example my wife witnessed was at a supermarket checkout counter where a five or six year old boy loudly demanded that his mother, swollen with another child to be, buy him some candy. She said no, he punched her in the belly and she responded by buying him the candy. She reinforced his unacceptable actions, guaranteeing they’d be repeated since they accomplished what the little rascal wanted.

What would our mothers and grandmothers have done in such a situation? Mine would have grabbed little junior by the ear and dragged him at a forced march out of the store to further punishment. I couldn’t even imagine what my father would have had in store for me when he got home from work and was informed about the attack on his wife by their offspring, but it would have been immediate and severe.

I don’t want to give the impression that this is some sort of American malady; it is the case in other European societies as well. The Spectator, a conservative British magazine, devotes much space and many of its clever cartoons to detailing the ever-increasing degeneracy of life in the UK. In France, the criminal justice system is unable to rouse itself whatsoever to defend France from a raging crime wave. Theodore Dalrymple has further details in a City Journal article at http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_7_15_02td.html

Watch Americans walking their dogs and observe how a large percentage of these occasions are more the dog walking the owner than vise versa. We don’t exert ourselves enough to train our pets, for gawd’s sake. Enough said for the moment.

I agree wholeheartedly with this post. From my vantage point as a parent of a first-grader, only about 15% of children are guided in any way towards proper behavior and manners. But I think the cost is especially severe on the boys, and the culprits are the fathers who are not there, either physically or morally. But then, what do we expect from a culture that ridicules the hard virtues? As C S Lewis said (whose anniversary of his death falls today), "We castrate the males and then bid the geldings to be fruitful."

Unfortunatly all this has consequences even for parents who raise their children right. One can give their children proper guideance and discipline, but after a point kids are more influenced by their peers than their parents. I guess the best one can do is stress the importance to their children of making the right kinds of friends, and tolerate no form of disrespect from them whatsoever.

I teach and many of the problems outlined in the article can be observed everyday in our schools. Barely four months into the school year, our seventh grade class has already accumulated over 500 discipline referrals with our principal. That's an average of four referrals per student (we have 125 children in our seventh grade). And, my school is located in a rural area of Mississippi, not the inner city.

The biggest problem? A complete lack of upbringing by their parents. Many of these kids come to school without any sense of self-discipline or purpose. They're used to doing as they please, and they try the same thing at school. Unfortunately, our discipline program is little more than a revolving door. Kids are placed in detention or suspended, then come back in the classroom and do the same things all over again.

Bill O'Reilly is right: we need to impose national school discipline standards--and adopt an educational equivalent of the "three strikes" rule. After a certain number of suspensions or a history of discipline problems, the offending student is out of school--for good. Many taxpayers don't realize that only 5-6% of the students account for about 55-60% of all discipline problems in school. Get rid of that hard core, and schools will improve immmediately...

Since my daughter isn't school age yet, I can't speak from experience, but my instincts run against nearly anything nationalized regarding schools. It seems local control of these issues is always better. Which leads me to believe she won't attend public school at all if we can help it. Of course, I don't think all the issues discussed in the article are confined to public schools, far from it. In the end it is the parents who bear the responsibility for parenthood, and lax parenting is everywhere I guess.

Many of these kids come to school without any sense of self-discipline or purpose. They're used to doing as they please, and they try the same thing at school.

My husband and I live in a college town, and he works at another college about 5 miles away, where he has been serving on the judicial board hearing disciplinary matters.

The college kids who come before the board lie, steal, make death threats, deal drugs, set fires and commit all types of crimes, and they are completely without remorse. When they tell outrageous lies - under oath or otherwise - they get offended when no one believes them.

One girl who actually urinated and defecated in her boyfriend's dorm room after a fight (and then smeared it around) just couldn't see why anyone was upset about her actions. When reminded that someone had to clean up her s#*t, she had a "so what?" attitude, completely self-centered.

Being around supposedly "educated" 18-22 year olds the past several years has made me very pessimistic about the future of this country. What you're seeing in 7th-graders is only worse a few years later.

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