Destructive instruction

None of us will ever get to see it, of course, but it would make for fascinating reading.

I’d love to get access to an accurate record detailing the educational backgrounds of every last person arrested over the last few months in violent outbreaks in places like Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore, Md., and Waco, Texas. Out of those several hundred people, how many would you guess got their schooling at public expense—and how many in private, parochial, and parent-sponsored schools?

We don’t know, of course—and for now, our conclusions would be no more than a guess. But in an era where we pride ourselves on pretending we can scientifically call up the tools of social science to discern cause-and-effect relationships on almost every societal front, maybe it’s time to apply some serious research to the correlation between educational background and later behavior in stressful times and situations.

After all, if the citizens of Baltimore are going to continue to be called on to hand over $18,000 a year for every student in the public school system there, and the result consistently includes cadres of young rebels whose destructive behavior will keep costing the city millions of dollars in reconstruction costs, those citizens deserve to know that there is an alternative available. And at a significantly lower cost.

Maybe it’s time to apply some serious research to the correlation between educational background and later behavior in stressful times and situations.

The irony is this: You’d think, wouldn’t you, that the very best return for the creation, upkeep, and protection of public institutions would come from those whose minds and value systems were shaped in public entities and at public expense? But real-life experience has turned all this exactly upside down. Instead of treasuring the structures and systems that have treated them so lavishly, the products of these structures casually celebrate their destruction in a few evenings’ bonfires.

And what’s behind all this emptiness? What prompts a youngster to look in a mirror and see nothing worth pursuing—especially if he’s already dropped out of life, but even if he’s completed a course of study you might well simply call “Vanity”?

We started, quite casually a century ago but with greater intensity just a generation or two ago, by stripping away the foundations of learning. No references to God, we insisted. No allowance for the supernatural. No reliance on suprahuman revelation like the Bible. No absolutes. No eternal verities. We went on from there to challenge the obvious realities of our lives. No male or female. All this, our educational institutions, our courts, and our media pronounced, was necessary to keep from letting anything that might be called “religious” from taking over the structure of our lives.

But all this, in steady progression, also established a new religion that increasingly dominated our existence.

And then we were surprised when we also found, in our schools and our cities, less and less basic order.

So this is partly to propose that some enterprising scholar, eager for a good topic for a graduate level thesis, dig in, search out the records of arrest in one or more of these battlegrounds, and document through good research just how many of the purveyors of such violence actually came from each educational background. Or some enterprising journalist, properly funded, might take on the same task. Better yet, let several such entities pursue the goal together.

Years ago, I heard about a traditional teacher who found herself in a progressive school where the principal said she could no longer teach the alphabet to kindergartners. Only when she protested—and in fact put her job on the line with her insistence—did the principal give in a bit. “All right,” he conceded, “but just make sure I don’t find you trying to teach the letters in alphabetical order.”

Is alphabetical order a “religious” idea? Well, let’s be bold to keep asking as an important public issue: Is order itself a religious idea?

Email jbelz@wng.org