Shame and School Sex Scandals

The following is an article that fell through the cracks sometime in March/April [apparently the editor hit 'delete' by mistake...]. Though it references events in Louisiana and Indianapolis that aren’t as current as they were three months ago, the message is still relevant: The issue is shame, and we need more of it.

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A seminal teacher told me that shame is a cornerstone of education. I didn’t understand it then, but I do now.

In recent months we have heard about two school sex scandals involving elementary-aged students. In Indianapolis, two sixth-graders had sex in shop class while another student served as a lookout and up to ten others watched. In Louisiana, two fifth-graders allegedly copulated on the floor of their English classroom while two more fondled each other.

If you can’t fathom the gravity of these incidents, imagine the little helpers on Fox’s “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?” erupting into a full-blown Dionysian orgy while Jeff Foxworthy turns a blind eye and the studio audience looks on in horror.

As educators whine and seethe over No Child Left Behind, they’re losing the battle of behavior in their schools. It is a battle between dignity and shame, between grace and the disgraceful, and in many schools the situation is dire.

Popular outcry after these incidents has focused on two questions: “Where was the teacher?” and “Where’s the discipline?” Michael Walker, a teacher at the school, said that, “students … are unruly, disrespectful and rarely disciplined.” In such an environment it is easy to see how behavior can spiral out of control.

But the angry parents – and many of us who have dropped our jaws after hearing this – are focusing on the wrong issue. The urgent question here is not about discipline but instead about why the tykes stripped down in the first place.

What made these students think, even for a second, that sex was acceptable behavior in their classroom?

When I was in school, being reprimanded by a teacher was embarrassing, but being sent to the principal’s office was terrifying. Your parents would be called and your entire fifth grade world – your family, your teachers, your friends – would show their disappointment. Even if they kept silent, you knew that they knew, and that was bad enough. But that was way back in the 1990’s. Those days of yore are nigh forgotten.

Educators in our nation’s worst schools will hasten to point out that my community wasn’t rife with drugs, violence and broken homes. They’re right. It was populated instead with teachers and school officials who did their jobs every day without deference to obstacles outside the system. Whereas teachers lament with validity that the behavior education they provide in the schools is undermined by anarchy after the day’s last bell, in no way are they excused from their duties based on that perceived hopelessness. Teachers would do well to watch 300 with a keen eye (I imagine they couldn’t be bothered to read Herodotus).

Their objections are moot anyway. Nowadays the kiddies don’t bother to discriminate between school and the home. Then again, neither do the teachers, who are increasingly charged with having seduced even the youngest students. When the writers of South Park aired “Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy,” a parody of the Debra Lefave case in which 3-year old Ike is seduced by his teacher, their absurdities may mimic the eventual truth more closely than they intended.

And discipline itself is not the answer. The role of discipline in school, as with our society’s law enforcement, is to regulate behavior so it conforms with the standards that district or state has agreed upon and on which the future adulthood of the students is built. Disciplinary policies do not, however, show those children what to do and what not to do. That is what the teachers and administrators are there for.

If we’re serious about stopping the public school’s swift descent into a pre-pubescent Amsterdam, educators need to realize that the first step toward curbing this behavior is to show the children how to act.

The second step is to keep doing it.

In an era of dubious family values, schools can’t expect students to abide by the behavioral standards that we assume are already in place – the kids in these schools simply don’t have any reference for shame and need to be given one. And that doesn’t mean that teacher gives a 5-minute talk about playing nice and respecting your elders at the beginning of the year. It means an effort by teachers and administrators to deliver with a committed seriousness of purpose constant examples of proper behavior and to mete appropriate consequences when the students fail to replicate them.

Teachers and administrators must demonstrate grace and dignity at every turn, They must show students the difference between the acceptable and the unacceptable, as well as the practical relevance behind it. They must impose efficient, effective discipline on students who choose to ignore it.

But we already know this.

The critical issue that no one wants to address is the schools’ aversion to delivering – and continuing to deliver – behavior education. We’re witnessing a tragic failure of will more than a failure of policy as lazy, permissive teachers and their administrators neglect students’ best interests and systematically position them for failure now and throughout adulthood. They seem to believe that the 11-year old exhibitionists of today are going to be the model citizens of tomorrow.

And to think, all of this can be stopped with a small dose of shame. The tough part will be deciding who should take the first bitter spoonful – the teachers or the students.