Integration and then Chaos
June 7, 2016
ALAN writes:
The lawlessness depicted in the movie “Blackboard Jungle” (1955) did not exist in American public schools in the 1930s, nor in all-white schools or all-black schools in the 1940s, and the lawlessness that is found in public schools today did not exist in those schools in the 1960s. The more power over schools that Americans have surrendered to their central government, the worse their schools have become.
Here is my chronology of 60 years of learned helplessness:
1956: A five-month study of the effects of government-mandated racial integration in Washington, D.C. schools revealed “a marked increase in truancy, theft, vandalism, and sex offenses in integrated schools. Dances and dramatic presentations have been quietly given up by most high schools. [Note: Spineless capitulation by those running the schools instead of militant enforcement of rules.] Senior and junior class plays have been discontinued. Inter-racial fights are frequent and constant vigilance is required to prevent molestation or attempted molestation of white girls by Negro boys or girls. In contrast, the schools outside the integrated neighborhoods have no more such problems than they had four years ago.”
[Sam M. Jones, “Caution: Integration at Work”, National Review, Oct. 6, 1956, p.10 ]
1959: In her essay “Reflections on Little Rock”, Hannah Arendt wrote:
“Children are first of all part of family and home, and this means that they are, or should be, brought up in that atmosphere of idiosyncratic exclusiveness which alone makes a home a home, strong and secure enough to shield its young against the demands of the social and the responsibilities of the political realm. The right of parents to bring up their children as they see fit is a right of privacy, belonging to home and family. [Note: Belonging to individuals, not to any department of government or group of do-gooders.]
“To force parents to send their children to an integrated school against their will means to deprive them of rights which clearly belong to them in all free societies–the private right over their children and the social right to free association. As for the children, forced integration means a very serious conflict between home and school, between their private and their social life, and while such conflicts are common in adult life, children cannot be expected to handle them and therefore should not be exposed to them. It has often been remarked that man is never so much of a conformer–that is, a purely social being as in childhood. The reason is that every child instinctively seeks authorities to guide it into the world in which he is still a stranger, in which he cannot orient himself by his own judgment. To the extent that parents and teachers fail him as authorities, the child will conform more strongly to his own group, and under certain conditions the peer group will become his supreme authority. The result can only be a rise of mob and gang rule……” (Emphasis added.)
[“Reflections on Little Rock”, in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, Schocken Books, 2003, pp. 211-12 ]
1991: “Forced integration was the death knell of America’s urban public schools. Virtually every major city went through the same turmoil of court cases, white flight, and the subsequent collapse of public schools. …..Public schools would be the reason, all by themselves, for whites to leave America’s cities.” [ “The Late Great American Public School”, American Renaissance, June 1991]
2003-2012: In the public schools of St. Louis: Declining enrollment, school buildings closed and vandalized, fights, shootings, dances cancelled because of concern about thugs, and shouting matches at school board meetings.
2011: Lawrence Auster asks: “Who’s manning the front lines in the hell on earth that is underclass black America?” in a discussion of violence in Philadelphia public schools and the feminized teachers who are there to keep it under control. [View from the Right, April 20]
2015: Laura Wood takes note of the “Chaos in St. Paul Schools” (The Thinking Housewife, June 2). The account she cited includes a sparkling example of modern Americans’ gullibility and hatred of responsibility:
“Special needs students with behavioral issues were mainstreamed into regular classrooms…”, the account stated.
Orwell would be delighted at this prize example of unmitigated Folderol. The reporter does not question the value of a phrase like “Special needs students with behavioral issues.” He and other “journalists” merely repeat such phrases in parrot-like fashion. In plain English: Thugs and troublemakers. What we see here are not words conveying information but justifying evasion.
“Special needs students with behavioral issues were mainstreamed into regular classrooms…..” is a hybrid of psychobabble, Orwellian Newspeak, psychiatric mythmaking, children’s fantasy writing, and militant hatred of the responsibility to enforce rules and call things by their right names. No one can force Americans to speak or write such Folderol or to take seriously those who do. That such Folderol is now accepted as credible by a substantial number of American parents, teachers, and “journalists” is one reason why American public schools are as irredeemably decadent as they are and the site of lawlessness like that predicted by Hannah Arendt in 1959. No wonder that children have little or no respect for their teachers and schools when both practice evasion to such an extent.
2016: “Mayhem in the Classroom”; still more about the fights, anarchy, and riots in the St. Paul public schools. [ Katherine Kersten, The Weekly Standard, April 18 ]
2016: A retired professor notes the disruptive effects of undisciplined, antisocial blacks in schools in Florida and compares that setting with his own high school years in 1947-1950 in a vastly different American culture with plenty of constraints and penalties for misbehavior. Twenty years later, when he was asked to speak to teachers at a high school in Watts, California, he saw that those teachers “were trapped in a prison-like atmosphere without the authority needed to teach the values that were utterly lacking in their students.” Today, he added, “adult authority is missing in both home and school….. …the fact is that any school with a substantial black faction is highly prone to chaos and failure…”
[Cornelius J. Troost, “Tampa Bay Times’ ‘Failing Schools’ Pulitzer Based on a Lie. The Problem is Bad (Black) Students”, V-Dare, April 19 ] (Emphasis added.)
The key element in all these episodes is government-initiated force in the form of compulsory school attendance laws and compulsory racial-mixing laws.
“Liberals” were appalled by Hannah Arendt’s argument because it collided head-on with their passion for coercive do-goodism and lust for power over other people’s lives and children. But if Americans had adopted the good sense in her argument against government force—instead of the totalitarian racial engineering schemes promoted under the pretext of “civil rights”—then American parents would still possess the rights that she described in her essay and American public schools would not be the nightmare from Hell that they are today.
It was bad enough that Americans generations ago permitted the enactment of compulsory school attendance laws in the first place. But rather than see and undo that mistake, later generations compounded it by permitting their government to force racial integration, busing, and indoctrination in Leftist propaganda under the names “sex education”, “diversity”, “tolerance”, and other, equally vile ideas. If those things had the slightest merit, American parents and taxpayers would choose to purchase them in an open marketplace and there would be no pretext for government force. But Leftists hate nothing more than the prospect of un-coerced choice in an open marketplace, because they know that millions of Americans would choose to have no part of busing, racial integration, or indoctrination in Leftist ideology.
That a central government must force those things upon Americans nullifies any claim for their merit. That Americans agree to take orders in such matters from a central government proves that they are morally and philosophically dead; people who are not dead would figure out sooner or later that such policies are a prescription for cultural suicide.
Someone should trace the increase in government power over schools, parents, and children over a span of decades alongside the increase in vandalism in public schools, non-enforcement of rules, lowered moral and intellectual standards, and the abandonment of authority by teachers and parents alike.
“Forced busing, conceived in absolute contempt for community identification and spirit, symbolizes how far Government is prepared to go in running our lives and institutions….”, a newspaper reporter wrote in 1975. “The Federal hand contaminates every level of education….. Federal bureaucrats are the most dangerous wielders of power in the nation. They will use that power to redesign society according to their own arrogant notions of egalitarianism….” [ Emphasis added. ]
[Edwin A. Roberts, Jr., “Mainstreams…Our Bullying Mandarins”, The National Observer, Oct. 18, 1975]
Of course he was right. But it is much worse than he imagined: Forced busing was a trial balloon. If Americans had had any backbone, they would have shot it down. Instead, they applauded its ascent or fell into line like obedient little lambs. The response to forced busing symbolized how far Americans were prepared to go in permitting their central Government to run their lives, their children, and their schools.
And what have today’s hip, cool Americans—who think they are the most-informed and best-informed people in history—learned from all of that? Nothing.
— Comments —
Paul C. writes:
The Republicans and the Media do not focus on what Alan describes. They would face rioting and lose money. It is more profitable to accentuate the establishment line, exactly why we find ourselves in this situation.
It will be the end of American civilization, as we more or less have now but surely had in the sixties, if Hillary is elected. Or there will be a violent revolution. I know there is at best a fifty-fifty chance that Trump can actually turn things around. There are many factors that work against him. Demographics and the Republican establishment are the major factors. Demographics make this our last chance. For example, Republicans are calling him the useless word racist for pointing out the probable bias of the judge in his university suit. The judge belongs to La Raza, a legal periodical and organization that is devoted to the Mexican race.
Republicans are wimps. They want to be polite and respect all authority, no matter how warped authorities such as the Supreme Court and the Democratic Party have become. When will they rise up and begin rioting? They don’t want to brand judges biased based on the judge’s race. Hypocritically, they not only keep their mouths shut as liberals brand Republican judges as racists and homophobes, but also they join the chorus. They grovel for their wages, yet we must vote for the grovelers if Trump is to have a chance at putting conservative judges on the Supreme Court. Later perhaps we can get rid of the idiots.
George Weinbaum writes from Houston:
Schools had chaos before forced busing. In 1958, I remember, George Allen wrote Undercover Teacher, (UT) about his experiences at JHS 210, John Marshall in Brooklyn, NY. Allen was inspired to write UT by the January 1958 “suicide” of George Goldfarb, JHS 210’s principal. Goldfarb supposedly jumped off the roof of his six-story apartment building on Eastern Parkway, one day before he was to testify in front of a New York City (NYC) grand jury about what was then quaintly known as juvenile delinquency.
Even in 1958 Negro kids in my grammar school were rarely disciplined for rule infractions. NYC had CRMD classes in 1958. CRMD classes, children with retarded mental development. NYC also had “600” schools for serious troublemakers.
My connection to JHS 210: I lived on its same physical block. I walked past it every school day on my way to PS 191. I remember. I saw fights about three times a week. Almost invariably between two Negro kids or a Negro and white or Chinese kid. I remember.
Any “school with a substantial black faction [was] highly prone to chaos and failure” in the 1950s. And every one in NYC knew it. The chaos was planned. It was part of Sam Francis’ “anarcho-tyranny”.
