Tie-ins

Kim du Toit had a post up the other day that tied in with Alger's post about public school.

Let me preface this little post with the statement that I cannot, at this point, understand why public schooling still exists. I cannot stand public schools, period. I think they do more damage to the youth in this country than we know at this point, and the damage is going to REALLY be clear in a few decades.

In any case, Kim du Toit and Mrs. du Toit homeschool their kids. Now, I know that not everyone can homeschool, but one of the reasons given by the du Toit's was something I wanted to add on to:

When we talk to people about homeschooling our kids, and are asked what we did about "socialization", our answer is dismissive. Here's the gist of it.

1. We were never interested in having our kids learning to socialize from a group of peers who were as clueless about the process as they themselves were. High school kids, unsupervised, are the most feral little beasts on the planet, and we saw no reason why we should subject our kids to that ordeal. The most common response to that statement was usually, "It makes them tougher" or "They learn how to cope with a hostile environment, like they may encounter in the adult world".

Specious nonsense. In the outside world, when you are immersed in a "hostile environment" (work, university, whatever), you have the means to leave it. That's not the case in high school, where you are coerced into staying together with no options to separate yourself from your tormentors.

Socialization in high school is more like learning how to survive in the jungle without getting eaten or stepped on. One thing that amazes me is how people can send their precious darlings off to a building filled with people I wouldn't allow into my house for the majority of the day, and then they wonder just where their little sugarbuns learned how to swear, or when he started smoking, or doing drugs. "But, but, but, I'm a good parent!" Yes, you are, WHEN YOUR CHILD IS AROUND TO LEARN FROM YOU. Trust me on this, I observed it way too much when I was in high school. You could be the best parent in the world, and I've met many parents who WERE good parents. But when you send your child to public school, you might see them for four or five hours a day, AT THE MOST. Meanwhile, they're spending eight to twelve hours a day surrounded by the very type of people you want them to stay away from.

My family is not a violent family in the least. My father never yelled at me. That might surprise some people, but it's true. He never once blasted me with a yelling rant. I was never beaten as a child. I was never abused as a child. As far as my home life went, it was damn near fairy-tale perfect, and I couldn't have asked for better.

So the people who know me are now asking, "So Dave, where did your temper come from? If your family was so great, why are YOU prone to flipping your lid and destroying things?"

The answer to that is simple: It's what I learned to do in order to survive high school.

Physically, I was a late bloomer. I weigh 205 right now, have a 44 inch chest, with 15% body fat. Back in high school I weighed, at the most, 165-170. And I was skinny. Did some wrestling, but other than that was never all that athletic. I was more into music than football. I hated the social circles in high school, and I avoided them as much as I could. Even back then, I didn't want to be categorized by who I hung out with. And when you're able to step back and look at situations from a distance, you can get a feel for the overall picture.

In school, I learned that smoking pot made you a dumb reject, unless you were rich or hung out with rich kids, in which case smoking pot made you cool.

I learned that drinking was bad, unless you hung out with the jocks and drank with THEM, in which case it was cool.

In high school, I learned that intelligence was a BAD thing and should be discouraged, unless you hung out with the right people, and then it was cool.

And more importantly, in high school I learned that violence will trump reasoned arguments. All the reasoned debate in the world will not stop a bully who knows he can make your life a living hell and get away with it. He doesn't care about anything but making himself feel big and important. Just ask your stereotypical nerd how reasoning and logic fare against a bully. In the school yard, might makes right. It wasn't that I couldn't argue, or debate, or talk a situation down, it was that words did not work. I was not dealing with someone who had a different point of view, I was dealing with people who got excited by the use of force against someone they thought of as "weak".

Believe it or not, I didn't get into one fight in high school, because I would use violence as soon as I saw a threat. Oh, I hit people, but it was never a "fight" as you might think of it. I learned early on that when someone pushes you, you don't just push back, you jump onto their back, or their chest, and start screaming while you hit them as fast and hard as you can. Nobody wanted to fight me, because while they might think that I was a skinny little band geek, they didn't know what I would do if I got pushed. I was the Psycho in my school. My buddies Alex and Jake were the Animal and the Immovable Object, in that order. Alex was the guy who would pound you into a pulp if you crossed him, and Jake was so damn big that all he had to do was push you into a wall and lean on you, and you hurt for a week. And he was too big for you to push back. You might as well pound your fists against a wall.

Together, our trio formed an Axis of Don't-Fuck-With-Us. And it worked, where every other method failed. We didn't care what group you belonged to, we weren't a part of any social circle. We just wanted to be left alone, and if you didn't leave us alone, we would make you very, very sorry that you hadn't minded your own business. Might made right. That alone might not have imprinted on me that violence worked where talk failed. But what really proved that violence deterred violence the way people in school dealt with us. Let me give you an example.

Of the many incidents that occurred in school on a daily basis, there's one that I think highlights the feral nature of teen-agers. There was, at one point, a verbal altercation between one of the Jocks and one of the Stoners. Most people might have just brushed it off as "The other guy is an asshole" and carried on with their lives. But the Jock, who was an asshole from way back, decided that he had been "disrespected", and was going to exact some revenge. So the Jock, with two of his buddies, hunted down the Stoner later that day and beat the holy hell out of him.

I'm not talking a fight out back after school. They cornered him in the middle of the common area in the school and beat him so badly that was in the hospital for days. Cracked ribs. A broken eye socket (can't remember the name of that bone that surrounds your eye, but it was broken in several places). Contusions, bruises, broken bones, you name it, it happened. Now, what do you think happened to these punks? Did they get expelled? Arrested?

Nope. They were suspended for ten days. TEN DAYS. And when I graduated, the family of the kid who was beaten was STILL trying to sue for money to pay the hospital bills incurred as a result of the beating. These thugs put a kid in the hospital, and got nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

At that point, you could see two three distinct groups forming in the school. The aggressors, the victims, and the undisturbed. The aggressors, knowing that if they beat someone they wouldn't get punished, actively went on the hunt. It was like all the petty complaints they had, either real or imagined, could now be physically answered, and they were gonna lay a smackdown. The victims were the kids who couldn't fight back, for whatever reason. The undisturbed were the people who for whatever reason were left alone. Maybe they were the "popular" kids, maybe they just hadn't flown onto the radar. Whatever. The point is that for a period of time, it was damn near a free-for-all, both in and out of school. Kim du Toit calls high schoolers "Feral little beasts". He's more correct than he knows. All the pleading, all the letters to the principal, all the "meetings" between kids and administrators, didn't do one damn thing towards cracking down on the violence that was going on between students. Many times, parents were told "Well, it happened off school grounds, so there's nothing we can do about it." Legally, perhaps that's true. But the victims of this situation would not be dealing with this if they were NOT forced to be tossed into the jungle with the predators on a daily basis. Both the state, and through the state the school, forced kids to be present at that facility, in the presence of these thugs. And the thugs were damn near getting away with murder.

My friends and I, being the Axis of Don't-Fuck-With-Us, were part of the undisturbed group. THAT lesson had been taught a long time ago. However, it got so bad in that school that we started enforcing a new rule. Don't fuck with us, and don't fuck with our friends. We didn't care if you'd run our pal down off of school grounds or in the hallway, we were going to hunt YOU down and show you the error of your ways. If we told you that you were going to feel our pain, we carried that threat out. No empty threats were issued.

And people gravitated to us. Because to be associated with us meant you were left alone. Not because we gave you a stern lecture. Not because we debated your action's impact on society. It was because if you messed with us, we would answer in violence so direct that YOU would become the prey. My friend Alex once had a punk so scared of him that the punk wouldn't leave his house if he thought Alex was outside. And Alex, being the kind of person who loved to play mind games, would go out of his way to be around the punk's house. He would detour there on his way to the store. He woke up early just so that he could take the long way to school, which of course involved walking past the punk's front door. Jake and I would come along for the fun of it. And after Alex was done toying with the punk, he delivered a beating and a lesson. The beating was short, nasty and brutal. The lesson was "If you even look cross-eyed at my pal, you'll never eat solid food again." The lesson took hold.

It wasn't logic that make this punk piss his pants at the sight of us. It was the beating administered to him by Alex. It was violence, and the threat of more violence to come should that punk step out of line again. It wasn't our pleasant demeanor or sense of humor that drew people to our group. It was violence, and the threat of violence directed at the predators in the school that made people run into our private social circle. Alex, Jake and I couldn't turn a corner without running into someone who just wanted to be around us, because so long as they were in our general area they were left alone and unafraid.

The summary of my high school education was this: It's not what you know or do. It's WHO you know or do. Everyone for themself. The Authorities will not help you. You're on your own, so you'd better start swimming before you sink forever. And when in doubt, violence trumps everything else.

Now, if those are the lessons you want your kids to learn, then by all means send your kids to the local high school. But if you want your kids to get an education, go read Alger's post, and Kim's post, and then take a good hard look at where your kids spend the majority of their day.

I got more of an education from my father's bookshelves than I got in most of my high school experience. Short of three very talented, very special teachers, the rest of my high school education could have been done in one year. In fact, if it weren't for those three teachers, I would have dropped out, gotten a GED, and been on my way.

I'll probably edit this post later on, as I smack my forehead and say "Ah crap, I shoulda put that in there!" But until then...