« Mood & Writing | Main | Who Said Religion and Science Were Contradictory? »
April 14, 2005
New Scapegoat for School Violence: Talk-Show Hosts
This AP article talks about rises in school violence perpetrated by parents.
The shooting last week of a Texas high school football coach -- allegedly by a player's father -- was just the latest and most extreme example of the threats and assaults that teachers around the country say they are increasingly being subjected to by parents."I know teachers really feel they're in a pressure cooker," said Aimee Bolender, president of Alliance/AFT, a Dallas teachers union. "The respect for authority has definitely changed. Teachers are no longer respected in general."
In Philadelphia in September, a mother slapped a teacher three times in the face after he told her she needed to get a late slip for her daughter, state officials say. In Dallas, police say, a mother stormed into a classroom, grabbed a teacher's hair, and punched her and kicked her April 1 after the teacher scolded the woman's daughter for loitering outside a locker. The mother is herself a teacher in Dallas.
I’d certainly agree that people in our society have lost a lot of respect for authority, although I think part of the reason that people have lost respect for teachers is because their quality has decreased a lot, especially in some areas. It’s not like respect is something you automatically get when you get your teaching degree, it still has to be earned. Not that having crappy teachers is any reason to be violent, of course.
But it’s not really surprising that some parents are having more trouble with violence, if their kids are too. Kids learn attitudes and ways of dealing with things from their parents, after all.
""They feel like the parents come in as CEOs and order them around," Jacobson said. "I've seen many cases of parents going into schools and coercing teachers to change grades."
Again, this is not too surprising considering that kids do this (and get away with it) all the time. How is a child supposed to learn to respect a grade as something given based on valued work, if their parents don’t?
"You listen to the talk show hosts on the radio, you watch the confrontational programs on TV. We're all more sharp and pointed and critical and demanding of each other," district spokeswoman Mary Waggoner said.
But of course, the fact that parents are now doing it gives us a whole new range of simplistic things to blame it on. It’s not just video games and gun rights, it’s Jerry Springer and Rush Limbaugh.
Posted by illuminaria at April 14, 2005 07:27 PM