Public Schools and a Permanent Youth Culture

The public school system has failed on multiple levels, the most obvious being the failure to educate and the shocking ignorance which persists in its pupils even after 12 years of schooling.  But there is another very troubling, and seldom recognized danger posed by the factory model of public education, and this is the creation of a permanent youth culture.  In a society in which individuals, families and communities are less interdependent, the last two or three generations have been particularly susceptible to this phenomenon. 

Most of these students have grown up without ever being initiated into the adult world.  They do not have apprenticeships, farm work, or family interdependence which lead them to take on greater responsibilities and interact with adults in an authentic, cooperative and mutually beneficial way.  They lack the opportunity to earn the respect of the adult world or contribute to their communities.  In fact, their contact with adults is generally limited to the school, and takes place in the context of clashing rather than cooperation. There, adults are given the task of trying to control large numbers of children.  The teacher and administrator quickly take on the role of the rule enforcer--the prison guard--while the student, who seldom wants to be in school that day to begin with, takes on the role of the inmate, seeking to disobey the rules whenever doing so holds the promise of making their time there more palatable.   In effect, this permanent youth culture is an institutionalized culture.  It is little wonder that so many young people, and so many young men in particular, opt out and fail to appreciate their government provided education.

When one considers the idea of placing several hundred or several thousand young people into a school in which the authority figures do not have the ability to seriously dismiss or discipline problem students, it seems hard to believe that this disastrous outcome could not have been foreseen.  And as with so many other well intentioned endeavors, the public school systems effort to educate every child has resulted in a system which is not capable of properly educating any child.  Pushing all down to the lowest common denominator is a frequent outcome of the efforts of well meaning do-gooders, like those who created and support our system of public education.

In the end, a handful of generations of American youth have already passed through their formative years as part of a youth culture which exists in opposition to the adult world.  The results are not hard to imagine.  We can already see them in the social and civilizational decay of our nation and across the Western world.