Public education; maybe it’s time to suspend Socrates

Have you read about Natalie Munroe, the Philadelphia high school teacher suspended for posting unflattering blogs about her students? Ms. Munroe identifies neither herself nor her school in her blog, but a couple students recognized themselves and went whining to school administrators, who did as school administrators always do: they wilted like salt-covered garden slugs.

According to Munroe, she was only telling it like it is.

“My students are out of control,” Munroe wrote. “They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.”

How dare Ms. Munroe say such dreadful (and undoubtedly accurate and applicable) things about the blameless angels she must contend with every day?

And how typical that the school’s administrators should penalize her for her words, rather than consider the possibility she’s right and that it is virtually impossible to actually teach in many modern classrooms, owing in large part to the fact that students really are “rude, disengaged, lazy whiners.”

It’s so much easier to simply shoot the messenger.

Besides, shooting the messenger makes parents happy, the same parents who created and coddled the rude, disengaged, lazy whiners in the first place.

If the ‘80s really were the “Me Generation,” today’s youth are the “Me Me Me Now Now Now and Nobody Else, Ever!” crowd. The chimps are in charge of the zoo.

I blame it on the death of Sister Sulpischia, about whom I’ve written before, and other teachers like her. Sister Sulpischia (known to her students and fellow faculty members as “The Moose”) was 200 pounds of black-robed, rosary-thumping fury who ruled over her fourth-grade charges with a ferocity rarely seen outside rabid wolverine attacks.

I was one of her students and like most kids my age, I was by nature a rude, disengaged, lazy whiner. But not in the Moose’s class. Sitting only two rows from the good sister’s watchful eye, I was attentive, polite, engaged and determined to live to see fifth grade.

Sure, there were some kids, even back then, who had the guts to smart off to Sister Sulpischia. We all missed them during their protracted convalescences.

Do I really wish teachers were still allowed to clobber students? Well, no, I guess not. I mean, I do still remember the perve-o gym teacher I had in ninth grade who should have been in A) therapy, B) prison, or C) the Ninth Circle of Hell.

But I do wish there were at least a few administrators willing to back their teachers, stand up to the sort of parents who think their innocent babies can do no wrong, and insist that students who prevent other kids from learning be sent packing.

One of the greatest teachers of all time, Socrates, is credited with saying, “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers.”

Good thing he didn’t post this on his blog; he’d have been suspended.

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