Teacher Attacked for Being White
3rd Graders Plot Teacher Attack
Teacher Attacked By Student (CAUGHT ON TAPE)
White teacher attacked at pontiac northern Highschool
Teacher: Student attacked me
SHOCK VIDEO: 61-year old female teacher brutally attacked
teacher attacked in class
The above is a list of real titles of YouTube videos on the Internet, there for all to watch and listen to, and they are all about students attacking teachers for one reason or another.
Some of the titles have been, according to their YouTube profiles, up for many months, while others are only a couple of days old.
Several localized news reports from all around the nation, and the world, have got me thinking about how kids may be “different” now than what they were even just twenty years ago.
The historian Ortega Y Gasset claimed that the Generation is the most important of all historical distinctions, with groups of adult people separated in age by about 20 years carving out three very distinct lifestyles from the other two groups, more or less culminating with age 60 and beyond. This is nothing new: it is a universal trait of the human experience and it transcends times, cultures, and epochs.
But this is not a question of a generation gap, or so it seems to me. It seems to me, and has seemed for a while, even when I was just out of university in the early 1990s and went back to do some part-time teaching at my former high school, that kids are not what kids used to be. They are not what we used to be.
Most of my family are or were in the education profession. My mother and father both were. My father taught high school, my mother taught “younglings”. They are long divorced, but they both agree on two things: when they entered the teaching profession, they loved it. By the time they were retiring, they were advising me against getting into it (which they needn’t have done, because I would never have wanted to teach anything lower than college anyway).
In his very last year of teaching, my father was knocked against a wall and knocked down by a student when he tried to break up a classroom fight. The kid was suspended, and dad suffered no permanent harm, but the whole thing was emblematic.
A lot of it, according to them, has to do with the nightmare educational system bureaucracy and our Liberal society’s breed of immature parents (my mother, as far as I know, votes Democrat, but she agrees with this all the same, even if not in political terms).
But I think the kids are different. Likely this is made possible by the aforementioned immature parents, but it’s a fact.
And the question is, what are the parents allowing their kids to do that makes them different?
At the beginning of this writing, I mentioned the world famous YouTube. There’s a helluva lotta stuff on YouTube. I think that’s great. I think it’s great that we can be so much more informed about the world than we ever were before.
But with more information, comes the very real potential for more misinformation. Back in 1994 I recall that a big-deal editor, I believe the former editor of Time magazine, said about the burgeoning Internet that it would “not make us more informed. It will make us more misinformed, and about more things.”
This is not the “fault of” YouTube or the Internet. Misinformation is not engendered by those media. It’s engendered by human beings, who then proliferate it via those media (as well as others, including print newspapers and books and telephone calls).
I wonder if children—and this includes teenagers—are just seeing too many things now that they can’t handle seeing. Children are the world’s ultimate mimickers. What they observe, what they hear about close to the bone, is what they try to do.
Parents and teachers can’t shape a kid’s personality. At least, that’s what I feel. IT’s there at birth. But, it’s still got to be unfolded into this world. And like with anything that’s folded up, if it’s not unfolded correctly, you’ve got something that gets twisted up, or torn, or mangled, or damaged by wind and weather.
We are well into the Information Age, that subdivision of the Space Age, and we are into it full-throttle.
Video games don’t cause kids to be killers, and YouTube doesn’t make kids brain-dead. Media reflect what’s there to begin with. But they also amplify it, sharpen its image, once it’s out there.
And the question in the Information Age has to be: What is that “it” that either should not be there, or which our kids are not being prepared to handle in the right way?
What is it that they are so drastically misinformed about?