Imaginary Conversations and Random Thoughts

Mr. Lawrence is always a good read. I get the feeling that he and I might not agree on a lot of things, but I also get the feeling that in education, he and I see eye to eye a lot of the time. He's just a lot nicer about it.

I write about things like how schools are bad factories because the raw materials (students) aren't sufficient to produce the desired product, and even if you ship the raw materials to a "good" factory, the raw materials merely ruin the good factory too.

I write about things like the inevitable failure of some students, and the cluelessness of policy makers who are so naive (charitably speaking, extremely charitably speaking) that they seem to honestly believe all children are perfect, cannot fail, can do no wrong, and in fact can only have failure and wrongness imposed on them by corrupt, incompetent, willfully malicious teachers.

I write about things like rampaging students getting arrested, the sad but true fact of their subhuman, animalistic behavior, and the apparent determination of our system not to encourage any semblance of humanity among them, so as not to hurt their self-esteem.

Mr. Lawrence writes about things like a child who, upon learning that a former teacher died of cancer, and had cancer when that child was in her class, reflects that if only she'd known, she wouldn't have treated the teacher so horribly. He notes that it's "chilling," the sorts of things that go through kids' minds. He's at least charitable enough to consider this example as a random thought of an otherwise good kid. As you might guess, I would come to a different conclusion. At least he recognizes the disturbing nature of the whole thing.

Who knows? Maybe he'll get out before his soul is consumed by the system.