Editor, Commonwealth:
Nancy and Cecil Brown bring up some good information about our schools’ problems with discipline (“School counselors not properly utilized,” Dec. 22).
All teachers and other team members are swamped with fruitless busy work, especially endless data entry that wastes their time and is useless for their students.
No doubt many students could benefit from counselors guiding them and teaching them problem-solving and boundaries. We all need guidance. It seems that the educational establishment has failed in maintaining order and discipline and providing a good learning environment for the students to grow and develop life skills that lead to their eventual success. This is the biggest reason for teacher burnout and leaving the educational field.
Scientists would say, “Let’s figure out the problem and devise another plan to solve it. What we have is not working.” The educational establishment can only recommend that we spend more money, especially for more administration.
Back in the Jurassic era when I went to school, we loved our teachers, loved school and had great fun. Any disruption in class immediately resulted in the villains being summoned to the front of the classroom to the teacher’s desk, where justice was immediately dispensed with discomfort. Then the rowdy boy had to walk back to his desk through a sea of faces looking up with horror and fear or grins. Matter closed.
Capital offenses were few and were immediately sent to the dreaded principal’s office, where all sorts of unknown things were rumored to have happened. We all knew of but had never actually seen the fearful paddling machine! Many unlucky students were never seen again.
We had two recesses and a long lunch hour, when we formed our own teams for softball, track, mumblety-peg and marbles. We ripped and ran and played. Bullies were finally dealt with when a victim had had enough and held him down and pummeled him, surrounded by all the cheering students surrounding the activity. When the thug cried uncle and repented, he was let up, and both parties became lifetime friends. If this took too long, one of the two teachers watching the playground would amble over and break it up.
Recess was a great learning tool. The worst words an underperforming or disruptive student could hear was “Johnny, you will need to stay in for recess!”
One lick on the palm with a ruler for each word he had misspelled was as effective as 30 minutes of phonics. Writing on the board 25 times burned the rules into our malleable minds
Expelling God from our schools has left us with no rules and has brought a malignant culture into our schools and community. For this reason, individual counseling usually doesn’t work. It is a toxic lawless culture we are now dealing with. No standard of truth, no consequences for behavior are now the standard. All of us need a book that controls our life.
If our school becomes taken over by this culture, the parents who love their child must get him out of that school. If the community is taken over by this heathen culture, then decent people will leave and seek a culture governed by the Judeo-Christian culture that made our country a great success.
I also would like to see the evidence-based data of the results of individual counseling.
What our city, state and nation desperately need is a spiritual revival and restoration of virtue and righteousness.
John Hey, MD
Greenwood
