Schools Are Prisons

COLUMN NOTES: This one caused a stir in the newspaper's comments (go to the link to read them)...almost as wild as a prison riot!

Check out the photo to the left. Is it a school or a prison? Answer at end of column.

HARBESON: Is this school or prison?

Imagine you want to leave your current job. You have decided, for whatever reason, that the position is not meeting your needs.

Even if leaving might make life hard, and it’s quite possible you will have to endure negative consequences, you are at the point where leaving and getting on with your life is the best choice.

Now imagine that your employer says you can’t leave for two years.

Next, take this scenario and imagine yourself scoffing at your employer. Imagine yourself saying you’re going to leave anyway, knowing they can’t actually kidnap you and hold you hostage. But they respond by informing you that they can “turn you in” to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles who will revoke your driver’s license for the two years they want you to stick around.

This imaginary scenario is just too unbelievable isn’t it? It’s laughable to think that an employer would try to force someone to continue showing up at a workplace for two years after he gave his notice that he was going to leave.

Nothing even close to that could ever happen in real life, right? Wrong.

Since 2006, when the compulsory school attendance age was raised from 16 to 18, creepy scenarios similar to the one described above have been happening throughout Indiana. It is not a joke to say that schools are like prisons.

Why does the government refuse to let these teenage students leave? Surely government officials don’t think a person can benefit by remaining trapped for up to two years in the very institution that has failed to serve their needs.

What’s even worse is that teenagers who do decide to leave school without graduating already face the possibility of many negative consequences and yet government officials add more punishment by making it nearly impossible for them to get a job — the one thing that could actually help turn their life around.

Trying to prevent these young people from getting driver’s licenses and jobs is treating them worse than a felon just released from a “real” prison. As a matter of fact, interfering with their ability to get a job could be the first step that helps turn one of these kids into a felon in the first place.

It’s just amazing to me that government officials would be so vindictive to these young people who simply want to break free from a system that is not working for them. It’s as if the government wants to ensure that these kids fail.

Even if a school official is genuinely concerned, he or she must know that forcing a student to stay will not help. This continued coercion could even be downright dangerous for other students, teachers and school personnel because who can predict how a given individual might respond to this government bullying.

If a teenager, for whatever reason, decides it’s in his best interest to leave school, government officials should get out of his way so he can take responsibility for his life. Instead of looking for ways to force young people to remain in a place that does not serve their needs, school officials could be focusing their energy on creating a place that teens would actually attend voluntarily — imagine the schools being so inviting and useful that the schools had to work to get kids to leave, rather than forcing them to stay.

Imprisoning young people inside a system that they want to leave is a shameful way to treat fellow human beings. But hey, I guess if you can increase the compulsory attendance age and then brag about a lowered dropout rate, then it’s all worth it because obviously education has improved, right?

— Clark County resident Debbie Harbeson observes lots of creepy scenarios as she digs through government actions.

ANSWER TO QUESTION: This photo was taken by the Louisville Courier-Journal during the grand opening celebration for Charlestown High School.

Year-Round School

NOTE: I wrote this for publication on Thanksgiving day and just realized I never posted it here. I guess I ate too much that day and just forgot about it.

HARBESON: Talking around the year-round subject

SELLERSBURG — Will you have the pleasure of interacting with school-age kids on Thanksgiving Day? If so, I have a suggestion for you — ask them how they feel about year-round school.

Be careful though. If they don’t know anything about year-round school, their first thought will be that you’re suggesting they attend school for more days of the year than they do now. The very idea would likely freak them out and you could end up with cranberries up your nose for even suggesting such a thing.

So make sure you explain that, at least right now, year-round school means a “balanced schedule.” The mandatory sentence they have to serve out for the crime of being a kid would still be 180 days, but the days off would be spread out somewhat more evenly throughout the year.

If you can get them to understand this before your nostrils fill up, great. Now you should be able to find out whether they would prefer to have most of their time off grouped together during the summer, or whether they would prefer taking time off throughout the year and have a shorter summer break.

If you ask more than one kid, chances are good that the answers will vary. Some will prefer to get the school year over with and enjoy the longer break and others would rather take more frequent breaks in smaller chunks of time.

Some kids will realize that the question is really a request to make a choice that isn’t really much of a choice at all. Fundamentally, the question is just a scheduling detail to these prisoners — I mean kids. Either way, they still have to “do the time.”

I bring this issue up not because I want everyone’s Thanksgiving Day celebration to be punctuated by having little red berries falling out of their noses, although the thought does kind of make me smile.

No, I bring it up because local government school districts are discussing the idea of moving to year-round schedules, mostly because they say it could lead to improved test scores.

Whether or not that’s true, and the data is mixed, school schedules are like everything else related to education — a singular choice mandated for all will never fit the needs and desires of each individual child.

There are possible advantages with year-round school though. This schedule could give kids more experience with real-life math because more frequent breaks provide many more opportunities to calculate and count down the days to the next break.

Year-round school would also help the problem of kids not retaining important lessons while enjoying a longer summer break. For example, year-round school might help kids retain the lesson that what they do outside of school during free unstructured time, while engaged in self-initiated and self-directed play, is not as important as what happens in school where information is injected inside their brains for the purpose of passing a government test.

There would also be more chances to remediate kids, particularly the ones who struggle because they would rather learn in their own way, at their own pace, sparked by their natural born curiosity. Yes, I imagine year-round school could be very useful in helping to retrain those troubled kids.

On the other hand, maybe neither schedule is the answer. Perhaps society should dump the compulsion and work on creating wonderful places that would draw kids in by choice. Places where kids are free to play, investigate, experiment and explore on their own terms. Places that immerse kids in a friendly, respectful environment — one that supports year-round learning rather than year-round schooling. Yes, there is a difference.

— Sellersburg resident Debbie Harbeson hopes she doesn’t end up with cranberries up her nose on this fine Thanksgiving Day.