On The Objectification Of Schoolchildren

It is now 2014, the year by which all students, and I mean ALL students, are supposed to be grade-level proficient in reading and math.  This was the deadline set by George W. Bush’s landmark act, “No Child Left Behind,” which received bipartisan support and ushered in a sweeping series of educational reforms, promising to fix the woefully broken and languishing education system by enacting rigorous national standards for testing and evaluation with the goal of ensuring all students have the opportunity to succeed.

Not surprisingly, it has been an utter and dismal failure.

Now I know there are those out there who may point to some examples they feel are successes of the program, and while I find most of them specious at best, I’m going to let those points wait for another day.  I’m pointing the finger at that “100% grade level proficient by the end of the 2013-2014 school year” thing.

I will grant you, it’s only February, and we’ve still got a good three and a half months left before the final bell, but I’m giving you all the heads up: <SPOILER ALERT!> we ain’t gonna make it, folks.   It is my sad duty to inform you that at my school (and I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess at roughly all of other schools,) 100% of the students will not be proficient.  Not gonna happen.

But then, it wasn’t ever going to happen, was it?

I mean, who expects 100% in anything?  If you have a garden, do you expect 100% of your seeds to sprout?  Surgeons have to be prepared for losing a patient or two, tragic though it may be.  Hell, even a cook at McDonald’s is going to face ruining a batch of French fries once in a while, tragic though it might be.

No, I’m not saying that any of those are the same as teaching, but 100% just isn’t realistic in pretty much any area, especially when human beings are involved.  And remember, that’s not just talking about the ‘regular” kids (ever met any regular kids in your life?)  They are talking about all students, everywhere.

That means that by the end of this year, according to the great minds behind dear old NCLB, we should no longer have any students with special needs.  No students with mental handicaps or learning disabilities, no children with developmental language issues, not even a single swatch of color on the autism spectrum.  Those children will all be grade level proficient in a few short months.

And as for those children who have just arrived in this country, and do not yet speak THE language?  Well don’t worry about them; they too will be able to demonstrate mastery of THE language on the state-designed test, which is given only in English.  And then everyone will be happy, n'est-ce pa?

And that should have been the second hint that NCLB was doomed to failure.  100% grade level proficiency in thirteen years is so laughably unrealistic, displays such a criminal lack of understanding of how education works, that it should have been a huge red flag to those who approved the measure.  Couldn’t they see that setting such an unattainable goal would undermine any good it might achieve?  I mean even from a political standpoint, this is such an easy avenue of attack, why would you leave yourself open that way?

But then, that just points to the first warning sign: the name itself.  I mean, let’s analyze the grammar and structure of the act’s title and consider what it tells us about the motivations and perspective behind it.

“No child left behind.”

A simple enough phrase, and full of the feel-good proactive tones that are the hallmark of such grand gestures of legislation.  But beyond the pie-eyed optimism and woefully unrealistic optimism of its message, there is a sinister secret lurking in the grammar of the phrase, revealing the fundamental flaw in the logic, the glaring oversight that will ever doom such well-intended, yet imperiously blind acts of governmental officiousness, the single addition error that inevitably causes such vast equations to crumble into mathematical gibberish.

Let’s begin with the verb shall we?  “No child left behind” is not a complete sentence, for it lacks a subject, although there is certainly one implied, but we’ll get to that later.  But we definitely have a verb here, in the form of ‘left.’  This verb is further modified by the preposition ‘behind,’ gamely playing the role of adverb, informing the reader that 'behind' is how whatever is being left is being left.

This is all well and good, as we can all understand that the phrase ‘left behind,’ as it is used in the common vernacular, is an undesirable outcome, wherein one is excluded from the desirable, pushed out beyond the safety of the communal firelight and cast into the outer darkness of ignorance and fear (or something involving Kirk Cameron or something, I’m a little fuzzy on that one.)

But being left behind sucks, I can grok that.

And who, precisely, is being left behind in this phrase?  Why ‘Child’ of course.  It should go without saying that a child being left behind would be terrible indeed.  Thankfully, ‘No’ appears like an adjectival white knight to complete the phrase, and reassure us that the number of said children who shall be summarily left behind is zero.  Hooray!

But still our sentence is incomplete; we lack a subject.  “Just who is it that is not leaving the aforementioned children behind?” we may well ask.  And here’s where things get sticky.

Seeing that it is the great and the good within our fine government, the men and women behind the creation and passage of this bill who enacted this great legal endeavor, should we not assume that the mission statement is for them to execute?  Shall they not perform the tasks necessary to avoid such behind-leaving of our children, whatever they should be (conspicuously not specified within the titular phrase.)

Much as I fear to shock you, dear reader, I’m afraid it was never the intent for this august body to engage in the daily practices necessary to avoid such dire consequences.

No, such tasks fall (as indeed so many tasks tend to do,) upon those lower in the bureaucratic hierarchy, in a thunderous cascade of delegation and passed bucks until it reaches the local education systems.  It calls to mind one of my father’s great aphorisms: “shit rolls downhill.”

Casting our glance ever downwards along this descent, we end up at the bottom with the humble classroom teacher.  It is these menials upon whose backs rests the burden, and it is incumbent upon them to ensure that the number of childs is no, and their lefting is not behind.

So if we were to complete this sentence, it would most likely read: “No child left behind by teachers.”  This is a terrible sentence, and not just because it is written in passive voice.  We could of course restructure it thusly: “Teachers agree that no child left behind is a laudable goal,” but that still will make any fan of the English language cringe.  But since we are talking about legislators, not writers, I think we need to take what we can get regarding language skills, and accept the flawed, passive structure and make our peace with it.

But passive voice isn’t the real problem.  However you structure the remaining sentence, the phrase ‘no child left behind’ remains fundamentally flawed.  Because by making the teachers the subject, they turned every child in America (well, the ones in public school anyway,) into mere objects.

Direct objects, but objects nonetheless.

So the children do nothing in this model.  They have no input, no action to take, no direct influence or effect.  Even though it is they who are in peril of being left behind, it is in no way up to them to work against this fate.

By putting the onus entirely upon teachers, it absolves children of any responsibility in the process.  If a child finds him or herself being left behind, there is no pressure to run faster, it is up to the subjects of the sentence to verb on over there and prevent it.

And what has been the result of putting the entire burden for children’s success upon teachers instead of students?  We’ve seen an epidemic of teaching to the test, tragic mass extinctions of arts education, elimination of higher-order thinking skills and such a narrowing of the curriculum that what was once a beacon of knowledge, casting beams of enlightenment to all who would turn their gaze towards it into a laser, burning a tight pinprick of coherent thought into our children’s flesh, all in an attempt to have them pass a single test, at the cost of the rest of their lives.

We have torn down the rose lattices that allowed the bright, the gifted and the talented to reach skyward, bloom and grow, and rebuilt them into stands for rows of well ordered clay pots, where as long as each seed can reach the rim of its terracotta prison, that is considered progress.

It’s 2014, and NCLB has not only not fixed all the problems it was enacted to fix, it has created a whole host of new calamities, often worse than what came before.  It’s time to scrap this sham of an act and go back to the blackboard with some new ideas.

I’m not saying we should not have laws, or that government is automatically wrong and incapable of creating something that could actually benefit our children’s education, I’m just saying that next time, let’s be more realistic about what can be accomplished.

Maybe next time, ask an English teacher to name it, too.

The Curse Of The Pink Aisle

This morning, a friend of mine posted (from those fine folks at Buzzfeed,) a picture of a letter to the LEGO corporation, purportedly written by a 7 year old girl named Charlotte.  In her charmingly-scrawled missive, she complains at the lack of representation of females in their product line (I might be paraphrasing here a bit.)

She points out that the girls found in sets in the pink aisle merely "sit at home, go to the beach and shop."  She further elucidates that while these plastic females are gainfully employed, the boys get to go on adventures, work, save people, and even swim with sharks.

She concludes by asking that the company makes more female characters so that they too can go on adventures.

As the father of an extremely precocious little girl, who is as comfortable playing princesses with her little brother as donning her astronaut outfit and exploring strange new worlds, I am sensitive to the 'Pink Aisle Ghetto' effect.

Wiser men than I have commented on the strictly enforced gender boundaries in the toy store, and I too in the past have taken up plastic torch and pitchfork (actually, my little girl really has both of these,) and decry the blatant sexism inherent in the toy industry.

DOWN WITH THE MAN!

But I'm older now, and I realize some harsh truths.  You see, there really is no sinister pro-male conspiracy.  The pink aisle will never go away, not because of the desire of the phallocentric male oppressors (local #473) to ban the envaginated from all things awesome, but because of simple economics.

In other words, if you want to blame old white guys for this problem, point your fingers squarely at the benjamins.

Because companies are ruled purely by what market research shows will be profitable.  Armies of angry girls are not lining up to buy these fem-friendly toys; previous attempts have shown that.  For every strong little girl that demands an AR-15 accessory with her Barbie (or little boy who wants to buy Talkout™, the G.I. Joe sensitivity training specialist,) there are simply too many others who are paying money for the status quo.  Making those figures is a poor investment (that's what the smaller, online specialty producers are for, and there are a ton of them out there.)

A business can't stay profitable by appealing to those few kids.

So here is my response to little Charlotte, and the LEGO corporation has my permission to use it (for a small fee, payable in LEGO sets.)

Dear Charlotte,

We at the Lego company understand your complaint, and we have always striven to maintain a strong message of equality of the sexes in our younger children's lines.

However, we are a business, and that means that to continue to be profitable (and stay in business making the toys you love,) we have to follow the demands of the market.  To put it simply, we have to make toys that people will buy.  As you pointed out, we do make a few toys aimed at girls, or that are highly inclusive of them, just as we have for years.

But over those years, we have learned that if we focused more on that ideal, we would lose significant amounts of money.  Our product lines are driven entirely by what research shows will sell, NOT by our opinions on the value of little girls like yourself.

This, by the way is why you see the same gender disparity in the action figure and doll lines.  There will always be more male action figures (even those of superheroes, where there are already plenty of heroines in the comics,) than female ones.  Those toy producers have learned that it is not a wise investment to make that many female figures, because too many of them will sit on the shelf and never sell.

In contrast, although there are plenty of little boys who might like to play with baby dolls, or fashion dolls like Barbie, there will never be that many males (or male-inclusive lines) produced, because they too would lose money, gathering dust in the pink aisle.

In conclusion Charlotte, the problem you bring up IS a serious one in our society, but it is not in the power of toy producers, who rise and fall at the whims of the purchasing market, to fix it.

I hope you will understand our position and continue to enjoy our LEGO family of products.  Of course, you could always take those female figures out of their boring routines and have them have adventures and swim with sharks, or even swap heads and hair and decide your favorite lego minifigs are female.

After all, they are toys, and it is your imagination that give them life.

Sincerely, LEGO