1. The political corruption we have in our school systems is dependent on political loyalty. Such an orientation rewards opportunists and low achievers. The novel Injury describes a Chicago high school principal, who once served as lieutenant superintendent for the entire city school system in the ‘80’s. He stepped down from the administration to a principalship after a new superintendent was hired. In his new position as high school principal, this former "second in command of all Chicago public education" continued to loudly proclaim his loyalty to the system as he sexually violated high school students behind the locked doors of his principal’s office. He offered them good grades, money, drugs, and apartments for favors. He went to prison when one teacher defied the system and blew the whistle. Whistle-blowers should be publicly honored and celebrated.
2. Oust the mindless loyalty-based control system in the American society. Our society is suffering from a mentality that destroys individuals. The CIA reportedly conducted brainwashing experiments in the not too distant past. Such experimenting proves where our society is headed: alienation and severe punishment for members of a social order who don't march in a line that answers to one. Teachers and ally parents go after elementary students to punish adults they don't like. Very often the unspoken motivation is jealousy--belonging to one or a few leaders. The parents of the picked-on primary tots will deny the prejudicial treatment their children have suffered because they fear further torment for themselves and their young.
3. Establish community hotlines to handle harassment of students in the schools and neighborhoods. Professionals equipped to diffuse mobbing problems should be sent into schools to find the problem and eliminate it. Schools should lose accreditation over refusal to cooperate with hotline problem solvers. A societal problem is not the problem of an individual. Teachers and neighborhood gossips who claim the victim “asked for it” are denying their role in the creation of the problem. There certainly are impossible students who are hard to reach. However, peer pressure to correct this problem hasn’t solved anything; this pressure has, instead, created a repeated violence that destroys young lives. The question to ask yourselves is who agitated these students into murderous rampages? And who is really behind the gang banging, ostracizing of individuals in our society?
4. Create accelerated academic schools for able students, requiring higher standards and higher test scores for enrollment. Set normal standards for non accelerated schools. This will allow children to be treated with better care: Teachers will not be pressured with the impossible—to make superior students of all—but will be required, instead, to allow some understanding for problem students. There are teachers who can reach anyone, but they’re few and far between. (Upton Sinclair saw great teachers were harassed by other teachers and pushed out. Today that still happens.) Since teachers of high caliber are hard-to-find and keep, unhappy students should be allowed to select alternative schools that would appeal to their strengths. Federal grants could be distributed to alternative education allowing new theories to attempt alternative solutions for old problems.
Don't blame teachers, communities, or shooters. Blame the system. Teachers are expected to follow a top-down order and enforcers of that order. Communities develop opinions based on hearsay. Hapless student shooters are provoked and pushed into insane acts by an out-of-control (insane) system which arbitrarily preys on individuals. Change the system! Create a new one that is more human, forgiving and accepting of divergence in its people. We'd like to think we're a great nation but are we?
Read this fictional novel to find out how the political corruption we have in our school systems is dependent on local politicians who are in turn influenced by big government, big business and world politics.
