the new war zone
FROM SCHOOL TO THE PRISON PIPELINE
by
HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship
at Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books
including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth
and Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.
Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear
on his website at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing.
World
renowned author Ngugi wa Thiong'o observed that "Children
are the future of any society [and that] if you want to know
the future of a society look at the eyes of the children. If
you want to maim the future of any society, you simply maim
the children." If one important measure of a democracy
is how a society treats its children, especially young children
who are Black, Brown or Muslim, there can be little doubt that
US society is failing. As the United States increasingly models
its schools after prisons, students are no longer viewed as
a social investment in the future. In the aftermath of 9/11,
students have become collateral damage. They are the most recent
victims of a punishing state in a society that "remains
in a state of permanent, endless war."
Students
are now viewed as a potential threat, and Muslim students are
viewed as potential terrorists. One result is that schools increasingly
have come to resemble war zones, spaces marked by distrust,
fear and demonization. For example, there are more police in
the schools than ever before. Security has become more important
than providing children with a critical education and supportive
learning environment. And authority in many of the schools is
often handed over to the police and security forces who are
now asked to deal with all alleged disciplinary problems, however
broadly defined. In most case, these involve trivial infractions
such as violating a dress code, scribbling on a desk, or holding
a two-inch toy gun. It is hard to believe that young people
are subjected to such horrendous practices -- children being
handcuffed and carted off to jail for minor incidents -- and
that such draconian practices could take place in a society
that views itself as a democracy. Stripped of their public mission
as institutions that nurture young people to become informed,
critically engaged citizens, schools have become punishing factories.
No
longer spaces of joy, critical teaching, and support, schools
are now modeled after prisons. The lesson that young people
are learning about themselves is that they can't be trusted,
cannot rely on the informed judgments of teachers and administrators,
and that their behavior is constantly subject to procedures
that amount to both an assault on their dignity and a violation
of their civil liberties. Schools have become institutions in
which creativity is viewed as a threat, discipline a virtue,
and punishment the reward for not conforming to what amounts
to the dictates of a police state. How many more images of young
school children in handcuffs do we have to witness before it
becomes clear that the educational system is broken, reduced
largely to a punishing factory defined by a culture of fear
and an utter distrust of young people?
The
most recent example can be seen in the case of Ahmed Mohamed,
a 14-year-old Muslim high school ninth grader who was questioned
by school administrators and the police for bringing a homemade
digital clock to school that he had made himself. Ahmed is a
gifted young man who makes his own radios, works on his go-kart,
tinkers with circuit boards and has a love for robotics. He
is a young man whose immense curiosity for the world has been
channeled into the kind of skills than any decent school would
recognize not only as a gift but as something to promote and
nurture given the potential future he might have as a budding
engineer or scientist. Ahmed brought a clock he had made to
school to show his teachers.
What
should have been viewed as creative act was interpreted as a
crime. Instead of being praised for his invention, he got pulled
out of class, interrogated and eventually cuffed with his hands
behind his back, and hauled off to a police station. There is
more at stake here than a sad example of adults who have defaulted
on any sense of responsibility and informed judgment -- from
the classroom teacher and principal to the police who arrested
Ahmed. Ahmed's case is another example of the terrible price
young people are paying: they are routinely treated with distrust,
disdain and suspicion. This issue could have been resolved in
ten minutes. Instead, it becomes another case of the culture
of fear that dominates the country poisoning a school and turning
the people who run it into hysterical adjuncts of the criminal
justice system. Ahmed has vowed never to show or take any of
his inventions to schools again. Surely, schools should not
be places that not only kill a student's imagination, but position
them to live in fear whenever they enter a school building.
Ahmed's
case is part of a larger trend that has turned schools across
the country into war zones and educators into prison guards.
What happened to Ahmed is far from unusual. As Glenn Greenwald
points out:
When
young people are viewed as a threat rather than as a social
investment, their behaviours are increasingly being criminalized
in the streets, malls, schools, and many other places once considered
safe spaces. As compassion and social responsibility give way
to mass hysteria, punishment and fear as the most important
modalities mediating the relationship of youth to the larger
social order, schools resort more and more to zero tolerance
policies that are punitive in nature and often result in the
handing over of disciplinary problems to the police rather than
educational personnel. With the growing presence of police,
surveillance technologies and security guards in schools more
and more of what kids do, how they act, how they dress, and
what they say is defined as a criminal offence.
Suspensions,
expulsions, arrests, and jail time have become routine for poor
minority youth. The most minor infractions both in schools and
on the street are now viewed as criminal acts. Rather than treating
such behaviours as part of the professional responsibilities
of teachers and administrators, such infractions are now the
purview of the police. A toxic mix of racism, Islamophobia and
fear has transformed schools into outposts of thoughtlessness
and stupidity, all hallmarks of the war on terror. What should
be viewed a teachable moment becomes a criminal offense. In
this instance, youth such as Ahmed become the object of a new
mode of governance based on the crudest forms of disciplinary
control often leading to the growth of what has been called
the school-to-prison pipeline. Ahmed's case reveals why police
should not be in public schools and that the targeting of children
by criminalizing their behaviour represents the antithesis of
how a school should treat its children.
How
much longer can a nation ignore the transformation of schools
into punishing factories and what I view as a war on youth?
What does it mean when a nation becomes frozen ethically and
imaginatively in providing its youth with a future of hope and
opportunity? Under such circumstances, it is time for parents,
young people, educators, writers, labor unions and social movements
to take a stand and to remind themselves that not only do young
people deserve more, but so does an aspiring democracy that
has any sense of justice, vision and hope for the future. Schools
should be places that educate students not punish them. Educators
should assume responsibility for their roles as informed administrators
and teachers. The classroom should be a place where the critical
capacities of students are encouraged. Schools not only teach
knowledge and values, they also speak to the kind of future
that young people might inhabit. Surely, there is no room for
schools that turn what might be dreams for children into nightmares.
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