Culture, Compliance, Community (Penn State part six)

Previous posts on Penn State: Cultures of Compliance,  The Teaching of Tribalism, Darkness at Noon (Saturday), The Realities of the Victims (Omelas), and The Silent Stadium. Please see Voices4Victims at Penn State for more information.

"They [the janitors] witnessed what I think in the report is probably the most horrific rape that's described. And what do they do? They panic. The janitor who observed this said it's the worst thing he ever saw. This is a Korean War veteran who said, 'I've never seen anything like that. It makes me sick.' He spoke to the other janitors. They were alarmed and shocked by it. But what did they do? They said, 'We can't report this because we’ll get fired.' They knew who Sandusky was. … They were afraid to take on the football program. They said the university would circle around it. It was like going against the president of the United States. If that's the culture on the bottom, God help the culture at the top." - former FBI Director Louis Freeh, 12 July 2012

a culture of fear and compliance

Last Wednesday I sat with Hamilton, Michigan schools superintendent Dave Tebo and liistened to him describe his efforts to get secondary school teachers to separate compliance from academic achievement in the grading process. And last Thursday I listened to former Clinton Administration FBI Director Louis Freeh describe the road to ruin which cultures of compliance create. On Friday I heard the Pennsylvania State University administrators respond to the Freeh report by announcing renovations to their football building. On Saturday I heard those same administrators insist that, regarding the campus statue of child rape enabler Joe Paterno, "[We] are hoping more time pass and people will forget about it and then it won't come down," one trustee said. "They don't get to tell us," the source said about members of the public clamoring for its removal. "This is a Penn State community decision."

We should not be surprised that the supposed "leaders" of a supposed "great research university" are betting on everyone in State College, Pennsylvania forgetting the rape of children - they worked so hard at forgetting it for 14 years. Nor should we be surprised if they - at least locally - succeed. "Happy Valley" has proven - again and again - to be the Omelas of Ursula LeGuin's fiction, a place where the comfort and glory of the majority are happily constructed out of the pain and misery of the forgotten few.

That happens not just because the Pennsylvania State University put football above all else (and women's basketball too), but because, clearly, Pennsylvania State University relishes unquestioning compliance in its community. It is the gruesome compliance of fake, forced smiles and pretend agreement which denies inquiry, investigation, and emotional and intellectual discomfort.

The football building must be rebuilt so that week-kneed Nittany Lion football players won't be "creeped out" by the thought of child rape. The Paterno statue must remain because "people would be unhappy" to see it removed. There remains - as Judge Freeh pointed out - not one thought about the victims. The voice of victims - whether whispered from the shower room tiles or shouted in the destruction of a monument to a monster - would force the Penn State community to think, to debate, to recall, perhaps even to disagree. And quite clearly, that is completely unacceptable to the leaders of "Happy Valley."

Which should force all of us to ask: what is education about anyway?

There are, in my mind, two forms of "education" we can choose from, or, as I might say, we can choose between "education" and "training." Now, I am not saying that there is anything necessarily wrong with "training" - the teaching of a specific form, a specific skill, through instruction and, usually, repetition - but I would argue that "training" is not something which moves us - as a society, as a community - forward. It simply reproduces what "we" already do.

What I would call "education" is something different. "Education" enables doubt, and doubt enables change, progress, and the future. If we simply "train" - for example, the mathematics educational efforts suggested here (or here) or the "go ask your elders" view which prevented Michael McQueary from acting when he saw a child being raped and prevented Graham Spanier from acting morally at any point - we remain locked in one place. I can recall being "trained" in a sport, but if I watch that sport today, there is not one technique which has not changed dramatically, and that change is the result of "education," of continuous investigation, challenge, learning.
 

Not, "how do I swim like that guy?" but, "how do I swim faster?"

1976 (above) 2012 (below)

When we "teach compliance" - whether by grading homework completion, or on-time appearances, or by insisting that a leading "educator" cannot be challenged, we are training. When we "educate" we force students to doubt their world, and to imagine all things greater.

This is not always easy in education. Many of the education professors I know speak of the trouble they have getting the future teachers in their classes to dissent, to doubt, to think beyond the linear. Many secondary school teachers, those who try to move away from "training," say the same things about their students. "I tried giving them choices," I've been told, "but the students want me to tell them what do do."

Faced with that, we can choose be "Penn State," and raise a generation which will challenge neither a Sanduskey nor a Paterno, nor a belief, nor formula, or we can choose to be something much better, and raise a generation which will lead us to new places.

Eight months ago I asked:

"What creates such a powerful interest in loyalty and stability that it completely over-rides the commitment to the best interests of children? And understand, I would not ask this question here if I did not think it had implications far beyond the ethically-challenged land grant university of Pennsylvania.

"This was not one of those, "uh, not sure it matters" kind of thing McQueary watched that afternoon in 2002 [turns out it was 2001 according to Freeh]. It wasn't a friend driving five miles an hour over the speed limit, or someone having a few too many drinks, this was - first - one of the "big crimes." In New York City's Police Academy we were told that there were only five crimes for which you could use deadly physical force to "prevent or terminate." The acronym was "Mr.Mrs." - Murder, Robbery, Manslaughter, Rape, (forcible) Sodomy. McQueary observed one of those, and - second - he knew the victim of this crime to be a child.

"What, one wonders, would McQueary have to see which might get him to call 9-1-1?

"Or, the real question, why did Mike McQueary not call police within this "educational environment" when - and I'm guessing here - he would probably have intervened if he had observed the same scene in another place, say, in a park or library rest room?"

In other words, the question becomes, how does the teaching of compliance and unquestioning respect for anything, deconstruct both our humanity and our communities? The Pennsylvania State University stands today as a monument to all that is wrong with the teaching of compliance in education, all that is wrong with traditional forms of institutional loyalty and "team spirit," and all that is wrong with reverence for leadership. All that is wrong with the community cultures of so many of our schools. And so, again, we must ask, how do we consciously, quickly, effectively, undo this.

What the Penn State story shows is that, at the "bottom" (to use Freeh's word), be it the custodial staff or a graduate student, the culture at Penn State was/is a culture of fear and blind compliance. No one, apparently, at that "bottom" felt allowed to trust their own judgments or to act on their own moral beliefs. All were sure that any challenge to the system would have devastating consequences for them. I suspect they were right, as was the reverse. Perhaps for his silence, certainly not because he had challenged Sanduskey or Paterno, Mike McQueary was the only graduate assistant coach of that time rewarded with a full-time job.

And this not only enabled child rape, it disabled thinking.

"Despite being children within easy reach of many supposedly great local figures, they were offered no outstretched hand. They were left to save themselves. This campus is plagued by desperate, insistent shrieks of `We are Penn State.' It's time for Penn State to realize that adhering to this mantra is distancing and self-defeating. It is time to follow a path of humility, not one of hubris." – Matt Bodenschatz, a Penn State student and spokesman for Voices for Victims.

And, I would argue, it is time to stop "training," and start "educating," because if Penn State had valued doubt, questioning, and individual decision-making, Jerry Sanduskey would have been jailed 14 years ago.

It may seem a huge leap to go from insisting on homework completion to Mike McQueary running away from the scene of a crime in progress and handing off moral responsibility to someone he had been told to respect ("You did what you had to do. It is my job now to figure out what we want to do," ... Freeh quotes Paterno as telling McQueary), but it is not a "slippery slope," rather, it is a direct path.

Do not challenge anything! Citizenship grading

Every time we tell a student what to do, we move decision-making from them to ourselves. Every time we decide how a student will learn something, we remove the learning of responsibility from that student. Every time we substitute our judgment ("You cannot skip class") for a student's own micro-economic decisions ("I have better things to do"), we block the learning of the connection between decisions and consequences. Every time we choose stock, pre-cooked rules for community developed moral and ethical expectations, we risk creating the next Mike McQueary, the next Graham Spanier, the next "Penn State."

A quick Google search found this "gem" of a definition of citizenship from a "California Distinguished School," Hilltop High School in Chula Vista, California:

"Citizenship grades are based upon the following criteria, each of which is observable during the grading period. Citizenship grades are also cumulative throughout the semester. Students are expected to be:

Responsible - Bring supplies regularly, submit completed assignments when due, have textbook covered at all times, request work missed during absences, put full name on all assignments, utilize class time wisely, be organized and neat (notebook, backpack, etc.).

Respectful - Behave in a manner conducive to the learning environment, follow all the rules within the class, be polite and courteous to the teacher and classmates, be friendly and helpful.

Reliable - Be on time and attend regularly (especially on testing days), make up work missed during absences, complete all individual and group work.

Honest - Some work is collaborative (group work) but most and especially quizzes / exams are not.  There is no tolerance for cheating, copying others, plagiarizing sources, etc. and severe penalties may result, including receiving an F grade in citizenship."

when your school reopens: don't be Penn State

This may seem like the "rules" in many schools, and it is probably close to the rules in Penn State's football building (We've been told many times this week that new coach Bill O'Brien's rules are "be on time and never lie to me."). It suggests that doubt, questioning, challenging, and making one's own decisions are not part of citizenship. It equates neatness with honesty, compliance with responsibility. It is a recipe for both school and community disaster.

Communities, societies, and nations succeed when people are not compliant, either in politics (think Thomas Jefferson), science (think Albert Einstein), arts (think anyone from Monet to Christo), or ethics (think about those French leaders in the late 1940s who began to forge a shared destiny with Germany). Communities, societies, and nations fail when they adhere to the past out of loyalty (think Czarist Russia, Imperial Germany, or Egypt's Mubarak Regime).

School begins (in the northern hemisphere) in five or six weeks. Will you be "Penn State"? Or will you be something better?

- Ira Socol

"the realities of victims and the realities of observers are worlds apart"

Happy Valley/Omelas, Buffalo High School, the Occupy Movement, and our Classrooms

Back in 2008 I wrote a post about "Constructing Disability." I was writing from bed after a disastrous accident and week in hospital. That week gave me a lot of time to think, and I thought about my life, my education, and my role as an educator.

I wrote that we disable people, that we make people "less than fully human," by using a number of techniques:
1. Not bothering to know who you are.
2. Not really listening.
3. Assuming that "you" can't hear.
4. Infantilizing.
5. Making it look easy.

If the "scandals" at Pennsylvania State University seem to be an obsession of mine this week, please forgive me, but please understand that I see in the events in State College, Pennsylvania over the past two decades - and in the past week - too much that is too familiar in education. And, reading people's thoughts on this, and discussing them with "Penn Staters," who both tend to agree with me and tend not to, I find the parallels overwhelming.

And so, in need of processing by us all.

"I will start us off, (a Penn State student and survivor/victim of child sexual abuse wrote to the State College newspaper Sunday) because I have something unpopular to say. I see everywhere — in your editorials on your social media pages, in your subversively-written chalk messages printed all over campus — your desperate insistence that “We are still Penn State.”

"And each of these that I come upon creates in me a feeling of isolating sadness and emptiness. It reinforces in me what I have long felt -that the realities of victims and the realities of observers are worlds apart." 

In so many ways this echoes what I see with children who "are different" - the students who we call "disabled" or "special needs," the students we see as "unsuccessful," in their interactions with so many of our schools and so many of our classrooms.

Let us pray that we can forget about all of this and go back to football and alcohol
AP Photo by Gene J. Puskar

Matt Bodenschatz, in his letter to his community the day after Penn State's big "healing" day of football, describes three of the five techniques I describe above:
1. The student body and the institution are not listening to the victims
2. The student body and the institution are pretending that the victims cannot hear them
3. The student body and the institution, in the form of the football program, are pretending it is easy
And so, the actions of those surrounding the victims re-wounded those same injured parties.

The "public piety" of the organized events at Penn State Friday and Saturday which so disturbed columnist Charles P. Pierce, "Watching everyone on the field take a knee before the Penn State-Nebraska game, and listening to the commentary about how devoutly everybody was praying for the victims at Penn State, was enough to get me reaching for a bucket and a Bible all at once."..."These things cannot be prayed away. Let us hear nothing about "closure" or about "moving on." And God help us, let us not hear a single mumbling word about how football can help the university "heal" (Lord, let the Alamo Bowl be an instrument of your peace.)," were so tone deaf, so cruel in many ways, and so obviously geared to demonstrating how quickly the institution could recover and students could get back to ranking themselves as "the number one party school in America," that, of course, a victim - even a non-connected victim like Bodenschatz - felt assaulted all over again.

Which is little different than what John Holtfound, as the 1950s ended, regarding his students who were "different." "I asked them, "Well, what kind of names do you hate to be called?" We were off. Before the end of the period the board was covered with names. About half were what I expected, the usual ten-year-old insults­ - idiot, stupid, nuthead, fat slob, chicken, dope, scaredy-cat, etc. The rest surprised me. They were all terms of endearment. It was quite a scene. There were all these bright-faced, lively children, eyes dancing with excitement and enthusiasm, seeing who could most strongly express their collective disgust for all the names that adults might suppose they like most. Someone would say, “Dearie-ug-g-g-g-gh!” Chorus of agreement. Someone else would say, "Honey-ic-c-c-c-ch!" More agreement. Every imagi­nable term of affection and endearment came in for its share. Not one was legitimate, not one was accepted. No­body said of any term, "Well, that's not too bad.""

In Holt's classroom he discovered that every adult attempt to "help" these students was really more of an attempt by the adults to help themselves - to support the self-image of the caregivers - and each of those attempts wounded the students.

Which is the issue, we need to look beyond ourselves if we are to be capable of empathy, but we are all too rarely willing to do that.

Two friends, Punya Mishra and Michael Faris, brought a short science fiction to my attention last night, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Variations on a theme by William James) by Ursula K. Le Guin. Now Punya writes: (see Michelle at Sans Serif and John Scalzi at Whatever for other blogs on this)

"It is about a beautiful city called Omelas, a city of happy people unburdened by any pain or sorrow. But this happiness is the result of a faustian bargain—a bargain where the happiness of all is dependent on having one child bear all the pain and sorrow of the entire city. This child lives in a dark, basement room, neglected and in constant pain. The story says that many people, though initially shocked, learn to accept this and seek to lead fruitful lives in Omelas. However, the story concludes that, there are always a few, who walk away, from the city, never to return. The story asks the question of whether it is, “right for the happiness of many to be built on pain and sorrow for one.”

I know that my synopsis does not do justice to the story. Do read it for yourself right here. Yes, right now. I can wait.
"OK. Welcome back. Now wasn’t that a great story. I truly think it is one of the greatest stories ever written (at lease one of the greatest I have ever read).

"So now coming back to the sorry state of affairs at Penn State. It seems to me that the Happy Valley in some sense struck a bargain similar to the one in the story. The entire football and university staff who knew or suspected what was going on chose to turn a blind eye to what was going on. The graduate assistant who stumbled upon the scene in the showers chose to let the child suffer to protect the good name of the program. The suffering of one child was worth it in exchange for maintaining the reputation of the football team or the University. The students who rioted after the firing of Joe Paterno were willing to make the same choice as well."

And I will argue that the students praying at Penn State's football game as others hugged the statue of Joe Paterno, were making the same choice as well. And further, I would argue that those working with students who "are different" without fighting to change a system which builds dependence and second-class humanity, are also making that choice. Whenever we choose what is easier for our system, our budget, our classroom, our effort, rather than what is right for kids, we make that choice (see, Not Getting to Universal Design).

Making the choice: PSU student Alexander Pinquett hugs the
bronze Joe Paterno Saturday
Photo: David Swanson/Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT

"We too often consult our own convenience, rather than the comfort, welfare, or accommodation of our children," William A. Alcott wrote in 1831, so, none of this is particularly new, nor, as I have said, is it rare.

This week the Buffalo, Wyoming school board, referring to a football coach who had passed out a "survey" to his players referring to people as "pussies" and "cry babbies" and people whose "butts are too easily hurt," said, “They accepted his resignation for his coaching and his other weight room activities. We’ve retained him as a school counselor, under administrative supervision meaning that we’re going to work on building his reputation back to where it needs to be.” Yes, you read it right, the issue for this school board, the choice they are making, is, "we’re going to work on building his reputation back to where it needs to be." Comfort, convenience, and the ability to not see the harm.

NYPD prepares to evict Occupy Wall Street camp. The threat that Mike Bloomberg's
friends might see, or even think about, their Omelas child was too great a discomfort
for the mayor (or his counterparts in Oakland and Portland) to handle.

And at the same time, clearly with tacit approval from Barack Obama's Department of Homeland Security, mayors from New York to Oakland to Portland, great "liberal" cities, made the same choice, evicting citizens who were choosing to be uncomfortable as a way of highlighting unfairness from public spaces, because these scenes might have forced the wealthy and powerful to see that child locked away in Omelas. And most of us stood by. And no major figure even resigned, as at least someone in Britain did over the absurdity of this.

"But this isn't about you. It’s not even about me," Matt Bodenschatz wrote Sunday, "Until and unless you find a way to do something genuine, lasting and sincerely sympathetic for someone at the receiving end of these very real, crippling crimes in our headlines — even if you never get to meet them or to know any of their names — then your indignation is unearned and misplaced."

And this is the most true thing of all. We are either walking away from Omelas, or we are not. The only other option is to break down that door, free that child, and destroy Omelas as it exists.

Are we willing to do that?

- Ira Socol