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 Silent Stadium (Penn State part five)

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

The Freeh Report on the child rape scandal and cover up at the Pennsylvania State University is a frightening glimpse into what can occur when an educational institution, from top to bottom, forgets what its purpose is.

Though the institution in question is one horrifically malignant example, that singularity should not make anyone, in any school, feel comfortable. One of the key things former FBI chief Louis Freeh's report does so well is to point out the very common mis-steps, many going back decades or even more than half a century, which led the Pennsylvania State University into this criminal place, and it is vital reading, because at so many levels of education - especially in the United States where being an educational institution conflates with so many other tangentially connected roles - the seeds of "the next Penn State" lie in fertile ground.

Case Hall at MSU houses both jocks and top students,
but that does not suggest that Michigan State students and programs
are treated equally.

As I read the report, I thought about my "own" Michigan State University. When I was an undergraduate student there in the 1970s a large field sat across the street from the "jock dorm" in which I lived. Actually, to MSU's credit, it was (and is) "half jock dorm" and half residential college for top achieving social science students, a fascinating mix. But then, that mix met every night in "the grill" on the third floor which connected the dorm's two wings, and flag football teams representing floors in all of the South Complex dorms (all of which housed varsity athletes) played each other on the broad green grass across the street in the fall, and floor basketball teams played each other in Jenison Fieldhouse (often on the same court used by Magic Johnson) in the winter.

Magic Johnson and the "Cannabis University [Fourth Floor of South Case Hall] Jointrollers"
both played on this court in the 1970s

Today, that broad green field is occupied by the "football building" - the Spartan equivalent of the infamous Lasch Building in State College, Pennsylvania - and vast, private-for-varsity-football, practice fields. The basketball teams play in the Breslin Center, where no intramural team would ever find welcome. And the third floor grill in Case Hall is now a private dining room for revenue sport athletes.

Splendid isolation from the campus and the norms of society:
The Lasch Building at Penn State (above)
The Skandalaris Football Building at Michigan State (below)

And I thought about a tiny Michigan high school I once coached soccer at. Tiny, the whole pre-K through grade 12 school district had fewer than 800 kids in one building, but football mattered in a huge way to the tiny city in which it sat. I had worked with kids who fought for boys and girls varsity soccer teams for years against, primarily, the football coach and his staff who thought that soccer would dilute his football pool of talent. (I continually pointed out that the football coach cut many potential players, and usually had a 14 boy team though only 12 would ever play most seasons.) When we finally got the teams, I reported to an Athletic Director who was the son of the football coach. Now, he was a really nice guy and a great physical education teacher, but... "Ira," he once told me, "you have no idea of what I go through at family dinners. We talk about you and your "fag" soccer players more than we talk about anything else."

And when the football team's star running back assaulted a teacher at a school-sponsored camp one summer, he was suspended for one game - that easy, non-conference opponent game which began the season.

Penn State Women's
Basketball Coach
Rene Portland sexually
harassed players for decades
without consequence

So, it isn't just Penn State, it isn't just NCAA Division 1, it isn't just big. The University of Montana football program tried to cover up gang rapes. The Baylor University basketball team tried to cover up murder. Penn State was just better at criminal behavior, or more successful, or both. They spent years covering up sexual harassment in their women's basketball program, and apparently much of this century covering up crimes committed by football players. The worst scandals, yes, but as I've said, the seeds of this lie everywhere.

What do we do now?

The only good thing I see which has come out of the Penn State crimes right now is the sudden commitment of Pennsylvania educators and politicians to the idea that "punishment doesn't work." I've seen that all over blogs in the past couple of days, and this is huge progress for a state last seen trying to charge an 11-year-old as an adult for murder. Pennsylvania has almost 500 people serving life sentences for crimes they committed as children, so it is fabulous to see that the Commonwealth will, apparently, revisit all of this, along with those in prison for drugs, and those currently on public sex offender lists.

I agree, punishment doesn't work, but required changes in behavior can work, and the Pennsylvania State University, the institution and community which together built the toxic culture Freeh's report speaks of, needs required changes in behavior. We know this not because a few morons gathered at the statue of child-rape-collaborator, but because, on the day after the Freeh Report's release, Penn State's one action was to announce that it would be spending money to renovate - yes - the Lasch Football Building. If anything says, "we don't get it," that bizarre news moment does.

Thankfully, European Football - the football with feet and no helmets - offers the answer. And we reach across the sea for new solutions when our issues overwhelm our old solutions.

Chilling: The Paterno statue right after Sanduskey's arrest.

Punishment doesn't work (please keep repeating that all you educators and politicians), and shutting down the Penn State football program for a year or two would punish current players and coaches, I am told, who were "uninvolved" (except for the few staff holdovers rarely mentioned). It might also punish other Big Ten football programs. OK, don't shut the program down. Yes, deprive it of post-season play opportunities. That's basic. Force it to contribute 100% of its Big Ten football revenues to non-Penn State related charities and research groups, that's vital. Do both for four years, enough to help break the cycle of football worship and profit across one "collegiate generation"... but then...

Do one more thing. End the football culture for four years. End it. When it returns, make sure it is part of the university, and that is is not the university.

UEFA, the European Football Association - and other global football associations worldwide - has the solution. When culture is the problem, culture is eliminated, and teams are required to play their home games in empty stadiums. This solution is used against clubs big and small, and it is effective. It targets - directly - the culture which lies at the heart of the problem.

in Kenya, a team endures the empty stadium

A Turkish team deals with the silence of fan misbehavior

Penn State should play its home games in an empty Beaver Stadium for the next four years. The games should not be on local television or on local cable systems or on the radio. ESPN3 and similar internet providers should block games from IP addresses in Pennsylvania. Those who "live and die" with Penn State football would have to find other things to do with their lives. The university would have to find other heroes. And, I suspect, all would gain dramatically from the experience.

Let the games go on, but let the culture die.

- 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

The Teaching of Tribalism

There are many young people demonstrating in the world today. All across the US and in many other nations people are building the Occupy Movement. In London, today, students are being attacked, as they ask for access to education, by the morally-challenged London Metropolitan Police and their own government.

But in State College, Pennsylvania last night there was an unusual demonstration. At least a few thousand students at the Pennsylvania State University came out into the streets to demonstrate their support for child sexual abuse and those who allow that crime to continue.

Penn State students attack the press for reporting about child sexual abuse

The students from Penn State would complain. They are, they will say, not supporting child sexual abuse at all. Rather, they are exhibiting loyalty. But that's the thing. These students are insisting that because Joe Paterno coached "their" team to 409 wins, because he has given "their" school much money, because Joe Paterno's iconic stature is important to them, Paterno's "dignity" is more important than the abuse of children.

It is a horrendous moral calculus, but not an unfamiliar one. Look at the Catholic Church. Look at the executives and staff of the corporations which destroyed the global economy. Look at Barack Obama's basketball loyalty to Arne Duncan. Look at the behavior of Donna Shalala at the University of Miami (Florida).

"Big-time athletic programs are not entirely unlike nation-states," Kate Fagan writes at Philly.com, "Everyone wears the colors, says the pledge, and sings the school anthem. Everyone worships the logo, recites the fight song, and reports up the chain of command."

Teaching tribalism. We do it all the time. In secondary school after secondary school across the United States we mix our national symbols with our local tribal symbols. And in both cases, our goal is to build tribal loyalty, and yes, tribal loyalty means that nothing is more important than "us" against "them."

Does it matter if them is "the Soviet Union" as it was in my childhood, or "Iran" or "Saddam Hussein's Iraq" or "Venezuela"? Or, for those banging around "Beaver Canyon" (a headline writer's dream) last night, the University of Nebraska? No, "brand loyalty" - tribal loyalty - skews the most basic morality which allows humans to share this planet.

It might be Katie Couric gushing over Navy Seals and breathlessly encouraging a war on Iraqis in 2003, or it might be Mike McQueary doing nothing after witnessing the brutal rape of a ten-year-old by a tribal elder in 2002. It might be The New York Times reprinting Dick Cheney's propaganda word for word, or it might be no one at Enron, or AIG, or Bank of America standing up and saying, "this is wrong" and reporting crimes in progress. Whatever, we teach our children - and you can watch those children in action on video from last night in State College, Pennsylvania - a twisted view of the world in which institutions matter more than people.

American children pledge allegiance
to their flag, 1930s

A friend of mine from the Netherlands, on her first trip to the United States, went to visit an elementary school. She came back to our big old house in Midwood, Brooklyn that afternoon shaking. "What's the matter?" I asked. "When I got there in the morning," she told me, "they made all of these little children stand up and chant some kind of loyalty oath!" She was horrified. "I've never seen anything like it except in films of the occupation." By "occupation," of course, she meant the German occupation of her nation during World War II.

Sometimes we need to hear these kinds of discordant observations. I never liked the "Pledge of Allegiance," I refused to say it once I hit seventh grade. Vietnam and then Chile and all. But I never connected it to the brutality of Naziism until Maria came from Amsterdam and held up a mirror.

I'm not claiming to be immune. Tribal loyalties - New Rochelle, NY. Bohemia and the Czech Republic. Ireland. Arsenal. The Derry City Football Club, the New York Mets, the New York Jets, the soon-to-be-Brooklyn Nets, the New York Rangers. I'm an American. I'm a New Rochelle High School Huguenot through and through. An Isaac E. Young [Middle School] Knight. I'll always be, conceptually, a member of the New York City Police Department. And yes, I am a Spartan, with deep if conflicted loyalties to a university where I have spent many years of my life.

Yes, as much as I want to remember being proud of Tom Izzo's willingness to kick his point guards off the team when necessary or to accept his own suspension for "minor" recruiting misdeeds of an assistant coach, as much as I quote Jud Heathcote's line after they lost an NCAA tournament game to a Georgia Tech shot taken two seconds after the final buzzer - "if you can be beaten by one referee mistake," Heathcote said, "you weren't far enough ahead" - I have also cheered for the football teams led by by the deeply ethically challenged George Perles, when we all knew he was bad for our university. I probably let myself wonder if Derry City really needed to get relegated for cheating on all their player contracts in 2009. I'm sure I find reason to defend NYPD officers at times when I should not. I haven't complained much about public money being wasted on Citifield or the Barclays Centre. All of those ethical lapses are part of the same socially constructed cultures which makes me listen to football games in the middle of the work day, or look up to see how Ray Rice has done each Sunday.

Fagan, then a 21-year-old University of Colorado basketball player, relates her role speaking to an NBC reporter regarding the conversion of female students into prostitutes to lure athletic recruits to Boulder. "As a 21-year-old in Boulder, I couldn't see the humanity - the women whose lives had been damaged - standing just outside our black-and-gold athletic gates. I pulled on my CU letter jacket and refused to understand why a few women wanted to destroy our athletic family. I explained to NBC that our sports teams were shiny and clean. Anyone claiming otherwise didn't understand what we stood for." She couldn't see the humanity, because she'd been trained in loyalty.

Fagan was, I'm sure, even then much more coherent than this Penn State undergrad commenting on YouTube, "Im guessing you didnt go to penn state cause you obviously have no idea. The things hes done for this university way out does anything bad that he has done in this case. The fact that he has taken this school from a small farming school that nobody has ever heard of to one of the best academic schools in the nation is remarkable. Penn State would barely even be a school if it werent for him. He has every right to feel that he is being mistreated because he is," but the impact of the university's training was the same: A moral calculus which means those you've been taught to deify need not conform to the rules, which means that almost any crime is secondary to your institutional loyalty, which means you no more go outside of the chain of command at your company or your school than you would if you were in the Mafia.

Loyalty is not all bad. Loyalty is essential to human society. But loyalty should never be taught as somehow involving unquestioning, or lack of doubting, or shutting off our moral compasses. As I asked yesterday, what would Mike McQueary have had to see happening in Penn State's football building that would have gotten him to call 9-1-1? The rape of a ten-year-old was not enough for this 26-year-old, steeped in PSU's concepts of loyalty, to over-ride his faith in a God-like Paterno and get him to pick up his phone. "McQueary locked eyes with the "boy" and Sandusky briefly and then quickly left the room" (says the Grand Jury report). What if he had seen a ten-year-old being stabbed to death? Would he still have walked away, gone home, talked to daddy and JoePa? And what about Paterno himself? What would McQueary have had to tell him to get him to dial 9-1-1? Maybe, "there are eight boys buried under our practice field"? How horrendous a crime would it have had to be for Paterno to move loyalty to Pennsylvania State University into 'second place'?

Germany, 1934-1945 - how could people not know?

When this involves others, we shake our heads. How could Germans in the 1930s and 1940s not have known? How could police officerscover up crimes? How could those guys at Enronhave slept at night?

And now it is time to stop shaking our heads, and to start asking questions of ourselves. It is time to take the kind of stock of ourselves which brought Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny to the floor of the Dail this summer, to discuss Ireland's deep tribal ties to the Catholic Church. It is time to assert that loyalty is great, but we must be very careful about how we teach it. This is, perhaps, a speech everyone at Penn State, and everyone involved in school athletics, maybe everyone involved in education, needs to listen to this week.

There have been few loyalties as binding as that between the Irish people and the Catholic Church,
and yet, the protection of children must matter more.

We owe our children more. We really do.

- Ira Socol

Cultures of Compliance

What, exactly, prevented a Penn State University graduate and grad student, from intervening to stop a crime in 2002, or from calling the police?

When Mike McQueary looked into the showers in Penn State's football team locker room that year, and saw a middle age man having sex with a 10-year-old boy, he chose to do nothing.

Why?

And, next question. When young Mr. McQueary told his faculty supervisor about his decision to do nothing the next day, what caused his supervisor, the highest paid public employee in the state of Pennsylvania, to do only the minimum. Actually, it is worse than that. The faculty supervisor not only did the minimum, he promoted the ethically challenged Mr. McQueary to a full time job. 

Kitty Genovese and where she was killed,
while many watched, and no one even called

The Penn State University football locker room showers

And no one in positions of power at Pennsylvania State University bothered to waste a minute of their precious time looking to help the victim of this crime. They were, as sports columnist Jason Whitlock notes, looking after their brand and their profits instead of looking out for children.

But why? Why would all these very educated men, or men and women, be so institutionally compliant that basic human morality was abandoned?

We've asked this question before, about Enron, about the Atlanta Public Schools, about Bank of America, AIG, Goldman-Sachs, the Bush Cabinet of 2002-2003, all places where people watched crimes in progress and did nothing - in sad Kitty Genovese style - but rarely have we had such a classic public illustration of compliance over-ruling basic social instincts as we have in the Penn State Child Sexual Abuse case.

I'm not going to spend too much energy here working on understanding the "criminal mind." I've spent enough time as a police officer trying to grasp the "why" behind truly deviant behaviour. My only guess is that some in any society deeply misread the selfishness limitation line which allows a society to exist. We either learn pretty early that we don't grab for everything we want, or we end up as thieves, rapists, Republicans, Tories, or Wall Street/City executives.

So, even if I could imagine why a guy like Jerry Sanduskey wants to pursue sex with people not mutually interested, I can't quite grasp where his social learning went wrong. But I can look around, I can see that Sanduskey lived in an environment, an environment built by his society, in which older men got to exercise absolute power over boys. He also lived in an environment which encouraged different rules, and different privileges, for different people. And he lived in an environment in which celebrity often appears to trump responsibility. So, nothing in Jerry Sanduskey's adult life was helping him to learn late lessons on living in a society which he had failed to absorb early. In this, he closely mirrors people like John Thane, the ex-Merrill Lynch chief executive. If Sanduskey or Thane missed out on "the rules" as two-year-olds, nothing in either of their environments was going to help them learn.

As for Paterno, well, imagine yourself learning that a 10-year-old was being abused by someone you knew in your - office, workplace, school, shop - and now ask yourself if you would do nothing more than call the next person up the line, and never ask another question? Arrogance? Disinterest? I don't know, but perhaps not the public face your organization desires.

What really interests me is then graduate assistant coach, now wide receivers coach, Mike McQueary. I do wonder, as Philly.com columnist John Baer does, "why a young, strong 6'4" recently former Division I athlete didn't stop the rape of a child in progress"? But I also know - those years as a cop again - that some people are interventionists by nature and others are not...

Yet, the biggest question is, why this young man, trained as a football quarterback, being groomed as a future football coach - a kid steeped in the leadership ethic of sport in education - did not even call the police?

Mike McQueary, man of action in 1996. Six years later, witnessing a major crime,
he did nothing, then went home and asked his dad what to do...

Mike McQueary
Wikipedia Commons Photo

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. 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?

I ask, because I often see people in education afraid to intervene, afraid to confront, afraid to report, when something involves people within the system. I spent years hearing about "the blue wall of silence," when I was a cop, but I knew then that, at least a New York City cop, was far more likely to turn in another cop, than lawyers or doctors were willing to turn in their peers. When I became involved in K-12 education, I remember saying, "a cop is far more likely to turn in a fellow bad cop (our term back in the 1980s was a holdover from the very old days of cheap phone calls, you, "dropped a dime" on someone) than a teacher is to do the same." And I thought, hell, cops faced more risk. You knew the person you were turning in had a gun.

We also confronted our peers a lot. I remember a fistfight breaking out in the "4-7" locker room over mistreatment of a prisoner. I remember a bunch of us standing in the street telling a narcotics officer we'd never come back him up again because of the crap he was pulling on people on the street. And, well, woe to anyone, of any rank or title, who messed with a child.

But somehow, in education, we choose "respect," "stability," and "caution," over action and intervention. Is it because a different personality type chooses education? Is it because education chooses different personalities? Is it because we train people, as Mike McQueary was trained, not to doubt? Not to challenge?

In every school I go to, people know if someone is causing harm to kids. But, in almost all of those situations, that person is not challenged, not reported. And if they are reported - counter to the anti-union nonsense floating through the media these days - the reports are made to respected Joe Paternos, who do nothing, because they too are afraid to doubt and challenge.

"We worship corporations and institutions. Our Supreme Court granted them First Amendment rights. The Fourth Estate, the alleged watchdogs of democracy, acts as their mouthpiece," Jason Whitlock wrote yesterday. "There should be no surprise that protecting Joe Paterno, Penn State, Happy Valley and Linebacker U — profit-generating institutions at the core of big-time college athletics’ amateur myth — appears to have taken precedence over the protection of children. It’s the era we live in. Institutions are valued more than human beings."

This isn't just true at Pennsylvania State University, or in their football program, it is true in far too many places. And in far too many places we train young people, like Mike McQueary, in our cultures of compliance, because we worship institutions, and we crave stability, and we place myths above human needs.

Joe Paterno and those above him at Penn State have been revealed for who they are. People who would choose to ignore "a 1998 case involving allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior by Sandusky investigated by campus police, the Centre County district attorney and the Department of Public Welfare," people who would not even look for the child victim of rape, people who would see these crimes as columnist Baer writes, as "collateral damage, I suppose, to maintaining the university's aura."

But we cannot let the questions stop there. We all need to ask ourselves if we are training Mike McQuearys in our schools. And if we are, we need to decide just what we are going to do about that.

- Ira Socol

A "universal" VoiceThread? Not quite. And, Google and Prezi

I love VoiceThread. I do think of it as a universal design tool - that is - students can comment with text, with voice, with video, by drawing. Those are good choices which bring many students in, but not quite all.

Because for all of its charms, VoiceThread has failed to work with any kind of screen reader, leaving those with sight issues, and reading issues, disconnected... from totally to partially.

Now VoiceThread has begun working to solve this. In a trial centered at Pennsylvania State University, VoiceThread is introducing VoiceThread Universal and is soliciting comment on this beta software.

Here's my quick review. VoiceThread Universal lets full-scale screen readers, software like JAWS and ORCA, read the text comments left on a VoiceThread and allow navigation. The navigation allows you to add comments as well, and that's great. But as the developers point out, the current system won't help you with, "creating and adding content to VoiceThreads," won't allow searches, doesn't allow phone integration, though they say all these things are being "worked on." Which is good and bad. Bad because its not ready, but good because it is coming.

A bigger issue for me is that neither VoiceThread nor VoiceThread Universal works with the kind of "light" screen readers used by those with dyslexia. The readers in Firefox (FoxVox, Speaking Fox) and Opera cannot read the text. The text cannot be copied to Microsoft Word and used with WordTalk, or copied to Balabolka, or higher end Text-To-Speech systems like WYNN.

That's a problem, and its a problem I'm hoping the developers at VoiceThread take seriously.

Yet, I want to thank those developers for trying. And I'll note that last week the National Federation for the Blind sued Northwestern University over ongoing accessibility issues in Google Apps. The details of the complaint are complex, but here's my Google Apps complaint.

Those same "light" screen readers, the ones which make browsers accessible? they don't work with Google Docs. Actually, they did with earlier html Google Docs, but the spring 2010 upgrade eliminated that functionality.

This causes deep conflicts for me. VoiceThread, Google Apps, and - to bring in another issue - Prezi, all contribute to universal design in significant ways. They help a wide range of students I work with. But all three, because accessibility has been an afterthought to their programmers, fail many students as well. I, for example, much prefer Prezi to PowerPoint, but I can make Microsoft's PowerPoint accessible with PowerTalk. There's nothing I can do to make Prezi accessible.

So, is it OK for us to use these tools in schools? I am conflicted. I tend to think "yes" assuming that we always - automatically - provide alternative access capability which is, essentially, equal. After all, we still use those inaccessible books in our rooms, we still let teachers write, in handwriting no less, on the "board." But I'm bothered by it because use may tend to remove the pressure on these organizations to move toward accessibility. These companies want access to our students, should we offer that if they don't really want access to all of our kids?

- Ira Socol