Every new school year starts with an uneasy mix of sadness and joy. That dynamic has probably never been better captured than with a long running commercial for Staples advertising Back to School sales: an exuberant parent dances through the aisles while trailed by a trudging teenager as the soundtrack soars with the holiday classic “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!”
The humor is infectious primarily because it’s true. The teen is stereotypically deflated at the prospect of losing his lazy summer idyll. The parent is thrilled to have the kid out of the house and headed back to class. Both are clichés, understanding that the best clichés are always elementally true. The hyperbole of both characterizations, however, clearly flags this as comic.
Port Washington Schools don’t see the joke. The district is painting a harrowing image of kids returning to some kind of dystopian slaughter. District Superintendent Michael Hynes made a point of giving – at taxpayer expense – all new faculty hires a copy of a book that equates contemporary schools to indoctrination camps. Author Peter Gray, a psychology researcher and professor at Boston College, notes that within the last century “the education of children was, to a considerable degree, a matter of squashing their willfulness in order to make them good laborers.”
Beyond not getting the joke, Gray massively misreads the systemic erection of a near-universal education infrastructure as a dark, leering conspiracy of child abuse. His scholarship, regardless of how dour, is fine as a critical exploration of education theory. The application of these ideas, made actionable by the indiscriminate promotion by an untethered administration in Port Washington Schools, is genuinely dangerous.
Dr. Hynes is promoting primitivism. Under the happy flag of “the Free-Play Movement,” our current superintendent and his supporters on the Port Washington School Board are driving our schools into a ditch of failure. Indoctrinating new teachers with this one inflammatory perspective – unleavened by any balancing view that might plausibly qualify it as critical thinking – is only the latest in a string of gross misuses of power.
The ambition to dismantle our schools as institutions of academic excellence is embedded in nearly every act from the administrative offices. This is a harrowing celebration of ignorance.
The vision Gray portrays in his writing makes this explicit. Gray points to the distant past as a goal for education’s future. Don’t assume he’s pointing to a sentimental simpler time of Tom Sawyer always staying one step ahead of the truant officer. Gray points further back to a pre-agricultural ancient era when “hunter-gatherer children must learn how to navigate their huge foraging territory, build huts, make fires, cook, fend off predators, predict weather changes, treat wounds and diseases, assist births, care for infants, maintain harmony within their group, negotiate with neighboring groups, tell stories, make music, and engage in various dances and rituals of their culture.”
Those are all valuable skills, but it has to be admitted that Gray’s vision, the vision our Port Washington School District wants to indoctrinate in all new teachers, is literally a culture of the stone age.
There’s nothing funny about that. Let’s all welcome the new school year, parents and students alike, as an opportunity to recommit ourselves to a vision of education as an embrace of the future rather than a yearning for a primitive past.
Douglas Parker
Port Washington
