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According to Dr. Herbert Pardes, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, what emerges from the familiar litany of teacher complaints is that administrative headaches and even physical assaults on teachers can be psychologically less wounding than the frustrating fact that teachers feel unable to do enough that is constructive and rewarding in their classrooms. Whether it is blackboard jungle, red-tape jumble, a place of learning or a collective holding pen for the hapless young, the modern classroom, teachers claim, is out of teachers' control. Some reasons:
Discipline and Violence. Last year 110,000 teachers, 5% of the U.S. total, reported they were attacked by students, an increase of 57% over 1977-78. Teachers believe administrators tend to duck the subject of violence in the schools to avoid adverse publicity. More than half the teachers assaulted feel that afterward authorities did not take adequate action. Today one in eight high school teachers says he "hesitates to confront students out of fear." One in every four reports that he has had personal property stolen at school.
Since the Wood vs. Strickland Supreme Court decision of 1975, which upheld the right to due process of students accused of troublemaking, the number of students expelled from school has dropped by about 30%. As always in a democracy, the problem of expulsion turns in part on the question of concern for the rights of the disruptive individual vs. the rights of classmates and of society. School officials argue that it is wiser and more humane to keep a violent or disruptive student in school than to turn him loose on the streets. But, says John Kotsakis of the Chicago Teachers Union, "schools are now being asked to be more tolerant of disruptive or criminal behavior than society." In a Washington, D.C., high school, a jealous boy tried to shoot his girlfriend in class. The boy was briefly suspended from school. No other action was taken. Says a teacher from that school: "These days if you order a student to the principal's office, he won't go. Hall monitors have to be called to drag him away."
Student Attitudes Toward Learning. In a current hit song called Another Brick in the Wall, the rock group Pink Floyd brays: "We don't need no education." There is near unanimity among teachers that many students are defiantly uninterested in schoolwork. Says one West Coast teacher: "Tell me kids haven't changed since we were in high school, and I'll tell you you're living in a fantasy world." A New York panel investigated declining test scores and found that homework assignments had been cut nearly in half during the years from 1968 to 1977. Why? Often simply because students refuse to do them. Blame for the shift in student attitude has been assigned to such things as Watergate, the Viet Nam War, the Me culture. Also to television, which reduces attention span. Now there are 76 million TV homes in the U.S., vs. only 10 million in 1950. By age 18, the average American has spent an estimated 15,000 hours in front of the set, far more time than in school. Whatever the figures, teachers agree, television is a hard act to follow.