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schools are the same. There are
more than 16,000 school
districts
in the United States, Jet alone
schools. No doubt many schools
are reasonably safe. No doubt
many of them still produce mini–
mally literate human beings. But
violence, drugs and illiteracy
are
widespread
in the American pub–
tic school system, and to a lesser
degree, the Canadian, Australian
and English systems as well.
Health Hazard
Part of parents' natural affection
for their c h ildren is a strong
des ire to see that they come to no
physical harm. Christ spoke of
one's
natural
desire to do good
for one's chi ldren when He said,
" If a son shall ask bread of any of
you that is a father, will he give
him a stone?" ( Luke 11:11).
As a parent, you have a serious
responsibility to see that your
child is not exposed to physical
danger because of where you send
him-or a ll ow him to go- to
school.
Yet the public schools are
increasing1y unsafe! According to
a 1978 report to Congress, more
than 8 percent of students in U.S.
junior high schools were assaulted
within a month of the survey!
The National lnsti tute of Educa–
tion estimates that more than
280,000 s tudents and 5,000 jun–
ior and senior high school teach–
ers are attacked
each month.
In
one school year, there were 1,500
attacks on teachers in the New
York public schoo1s, 1,300 such
attacks in Chicago, and 300 in
Los Angeles- and those are the
reported
assau1ts!
(New York
Times Magazine,
December 1
O,
1978). One s t ate legi s lator ,
quoted anonymously by UPI ,
calls public schoo1s a "battl e
zone" where drugs and violence
are common. Affai rs have gotten
so bad .that California State Uni–
versity at Los Angeles has offered
a course entitled "Self-Defense
for T eachers."
The bare statistics, of course,
do not do j ustice to the terror that
pervades many schools. A 16-
year-old high school student in
Southern Californ ia ís shot to
death by unknown assailants. A
12
Bronx teacher is grabbed by the
neck, cut in the throat, molested
and robbed. A Brooklyn gym
teacher is stabbed, punched in the
f~ce,
and kicked in the head after
reprímanding a 14-year-old trou–
blemaker.
A high school plain clothes
s,ecurity officer, quoted in the Los
Angeles
Herald Examiner,
can–
didly describes the state of affairs
at his high school, somewhere in
the Los Angeles area:
"This year we've had three stu–
dents murdered on their way to
school. We make felony pinches
every week. Lots of blades, once
in a while a gun. That's right;
guns carried by high school gun–
sels. Yesterday we found a .44-
caliber Magnum in a student's
locker.... There's so much nar–
cotics it's a joke. A kid was shot
on the corner next to the gym last
Monday. He lost an eye."
Horrible examples of vio1ence
are not confined to big inner-city
high schools. Recent ly
The Plain
Truth
received a revealing letter
from a reader i n northern
Colorado, a comparatively quiet
area where school violence has
gotten so bad that the reader
is seriously considering enrolling
h is sons in a judo class. He
writes:
"This last week was the worst
attack against my son. During
lunch recess he was playing vol–
leyball. Near the end of the peri–
od the score was tied and he
fai led to score the last point for
his team, so of course they lost by
one point.
"This so angered severa! on his
team that at the beginning of the
next class period-they ganged
up on him and severely beat
him-pulled out a patch of hair
from his head, kicked him in the
eye and side of face, split his lip
and bloodied his nose. He didn ' t
fight back- a lso said he was
afraid to fight back in fear of get–
ting beaten worse. This happened
in front of the whole c lass–
before the teacher carne in the
room."
The author of the letter knows
of other families having similar
problems. "One family's daugh–
ter had to be escorted to the
school bus and have teacher pro–
tection throughou t the school
day. Even that didn ' t work- she
was still beaten up. Finally the
parents took the matter to the
police."
If
school violence is that bad in
nor thern Colorado, what must it
be like in the big city hi gh
schools?
The New llliteracy
Yet a more general problem is the
failure of large numbers of public
schools to
educate!
If
the public
schools have any purpose, it is
cer tainly to produce students who
can read, wr ite and calculate.
lncreasingly, they are fail ing to
achieve this purpose.
Schoo l attendance in the
United States is compulsory to
at least age 16. Yet depending
on how you define "functional
illiteracy," significant percent–
ages of the American popul ation
are functionally illiterate, despite
many years of formal education.
A Ford Foundation study has
reported that as many as 64 mil–
lion adults in the United States
may be considered functionally
illiterate- unable to read road
signs or simple directions.
Even if this estímate is
extreme- and defines "function–
al"
too broadly- the situation is
still alarming. The scholastic apti–
tude scorcs of American high
school seniors have fallen steadi ly
fo r a decade now. In 1979, for
example, the average Scholastic
Aptitude Test (SAT ) verbal score
hit 427; once the "average" was
supposed lo be 500.
Remedia! reading expert Paul
Copperman has been very outspo–
ken in his warnings about the
trend. Speaking befare a U.S.
Senate sub-committee in 1979, he
declared:
"Every generation of Ameri–
cans has surpassed its parent in
education, literacy and economic
attainment- except the present
one. For the first time in Ameri–
can history, the educational skills
of one generation will not even
approach those of their parents."
Mr. Copperman has a l so
declared that between 40 and 60
percent of high school graduates
The
PLAIN TRUTH