The Vampire School - by Anthony Esolen

In CWR 

“Schools, I hear it argued, would make better sense and be better value as nine-to-five operations or even nine-to-nine ones, working year-round.  We’re not a farming community anymore, I hear, that we need to give kids time off to tend the crops.  This new-world-order schooling would serve dinner, provide evening recreation, offer therapy, medical attention, and a whole range of other services, which would convert the institution into a true synthetic family for children, better than the original one for many poor kids, it is said—and this would level the playing field for the sons and daughters of weak families. 

“Yet it appears to me as a schoolteacher that schools are already a major cause of weak families and weak communities.  They separate parents and children from vital interaction with each other and from true curiosity about each other’s lives.  Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop—then they blame the family for its failure to be a family.”  (John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling) 

One day it struck John Taylor Gatto, Teacher of the Year for New York State in 1991 (and therefore, inevitably, disliked by his administrators), that our schools were not failing.  Rather, they were succeeding fabulously at what they were constructed to do: to produce dull and compliant workers in a technocratic economy.  School, he argued, instills in us a perpetual childish neediness.  We need to toady for grades, because we need to get into the “best” schools, because we need to have a prestigious and well-remunerated job, because we need to buy a lot of stuff to pretend to fill the emptiness of our lives.  Among that stuff will be the odd child or two, who will also need to toady for grades, to get into the “best” schools, and so on, world without end, Amen. 

The Vampire State naturally requires a Vampire School.  Recall the two things everybody needs to know about vampires.  Vampires need blood—a lot of it; and vampires endow their victims with a shadow-life, a kind of immortal death, always dependent upon the vampire.  The Vampire School uses words like “community” and “family” the same way a vampire talks about life, as from a vast distance, with only a vague and twisted memory of the reality of such a thing, long ago. 

Is that too harsh a verdict? 

Someone knocks at your door.  “Hello,” says the fellow, flashing his card.  “My name is John Smith.  I hear you have a twelve-year-old boy here.” 

“Yes, my son Bobby.  Has he gotten into any trouble?”

“Oh no, sir, not yet.  I am simply here to talk to him about sex.”

“I see.”

“Yes, I am licensed by the state and the school district,” he says, flashing another card, “to talk to Bobby about sex.  He is here, perhaps?”  The man elbows his way into the living room, glancing at the titles of the books in your bookcase.

“As a matter of fact, he isn’t.  He’s down by the pond fishing with his little brother.”

“A pond, fishing,” says the man, writing on a notepad.  “Unsupervised fishing at a pond.  Very well.  When may I see him?  My appointments are rapidly filling up.”

“Shouldn’t I first know something about you?” you ask, naively.  “Suppose you don’t believe the same things I believe.”

“My dear sir,” says the man, arching an eyebrow, and smiling ever so slightly, “it is not your place to know anything about me.  If there’s any knowing going on, it will be I who must find things out about you.  But really,” he continues, assuming an academic air, “the subject of sex is as scientific and precise as physics or mathematics, so that what you happen to believe about it is of no more import than what you believe about the composition of the moon, or the area of a circle.  It is a part of my work”—here he lowers his voice to something between a purr and a growl—“to disabuse young people of the prejudices their parents bring to sex.  Now then, when will your son be available?”

You hesitate.  More writing on the notepad.

“Will tomorrow at noon be all right?”

“Tomorrow at three, fine.”

You begin to close the door.  “Not so fast,” says Mr. Smith.  

“There’s the little matter of the fee.”

“You mean you are going to charge me money for this?”

“My dear sir,” he beams, “recall, I am an expert.  You wouldn’t want to do your own plumbing, would you?  No, of course not.  Or prepare your own meals, except under duress?  Or provide your own entertainment?  Play your own musical instruments?  Invent your own sports?  Get together with your own neighbors to play cards?  Build your own garage?  Farm your own land?  Read your own old and musty books, and think about them by yourself?  Make love to your own wife without the aid of expert tips from magazines and pornographic videos?  Worship God with your fellow believers?”

“What’s wrong with that?” you stammer, but he snaps the notebook shut.  “I haven’t all day.  Here is my bill.  I make $50 an hour.  Sixty hours with Bobby should about do it.  If he fails, my colleague Ms. Jones will be available for remedial lessons.  Good day.”

And you give in.

Or perhaps not.  There are some people—homeschoolers most notable among them—who have tried to elude the Vampire altogether, with greater and lesser degrees of success.  But there are others, whose number is Legion, who have been bitten too deeply, and who have come to depend upon the Vampire School.

They secretly look forward to the nine-to-five or nine-to-nine school whose prospect fills Gatto with horror.  They do not want more time with their children.  They hardly know what to do with the time they do have.  They pay, handsomely, for time-consuming activities that relieve them of the responsibility of a real life.  They have been trained to consider all things done with simple independence as beneath an intelligent person’s notice.  “Slavery is freedom,” says Big Brother, who is now also Big Sister.  So a woman will pay to rid herself of her children for certain hours during the day, so that she may work, let us say, as a cook in a local restaurant, to pay for the Vampire and its minions, and for prepared meals from the Vampire Market.

In Free at Last: The Sudbury Valley School, Daniel Greenberg reveals to us not only that the Vampire is a Vampire, but that he is a naked Vampire to boot.  For the Vampire, lending his victims the simulacrum of life, delivers the simulacrum of education, but paradoxically must be seen to “fail” frequently, so as to justify the transfusion of greater and greater quantities of blood.  He can do so only by persuading people that learning how to read and cipher and so forth is so tremendously difficult and unnatural that many children, especially those from poor homes—here he dabs a dry eye with his handkerchief—will never manage it, unless they submit to ever more (and more intrusive) ministrations from the Vampire, who alone knows how to teach, being the expert and all that. 

But Greenberg laughs the Vampire’s pretenses away.  When children are ready to learn a subject, they will learn it.  He tells of a group of his school’s nine-year-olds and twelve-year-olds, who suddenly announced that they wanted to learn arithmetic—all of it.  So he dug up a textbook from 1898, full of examples and exercises, and gave it to them.  Addition took two classes, he says, and subtraction another two.  The children memorized the multiplication tables, then tackled the exercises.  “They were high, all of them,” he says, “sailing along, mastering all the techniques and algorithms.”  Then they went on to long division, fractions, decimals, percentages, and square roots.  “In twenty weeks, after twenty contact hours, they had covered it all,” writes Greenberg, “six years’ worth.” 

And then there is reading.  Consider that a little child learns the most complex thing that most people will ever learn—human language.  He learns it naturally, because he has a hunger to learn it, and he learns it without training by experts, and at no expense at all.  When speaking has been mastered, reading is not all so hard, if the child has things to read.  These days, it is almost impossible to avoid things to read.  Most of it is junk, but then, so is most of what is assigned as reading in school.  So what are we paying all that money for?  To ensure, perhaps, that children associate reading with drudgery?

 

Can a vampire be reformed?  In a manner of speaking, yes: with a stake.

Forgotten Study: Abuse in School 100 Times Worse than by Priests

By James Tillman and John Jalsevac

WASHINGTON, DC, April 1, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In the last several weeks such a quantity of ink has been spilled in newspapers across the globe about the priestly sex abuse scandals, that a casual reader might be forgiven for thinking that Catholic priests are the worst and most common perpetrators of child sex abuse.

But according to Charol Shakeshaft, the researcher of a little-remembered 2004 study prepared for the U.S. Department of Education, "the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests."

After effectively disappearing from the radar, Shakeshaft’s study is now being revisited by commentators seeking to restore a sense of proportion to the mainstream coverage of the Church scandal.

According to the 2004 study “the most accurate data available at this time” indicates that “nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career.”

“Educator sexual misconduct is woefully under-studied,” writes the researcher. “We have scant data on incidence and even less on descriptions of predators and targets. There are many questions that call for answers.“

In an article published on Monday, renowned Catholic commentator George Weigel referred to the Shakeshaft study, and observed that “The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague” in which Catholic priests constitute only a small minority of perpetrators.

While Weigel observes that the findings of Shakeshaft’s study do nothing to mitigate the harm caused by priestly abuse, or excuse the “clericalism” and “fideism” that led bishops to ignore the problem, they do point to a gross imbalance in the level of scrutiny given to it, throwing suspicion on the motives of the news outlets that are pouring their resources into digging up decades-old dirt on the Church.

“The narrative that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today) than it is about taking the Church down," he writes.

Weigel observes that priestly sex abuse is “a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared,” and that in recent years the Church has gone to great lengths to punish and remove priestly predators and to protect children. The result of these measures is that “six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members.”

Despite these facts, however, “the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young.”

Outside of the Church, Shakeshaft is not alone in highlighting the largely unaddressed, and unpublicized problem of child sex abuse in schools. Sherryll Kraizer, executive director of the Denver-based Safe Child Program, told the Colorado Gazette in 2008 that school employees commonly ignore laws meant to prevent the sexual abuse of children.

“I see it regularly,” Kraizer said. “There are laws against failing to report, but the law is almost never enforced. Almost never.”

“What typically happens is you’ll have a teacher who’s spending a little too much time in a room with one child with the door shut,” Kraizer explained. “Another teacher sees it and reports it to the principal. The principal calls the suspected teacher in and says ‘Don’t do that,’ instead of contacting child protective services.”

“Before you know it, the teacher is driving the student home. A whole series of events will unfold, known to other teachers and the principal, and nobody contacts child services before it’s out of control. You see this documented in records after it eventually ends up in court.”

In an editorial last week, The Gazette revisited the testimony of Kraizer in the context of the Church abuse scandal coverage, concluding that “the much larger crisis remains in our public schools today, where children are raped and groped every day in the United States.”

“The media and others must maintain their watchful eye on the Catholic Church and other religious institutions,” wrote The Gazette, “But it’s no less tragic when a child gets abused at school.”

In 2004, shortly after the Shakeshaft study was released, Catholic League President William Donohue, who was unavailable for an interview for this story, asked, “Where is the media in all this?”

“Isn’t it news that the number of public school students who have been abused by a school employee is more than 100 times greater than the number of minors who have been abused by priests?” he asked.

“All those reporters, columnists, talking heads, attorneys general, D.A.’s, psychologists and victims groups who were so quick on the draw to get priests have a moral obligation to pursue this issue to the max. If they don’t, they’re a fraud.”

O Crucifixo nas Escolas

1. Desde há muito que para mim era evidente o propósito de substituir o crucifixo nas escolas pelo preservativo, e o capelão, director espiritual ou professor de religião e moral pelo pervertedor sexual, isto é, pela APF e seus comparsas. Por isso, a notícia da directiva ou decisão do Ministério da Educação, não me surpreendeu absolutamente nada. A partir do momento em que o Estado assume tiranicamente o papel de doutrinador materialista e naturalista só se pode esperar que seja coerente com essa lógica intrinsecamente perversa explicitando desaustinadamente o confessionalismo aberrante, implícito nas penetrações obscenas da inocência, violada pela imunda “educação” sexual e outras ignomínias lambodas. Neste sentido, não teria sido, porventura, prudente que fosse a própria Igreja a antecipar-se exigindo a retirada dos crucifixos em nome do pudor, para que, ao menos, as desvergonhas descaradas não se cometessem diante das imagens do seu Senhor? Quem sabe se isso não teria despertado a consciência dos fiéis e das famílias para as malvadezes que a cainçalha ignobilmente perpetra contra os seus filhos? Não poderia esse choque provocar um tumulto, uma rebeldia, contra a matula totalitária?

2. Argumentar com a separação entre a Igreja e o Estado é uma insânia, um desvairamento. De facto, essa separação que se aplica a outras tantas realidades, não suscita qualquer escrúpulo a esse respeito. Pois não há ruas com nomes de maçónicos e estátuas com as suas figuras? Não estão as escolas invadidas pela ideologia técnica que nelas se ensina e pratica? Não autoriza o Estado que as vias públicas sejam infestadas de capital privado através de publicidade, frequentemente indecorosa e não raro utilizando símbolos religiosos para transmitir, tantas vezes sacrilegamente, mensagens opostas ao que eles significam? Não veiculam a RTP e a RDP, ideologias, visões agnósticas, ateias, etc.?

Depois, o Estado não é mais do que a sociedade que se constitui em parte (o Estado está para a sociedade como a parte para o todo) organizando-se politicamente com o objectivo de servir o bem comum, isto é, o bem de todos e de cada um. Donde o Estado existe para cuidar subsidiariamente da pessoa e da sociedade que o precedem e não para as controlar, dominar e oprimir. Uma vez que Portugal é um país que desde a sua origem é católico e que a maioria do povo português se reconhece nesta confissão, o propósito de sanear Jesus Cristo das escolas só poderá ser entendido como uma violenta agressão à nossa cultura, à nossa história e, principalmente, à liberdade religiosa, direito fundamental que merece o máximo respeito.

3. Recebi, creio que ontem, umas mensagens de correio electrónico propondo uma manifestação contra a retirada dos crucifixos, suponho que depois de amanhã, diante do Ministério da Educação. Salvo melhor opinião e sem intenção alguma de desmobilizar seja quem for, não me parece boa ideia. Pelo contrário, considero bem mais interessante a sugestão do sítio Pensabem.net (nota: o site algum tempo depois de escrito este texto foi desactivado) disponibilizando uma propositura de mensagem para ser enviada a algumas autoridades do país – Ministra da Educação, Primeiro-ministro e Presidente da Assembleia da República. No entanto, creio que se poderia ir, ainda, mais longe. É certo que os nossos bispos se irão pronunciar, através do Conselho Permanente da Conferência Episcopal, e que importa estar disponíveis e prontos para acolher e seguir as orientações que creiam por bem dar-nos. Não obstante, há coisas, e esta é seguramente uma delas, que clamam pela responsabilidade imediata e directa dos fiéis leigos, os quais não só podem como devem ter iniciativas concordes com o juízo prudencial que realizem. Neste sentido, a minha proposta é a de que as famílias e os jovens considerem a hipótese de levarem ao pescoço, por fora da roupa, crucifixos bem visíveis e que arranjem outros suficientemente grandes para fixarem nas paredes exteriores ou varandas de suas casas, de modo a serem perceptíveis da rua. Se o futebol foi capaz de encher Portugal de bandeiras, esperemos que o nosso amor a Deus e ao próximo seja capaz de inundá-lo de crucifixos.

4. Como evitar, porém, a transformação, durante as aulas, das obscenidades em blasfémias, devido à circunstância de serem realizadas na presença da imagem de Deus Redentor?, preocupação que manifestei no início deste texto. De facto, se os alunos vão para as escolas com crucifixos fora da roupa, bem expostos, não se vê como será possível evitar esses desacatos. Creio que importará aqui considerar outros factores que poderão obviar a que isso venha a suceder. O facto de se tratar de uma acção deliberadamente feita em conjunto, dotada de um propósito consciente de amor a Cristo, para o bem de todos, teria a meu ver, pelo menos, duas consequências: i) tornaria os alunos mais conscientes dos padecimentos do Crucificado, que carregou com todo o nosso enxurdeiro, suscitando um asco a tudo o que é espurco, abjecto e sórdido; ii) provocaria um avivamento da sua fé exorcizando os cães-tinhosos e porcos-sujos, que por lá defecam e vomitam suas infâmias.

Nuno Serras Pereira

28. 11. 2005