More and more individuals have reached the conclusionasserts Dr. William C. Kvaraceus in his study, Juvenile Delinquency and the School that the whole problem of juvenile delinquency revolves Repeated instances have shown that with proper leadership a school system can achieve substantial results through attempting to unify community efforts for the prevention and control of delinquency.19 In consideration of education in the United States, it is perhaps important to direct attention to some of the weaker aspects in the anticipation that public awareness of the shortcomings in the schools is the first step toward taking appropriate action. It is recognized that differences of opinion and free and vigorous criticism are integral to the quest for truth and the reduction of error. Let it suffice for me to say that our educational systemwrites the Reverend Canon Bernard Iddings Bell breeds moral irresponsibility-the result of intellectual wonder that people brought up to think in this fashion, if There is a consensus among many experts that in 95 percent or more of the cases delinquency is learned. Many educators look at delinquency as a possible outcome of learning experiences just as they regard reading disability as a possible outcome of a child's responses to home and school experiences. The child has learned the way of 18 Kvaraceus, William C., Juvenile Delinquency and the School, p. 4. "Teachers and school officials are in a special position to detect behavior disorders. The retarded or failing students need attention; otherwise they drop out prematurely and create various other problems. When children are adequately dealt with during the early stages of maladjustment, the problems can be more easily solved than later in the process. The problems encountered are numerous, for personality conditions and environmental pressures sometimes make it difficult for schools to overcome their detrimental effects. Furthermore, schools are not always equipped to deal with problem cases. The curriculum is sometimes not adjusted to the needs and interests of pupils, teachers are inadequately trained for the job, buildings and equipment are meager, classrooms are overcrowded, and many schools are not equipped to deal with special types of maladjusted children, including the behavior problem cases. It is difficult to correlate the relationship between school experience and delinquency. Investigations of delinquents have revealed that many of them dislike going to school. Since nearly every child in America, except the few who are incapable of doing so, goes through a public or private school, the school has a special responsibility to create a wholesome atmosphere and a constructive program of education. Deviations from normal behavior should be observed by teachers and school administrators, especially by the counselors, and the school system should provide the child with corrective influences that lead to normal social participation. Neumeyer, Martin H., Juvenile Delinquency in Modern Society, p. 231 Another view is expressed by Prof. Arthur E. Bestor who writes: "The school is one, but only one, of the agencies of society ministering to the needs of young men and women. The family, the church, the medical profession, the government, the business concern, and the welfare society all have something to do with meeting the needs of citizens, young and old. The fact that other social institutions may not be doing their jobs as well as, or in the manner that, one would like is no reason for inducing the school to neglect its own tasks, too, in an ill-considered attempt to remedy the deficiency."-Bestor, Arthur E., The Restoration of Learning, p. 119. Bell, Bernard Iddings, excerpt from letter to Senator Estes Kefauver, dated January 10, 1956. In the same letter, Canon Bell writes that he realizes this is "a large generalization." He also refers to his book, Crowd Culture, adding, "in it I have set down further ideas which may be pertinent." delinquency. Frequently, emotional obstacles may have had a part in hindering his learning of acceptable social behavior. In examining conditions that may have a possible casual relationship to delinquency, we found many that are common to other kinds of development, such as broken homes, poverty, poor social adjustment, emotional conflicts in relationships with parents, retarded mental development, to mention but a few of them. But, in the last analysis, the problem of delinquency is a symptom of the weaknesses in our moral and social fabric. A scientific approach to the prevention and control of juvenile delinquency asserts Dr. William C. Kvaraceus involves one other element. While the treatment of children Recent technical developments in the media of communication are having a far-reaching effect upon the American cultural pattern, or our way of life-an effect comparable in impact to that of modern transportation improvements.23 The strides being made in improved audiovisual aids for teaching are producing significant changes in classroom instruction. Although a vast amount has been accomplished, there is much research that must continue to be done in the careful investigation of the processes of teaching and learning. Further inquiry is desir 24 21 Delinquency includes but is not limited to commission of crimes. We know that crime is defined legally as a violation of criminal law, involving both an overt act, or the omission of a duty required of citizens, and a culpable intent. Crimes have been classified as: 1. Offenses against the State's regulatory functions; 2. Offenses against bodily security; 3. Offenses against property; 4. Offenses against religion and morality; 5. Crimes relating to crimes themselves, such as fixing criminal acts and the enforcement of criminal law; and 6. Possession of burglar's tools, firearms, and other illegal items. Examining the cases of many youths, who have been adjudged delinquent through 1 or more offenses from those 6 classifications, it is frequently found that evidence of maladjustment was apparent prior to the offense for which the youth was summoned to appear. The list of other acts or conditions which may bring a minor within the jurisdiction of the juvenile court is quite long, when we take all the items of all the States. On an average, the laws of a State have 8 or 9 items in addition to violations of law. There is no juvenile court law of a State which confines its definition of delinquency to violations of laws and ordinances.-See Neumeyer, Martin H., op. cit., pp. 20-21; also National Society for the Study of Education, 47th Yearbook, pt. 1, Juvenile Delinquency in the Schools, edited by Nelson B. Henry, p. 4. 22 Kvaraceus, William C., Juvenile Delinquency and the School, p. 6. 23 Another thing which is stressed by many of the teachers who write me or with whom I talk is that in the education of youth formal schooling plays only a minor part; that this is particularly true in those phases of education which tend toward character development. Morals and manners, they say, can never be adequately taught in schools. They are caught from the community directly, extrascholastically: from family conversation, ideas, ideals and practices, from sensational newspapers, comic strips, cheap magazines, tawdry literature in general; from ubiquitous advertising on billboards and in a hundred other insistent media; from television programs and over the radio and from the movies; from dress and talk and common behavior as these reveal themselves everywhere.-Bell, Bernard Iddings, Crowd Culture, p. 77. The country will be in ferment over its educational problems for the next 25 years, and some of its problems will not be solved to its own satisfaction. But let us be proud and happy that the vitality of our democratic ideal has created such a welter of new opportunities for the future of a new American culture.-Taylor, Harold, Toward a New Cultural Era? Newsweek, vol. 46, No. 23, December 5, 1955, p. 58. 24 Instruction may be regarded as being both developmental and corrective. On the basis of dependable systematized information about the individual learner-his needs, abilities, interests, traits, and capacities and his experiential background-the school through an efficient program of guidance attempts to help him to set up goals that are meaningful and significant to him. The school arranges a variety of functional learning experiences that, if effective, will lead to the well-rounded growth and development of all wholesome aspects of his personality. The chief problem involved is to provide fully and efficiently for individual differences among learners.-Barr, A. S., Burton, W. H., and Brueckner, L. J., op cit., p. 505. able in the psychology of learning and the adapting of instruction to pupils of different intellectual capacities. Better textbooks and teaching aids are needed. A number of students of the problem have pointed out that there is a relationship between the schools and delinquency.25 They found that the school is related to juvenile delinquency in three ways: (1) It may produce delinquency; (2) it may help to prevent delinquency; and (3) it may deal with delinquent behavior that is encountered within its walls.20 Dr. Samuel M. Brownell, United States Commissioner of Education, asserts that the most startling of these statements is that the schools may produce delinquency. He points to studies that "show that a bad home or a bad neighborhood produces delinquency more often than a poor school and for different reasons" but, he adds, "a poor school must share the blame." 27 He also pointed out that schools contribute to delinquency in both a positive and a negative sense. "In other words," he explained, "some school conditions may actually set up situations that cause delinquency; others may simply fail to supply the stimulating interest, or the release of tension, or the sense of security or satisfaction that children need." 28 He emphasized that these failures may result in juvenile delinquency just as failure to supply reading opportunities may leave many children unable to read. Dr. Brownell pointed to a number of factors which make schools. ineffective in handling children. They are: (1) Many teachers are not given time to know pupils as individuals; (2) some teachers are not properly prepared to detect the needs of pupils who should have special attention; (3) many teachers are not given special assistance to deal with problems which they recognize but do not know how to treat.29 In determining whether the school rather than some other agency has the obligation to treat problem children and assist in solving their problems, the relationship of the school to other institutions must be considered. In such a relationship, education begins in the family group, continues in the school and is extended to the church and other social organizations within the community. FAMILY EXERTS PRIMARY INFLUENCE The primary agency of the social development of the child is the family; it is there that models of conduct or social roles are first. represented to the child. The family is a direct form of social control. One of the major factors behind a greater part of juvenile delinquency 25 Youth must not be blamed too severely if it fails to meet expectations when it is denied a reasonable chance to learn. To ascribe to untrained or poorly trained children the power of infallibly choosing right and rejecting wrong, to look to them for obedience, to expect that they will adopt satisfactory standards of taste in manners, styles, and the arts, to hope that they will select ideals of life and conduct and conform to them is to attribute to young people more intelligence and judgment than many of their elders possess. Such reasoning is not even manifested by adults, many of whom themselves need guidance and even compulsion from time to time. Only by careful instruction in season and out of season can children be taught the ways of civilization and their duties toward their neighbors.-Percival, W. P., op. cit., p. 4. National Society for the Study of Education, 47th Yearbook, pt. I, Juvenile Delinquency and the Schools, edited by Nelson B. Henry, p. 10. 27 Brownell, Samuel M., Juvenile Delinquency-Your Problem, paper read at Arkansas Polytechnic College, Russellville, Ark., May 22, 1955. Printed in hearings before the Subcommittee To Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, U. S. Senate, 84th Cong., 1st sess., Education, August 10, 11, 12, 1955, p. 420. "Brownell, Samuel M., op. cit., p. 420. Brownell, Samuel M., op. cit., p. 420. lies in family disorganization, recurrent interfamily strife, resulting in substantial loss of control over the behavior of the child.30 Among the other factors frequently pointed to as contributing to the disorganization of the family are: working mothers; absence of fathers in the Armed Forces or at work away from home for extended periods of time; the homes broken by death, divorce, or desertion; the loss of traditional family functions to mass institutions; the transiency of the family, a problem difficult to solve because the American labor market demands a free and mobile market in which families move from communities of excess labor to communities in which labor is short.31 The school grows out of the structure of the local community. It is one of the many agencies which make up the community and is related to other vital community institutions and processes.32 31 Basic cultural changes in our Nation, such as urbanization, mechanization, the relationship of women to the economy, the home have altered the state of the school, the community, so that today in many areas, particularly in urban areas, the school is not considered a part of the community.33 There are many persons who maintain that the high juvenile delinquency rate in the United States is an index of social, emotional, 30 The family in America is an obsolete institution. Population is fluid, housing is cramped, the com munity is unstable. How can children learn in this atmosphere? Until the family again accepts the teach ing tasks it has abdicated so freely to the schools, education must be overburdened.-Bell, Bernard Iddings *** Or a Bog of Cultism and Professionalism?" Newsweek, vol. 46, No. 23, December 5, 1955, p. 59 See also: Blau, Peter M., Social Mobility and Interpersonal Relations, American Sociological Review, vol. 21, No. 3, June 1956, pp. 290-295. 31 Schoolmen would be more wise, more honest than they usually are, if they said in reply to taxpayers, to the community, above all to parents, "we refuse to take upon ourselves responsibility for the character development of your children. We shall do our bit by them, but you must give them the more important part of that training in your own homes. If because of community maladjustments you can no longer do this, then rectify the social wrongs; do not push off the malformed and stunted youngsters on us and then blame us for their deficiencies. If you can do your job and will not, let the responsibility for what your boys and girls turn out to be rest where it belongs-on your own heads, not on ours. If, as seems not unlikely, our civilization comes to ruin because the oncoming generation lacks character, that will be too bad; but if it happens, know this: we will not take the blame." Instead, partly because many school people are puffed up with a sense of imagined omnipotence and partly because, even when they know that they cannot do their own difficult work plus the work of parents, they have pity on poor home-neglected little tikes, they tend more and more to be obedient to the demands of incompetent fathers and mothers and try their best to take care of these spiritual foundlings. This is noble of those in the schools; it is also stupid of them. From their soft-hearted foolishness all suffer: the children, the increasingly heedless progenitors, the pedagogs themselves who fail and are berated for it, the commonwealth generally.-Bell, Bernard Iddings, Crisis in Education, pp. 99-100. 32 The way of life in any culture is revealed not by what is emotionally said or written about it by the boastful or by the scolding, but through examination of certain indexes. Among the ones usually relied on by social scientists as most revealing are the press (with its modern variants radio and television); books and magazines commonly read; advertising; sports and recreation; music; the pictorial arts; the theater, including again the movies, radio and television; divorce and the permanency of the home; good or bad manners, including general attitudes toward disorder and noise; education and its objectives; religion, and the concern or lack of esteem in which it is held. If anyone examines such indexes dispassionately objectively, he will speedily discover what is the American way of life in these midcentury years. He will come to understand what the pressures are which have most to do with making him and you and me and the neighbors and the children what we all are, the pressures from which there is no chance of easy escape for anyone who believes in the sovereign rightness of the multitude. To understand our culture no special shrewdness is required-only honest observation of the indexes".-Bell, Bernard Iddings, Crowd Culture, pp. 23-24. A society is a product of the relations between individuals, and these relations of theirs arise from the coincidence of their individual fields of action. This coincidence combines the individual fields into a common ground, and this common ground is what we call a society. *** If this definition is accepted, an important though obvious corollary emerges from it. Society is a "field of action" but the source of all action is the individuals composing it.-Toynbee, Arnold, A Study of History, abridgement of vols. I-VI, p. 211. 33 From these sources, rather than from the schools, children derive their estimate of values. They are apt to get the idea that to be a real American means to share enthusiastically and uncritically in the sort of culture we were looking at in our first chapter. That culture is based largely on (1) an overestimate of the value of possessions, comforts and amusements; (2) an aggrandizement of sensory appetite, particularly that of sex, out of all ratio to real importance; (3) a notion that the only way to judge the morality of word or act is by whether one can get away with it; (4) a conceit that to wisecrack is as effective as to be wise; and (5) a conviction that it is clever to get something for nothing, to obtain reward without labor. These are not the ethical bases on which America was built nor those on which any nation can long be maintained, but they are the impressions hammered home to children by life around them; and there is little the schools can do to correct them."-Bell, Bernard Iddings, Crowd Culture, p. 78. and moral maladjustment of the Nation.34 There are those who say that the schools should be better able not only to help redirect the delinguent behavior, but to see how to avoid its repetition so that the path of children in the schools will have been made safer. INNOVATIONS IN THE EDUCATIONAL AREA There are those who maintain that it is remarkable that under present conditions so many young people proceed successfully in their developmental tasks and are able to meet, survive, and overcome numerous complications without becoming enmeshed in delinquency. In the present complex social structure there are many institutions which affect children and youth growing up.35 These include schools, libraries, churches, health departments, playgrounds, clinics, and other institutions which serve young people. For these institutions, the task of the school is the most far reaching. Not only is its use compulsory, but it is free and universal. The school's obligation to serve the needs of young people is far reaching. This need can be met by the public schools supplying standard instruction in the basic disciplines, remedial work in these fields for the slow learners and more intensive work for students of high ability. The schools in many instances can supply vocational training, physical education for all students and the various extracurricular activities. Many schools are offering "life-adjustment" programs.36 The movement known as "life-adjustment" education became farreaching following a resolution drafted by Dr. Charles A. Prosser and adopted at an education conference in 1945. The resolution said: It is the belief of this conference that, with the aid of this report in final form, the vocational school of the com 4 Parents of today find it increasingly difficult to do what they know is their duty, because our present society has "set" in a pattern which makes a home in any true sense of the word less and less possible to maintain. Realizing this, consciously or subconsciously, many parents listen entranced to the siren voice of the total educator. They know that they cannot, if they will, take proper care of the character development of their young ones at home, and they hope against hope that the schools may succeed where they, through circumstances largely beyond their control, seem almost sure to fail. Instead of looking for the substitute for the home, they would do better to demand such radical changes in our social structure as would again make the home possible. There is-be it repeated-no substitute for the home as chief teacher of character. But it is bitterly hard to reform a society gone haywire; it is easier to rely on the schools. It is easy to damn the schools, too, as is quite too commonly done, when we face the inevitable juvenile delinquency: "One-half our crimes are committed by children under 16," "Our children act like hoodlums, destructive, utterly inconsiderate," "Premarital sexuality grows among our boys and girls." It is folly for parents or for the general public to expect the schools to overcome basic cultural maladjustments which are beyond the homes to overcome. One must out of compassion pity American parents as much as one blames them, in terms of which parents have to educate their young, is becoming obsolescent.-Bell, Bernard Iddings, Crisis in Education, pp. 84-85. One of the most vital lessons they-our potential adults and citizens-must learn is that to have more freedom they must constantly and intelligently give up some that they have already earned. They have to be willing and able to carry satisfactorily personal and social responsibility of a definite, weighty nature. Therefore, the kind and extent of formal and informal education of all children becomes exceedingly important to them and to us.-Dobbs, Harrison Allen, Getting at the Fundamentals of Preventing Crime and Juvenile Delinquency, in Federal Probation, vol. 13, No. 2, June 1949, p. 5. 35 The educational program of a community consists of the total range of influences in the environment to which the individuals are exposed. The school is obviously the special agency of the community to guide and direct the learning experiences of the children of the community; however, it is almost everywhere recognized at the present time that there are many other agencies in every community that affect either directly or indirectly the nature of the experiences that condition the growth of the children. Sometimes these influences affect growth favorably but in some instances their effects are definitely harmful. The home obviously is a major factor in determining the kinds of experience to which children are exposed in life outside the school and homes vary widely in their quality. Then there are numerous social influences that must be reckoned with: the radio, the motion picture, the press, the church, recreation center, the neighborhood contacts, charitable agencies, youth organizations of all kinds.-Barr, A. S., Burton, W. H., and Brueckner, L. J., op. cit., p. 696. "The modern schools seem under the false impression that children acquire good manners more or less by nature, that they are little adults almost from birth. This is simply not true. Each child is born a little savage who must be taught how to behave, at first under external coercion by his or her elders, then gradually, only gradually, by a growing appeal to reason. Never, in childhood, adolescence or adulthood, should one be permitted to behave as an anarch who rides roughshod over other people and expects to get away with it. This is what American children quite generally do. The schools frequently allow this immoral and antisocial attitude, sometimes encourage it. This negates a growth into constructive citizenship."-Bell, Bernard Iddings, Crowd Culture, p. 63. See also: DeYoung, Chris A., Introduction to American Public Education, pp. 472-476. |