In Childhood’s End, Arthur Clarke writes of a future earth where human beings (and anything with a nervous system) experience dramatic increases in intelligence. It seems life on earth evolved while earth was moving through a cone of radiation that beams out from the center of the galaxy, which depresses mental functioning. Children born after Earth’s emergence from the harmful radiation are practically a new species, with psychic powers and a collective mind. A race of aliens - who evolved outside of the harmful radiation - arrive to observe the changes, and to help the children join a universe wide collective mind that is kind of a deity. (The aliens, it turns out when they reveal themselves, can never join the Overmind, cast out by their luck of evolving without the harmful radiation. They are also black leathery beings with wings, horns, hooves, pointy ears and pointy tails.)
Recently friends have been complaining to me about children in D.C., whose evolution is going in a different direction. One couple showed me their home in the gated community of Hillandale in the northern end of Georgetown, where attached houses start out just under $2 million. They are leaving D.C. They are tired of shopping in Georgetown where the CVS drugstores are stripped bare by shoplifters and you must request a staff person to go in the back and bring out items you would like to buy. They are tired of shopping at the Safeway grocery chain where feral kids wander about shoplifting and the store has increased the number of security guards. They are tired of a car that sells illegal drugs to people who work at Georgetown’s Medical Center. They are tired of homeless people and beggars everywhere. Another friend, who buys groceries to care for his elderly mother, who lives in Georgetown, confirms their stories. These people are not complaining about Anacostia, or Ivy City, or some downtrodden or recently gentrifying neighborhood, the ones you hear about in the news. They are complaining about Georgetown.
Since the Covid lockdowns I rarely shop in DC, though I live there. I go to northern Virginia every day, where restaurants stayed open later during lockdowns and re-opened earlier than in DC. Briefly I rented an apartment there, even though I own a co-op in DC. I moved my real estate licenses (DC, VA, and MD) to a Virginia office. I started teaching in Virginia schools. So in D.C. I only sleep, visit friends, or show property. Even my car is garaged in Virginia - I take the subway to get to it.
But the situation is not completely different. In one class (I push into a number of classes to teach remedial literacy/English/reading comprehension to the students with the worst assessments in these areas) a kid begins to admit to others asking that he is indeed “banned” from Target. He’s walked off with $500 worth of merchandise (“I borrow”) and when it hits $900 his Virginia county will actually prosecute.
The students in the classes I enter - I would suspect half from Latin immigrant families, the rest a diverse collection of every other ethnic group - do everything wrong. In many classes of 20-24 students, two will sleep through an entire class. Several others will go to the bathroom and miss most of the class. Several will forget their laptop or the charger for it (I then take them to the library to do their work on library desktops - but all classes don’t have a spare person like me). One girl will spend the entire class applying makeup, and one or two others will watch fashion videos. Several boys will play video games. The Latin kids call each other, their black friends, and their black teachers, the N word. Most kids cuss without thinking, using “shit” in place of the word “stuff,” using “fucking” to mean very, and referring to almost every female as a “bitch.” Half a dozen will pass snacks back and forth and have inane conversations akin to being at a happy hour. Being asked to work on the assignment being presented produces responses of how they will do it in a minute or at home. Being asked to pay attention to the main teacher presenting beautifully organized lessons and instructions in the front of the class is met with evasion and continued side discussions and then outbursts about being ridden too hard. Absenteeism is rampant, especially among the children doing badly. Sometimes if one asks about someone’s not being there that day one learns that they have been suspended or are in “lockup.”
I can see how the works that Virginia Common Core and Standards of Learning demand be covered - Julius Ceasar, Romeo and Juliet, The Odyssey - may be beyond these students. (Though my late mother, born in 1933, left behind Shakespeare books that she used in her rural Tennessee high school, full of elaborate notes.) Many of the students ironically are like Penelope in the Odyssey, weaving a burial shroud for her husband Odysseus by day, unraveling it at night, and telling her house full of ravenous suitors that she cannot pick one of them until she finishes the shroud. These students are almost as clever in finding ways not to learn and not to do any work.
And so perhaps one solution would be to give them what they want: no school. Why not legalize child labor, down to a certain age (12? 14?) at least for illegal immigrants or their children? Why not end mandatory public schooling at least for illegal immigrants and their children? Let them go to work. For a year, or two, or four. And then see if perhaps they would like to try education, at least a G.E.D. or a “career center” plan of vocational instruction.
Currently these teens are simply a waste of space and money and resources. They disrupt the school. They set bad examples for better students. They drag things down. They depress teachers. Let them go. Let childhood end.
A version of this ran last week at SpliceToday.