Blogger Interested Participant casts a cold eye over a high-school program to teach kids "increased awareness of homelessness":
Juniors and seniors at Roger Bacon High School will build their own Shantytown on Friday out of cardboard boxes at the school.
The cardboard town will open for the fourth consecutive year at 6 p.m. and will be torn down at 8 a.m. Saturday. Students will sleep in boxes with only the clothes on their back to increase awareness of homeless people and issues they face.
Presentations will be made by Betty Kelo, a resident of the Drop In Center, and Steve Sunderland of the Peace Village. There will be candlelight prayer vigils, a soup kitchen and a performance by the Bucket Boyz.
This reminds me of a rant by (I think) P.J. O'Rourke, in which he said he didn't understand why people felt they had to sleep in a box to understand that being homeless can be uncomfortable and upsetting. He also didn't get why that "understanding" had anything to do with actually alleviating the problems of homeless people.
I tend to agree; working in a soup kitchen is a helpful act, while sleeping in a cardboard box just to "experience" homelessness is not. This type of faux "experiencing" is as condescending as it is useless.
Interested Participant had some questions:
One other aspect of the "awareness program" needs to be addressed. Will their force-fed "awareness" include knowledge concerning the demographics of homeless people? Will they be told that homeless figures are customarily unverifiable and therefore consistently exaggerated? Will they be told that the greatest proportion of homeless people are substance abusers that eschew rehabilitation? I strongly suspect that these high school students will be inculcated with a "selective liberal awareness."
I say there's nothing wrong with teaching kids to have compassion for those less fortunate, but bypass the silly "experiencing" tasks and give them the facts, so that they can decide whether they want to spend their time working in soup kitchens or drug rehab centers.
Update: As Joanne Jacobs notes, this craze for "experiencing" or "feeling" over knowing doesn't stop with social causes; dig this high school history class that is all about "feeling" what it's like to be at war:
Social studies teachers across the country routinely try to teach their students "what things were like" at particular times and places in history. Many such lessons, however, are a waste of time. The Detroit News, for example, recently praised a teacher who built a life-size replica of a World War I trench with his students to help give them " a realistic feeling of being a [Word War I] soldier." Sixteen-year-old Jessica Harbin, faithfully parroting the party line, told the News that once students see the trench, "there will be a great impact in their understanding and knowledge of war." No word on whether rats, mud, influenza, dead bodies, and post-war mental problems are part of the lesson.
Um, yeah. All it takes is to see a life-size trench to really "impact" one's "understanding and knowledge of war." Why do I have the feeling that the "knowledge" the teacher was trying to convey was "War is bad," or "War is never necessary"?
Funny, but I always thought that an educated person was one who did not have to personally experience homelessness in order to research methods of reducing it, or one who did not have to fight in a war to understand the complicated, dangerous, and sometimes necessary nature of it. We seem to have made a 180 in public education; now "education" means you have "felt" something about a topic, rather than thought about it, or learned facts about it.
What's worse, these faux "experiences," which are not meant to generate anything except vaguely-focused emotional reactions, are probably not doing even that. You want kids to "understand" or "experience" war? Then take them to Auschwitz, or Pearl Harbor, or Ground Zero. I mean, if we're going to "teach" history by evoking emotion, let's at least unleash the real thing on them.
Posted by kswygert at November 5, 2003 02:49 PM