The Unrest of Today is Linked to the Social Experiments of the Past

Beginning at around the age of 12 or 13, peer group begins to take over from the parents as the major influencer in the lives of children. It is a period of experimentation and testing of rules. It is natural and the same type of behavior can be found in herd animals such as elk and buffalo where the adolescents, especially males, leave the herd and gather together on their own. 

When I was a high school band director, I understood that this was a natural tendency and became very good at recruiting 6th graders to join my band! I also understood that it is super important to have rules. Kids are going to experiment, and it is better to have clear-cut and unambiguous rules with clearly spelled out and consistently delivered consequences. The kids are going to test the rules and the teacher or the parent had better be prepared to follow through with consequences. Otherwise, all hell will break loose!

What we are seeing today is a consequence of the Great Society experiment of the '60s and '70s. This country did have very real problems and the Great Society was an honest attempt to solve those problems. But much of what followed completely ignored the nature of how children and adults grow and learn.

What happened was that rules went flying out of the schoolhouse window! Children (and some parents) quickly learned that schools would not enforce consequences for breaking the rules. The schools were too frightened of lawsuits to do so. They still said that they had rules, but in practice, they were frightened to enforce the rules.

At the time, I was teaching high school in Austin, Texas. The school where I taught tried to solve the dilemma by having one set of rules with two sets of consequences: one set for white kids; and a different unstated set for black kids. Clearly, that did not work! What had been one of the top schools in the district quickly devolved into an educational cesspool.

And my school was not unique. That sort of thing happened all over the country. School districts and officials that are more concerned with politics than they are with education became the norm in education. They were pushed into it by a legal system that did not understand how and why education works, and they were aided and abetted by the colleges where future teachers are trained by professors who would never be successful if they were teaching in a public school classroom.

Today, we are seeing the results of the Great Society as it has expanded past education and into our culture at large. City mayors and state governors who grew up learning that rules have no consequences are now in the same position that educators were in during the 70s, and they are making the same mistakes again. The problem is that the consequences are much greater now than they were in 1970.
The consequences for tossing a firebomb or taunting armed police can, and eventually will be much greater than the consequences for cutting a high-school class. But for these people, "consequence" is an abstract term and they discount it as imaginary. That is what they learned in school and from their enlightened parents.

So they keep pushing the rules until someone comes up against the hard wall of reality - someone dies! Then our enlightened politicians and media immediately lay blame, not on the person or persons who instigated the activity that led to the death, but upon the person or persons that administered the prescribed penalty for breaking the rule!

The schools pushed administering consequences off to the police. Now the police are in the same situation that the schools were in. It is because we ignored the fact that when God, or Nature if you prefer, sets a rule, He is not worried about lawsuits or what we and our neighbors may think. God enforces his rules! Parents and schools should teach this to children so that children will not end up lying dead in an alleyway for doing something stupid.