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America's Children: Our Threatened Future
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14761 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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11 / 1988 |
5,950 Words |
| Author
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Karl Zinsmeister
Karl Zinsmeister is a an Ithaca, New York, writer and adjunct
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is currently
at work on a book about the state of American families for
HarperCollins publishers. |
Last May in Washington, D.C., where I live, a little-noticed event took place that struck me as deeply telling about the current condition of children within our culture. As a gesture toward public education, D.C. mayor Marion Barry substitute-taught an eighth-grade science class for gifted students at Fletcher-Johnson Elementary School in southeast Washington. The mayor holds two degrees in chemistry, and in this particular class, he was leading a discussion on the food chain.
As talk turned to predation, then cannibalism, the mayor posed a question. "We don't eat other people, we just kill other human beings. We shoot them, cut them. How many of you," Barry asked pupils, "know somebody who's been killed?"
There were nineteen students in the class. Fourteen hands shot up. The teacher went around the room: How were they killed? "Shot." "Hit by truck." "Stabbed." "Shot." "Shot." "Drugs." "Shot." The conversation quickly passed to another subject.
Remember, these were thirteen-year-old children. And given that they were in the gifted-and-talented class, you may assume they were from atypically privileged backgrounds when compared with most of their classmates.
On a day when the major news stories concerned Gary Hart's personal life and Robert McFarlane's testimony about what may have happened to $3.8 million in errant Iran-Contra proceeds, this revelation that murder, overdoses, and mayhem have become a routine part of urban life for our young was barely reported and not commented upon at all. Apparently it neither surprises nor unduly disturbs us.
Urban Barbarism
And this is hardly unrepresentative material. In Detroit, 102 youngsters aged sixteen or younger were shot in just the first four months of 1987 in gang and drug wars, nearly all of them by other children. A survey at one Detroit junior high school found that a third of the students had been offered drugs and that two-thirds knew someone their age who was selling them.
Though most Americans are fortunate enough to be able to commute away from these horrors at the end of the working day, we all know such thing are happening. And most of us realize that a substantial minority of our youngest citizens is badly caught up in the carnage. Yet we fail to put an end to
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