The Youth Of Today. Sigh.

May 29th, 2007

Here’s an interesting high school story from Colorado, about a teenage high chool yearbook editor, Hannah Fredrickson, who dared to peel back the layers of hypocrisy practiced by parents and schools about what actually goes on among average young people at the average American high school (and British too for that matter).

Colo. Prep Yearbook Shows Alcohol, Pot
High School Yearbook Includes Photos of Colorado Students Drinking, Smoking Marijuana
The Associated Press

CONIFER, Colo.

Most likely to succeed? Try most likely to go to jail.

The yearbook for the high school in this mountain town near Denver published photos of students smoking marijuana and drinking beer, drawing the ire of parents and administrators.

Hannah Fredrickson, the senior who served as yearbook editor, said she regrets not balancing the yearbook pictures of teenagers smoking pot with pictures of non-drug users. She also said she is sorry about not warning her principal.

But she said people need to know what is going on.

“The point of the yearbook entirely is to cover what happens in the year,” she told KCNC TV. “You’d be surprised at how many children at Conifer High School smoke pot. I wanted to push more for a deeper side of Conifer, which, for a lot of students, is drugs and alcohol,”

The Jefferson County School District began an investigation after parents complained, and the school has offered to take back yearbooks and refund payments.

“There were some things … that I don’t feel that I can defend. There were some pictures and quotes that I do believe have crossed the line,” acting Principal Pat Termin said.

Students were shown holding a bong and exhaling smoke in a section labeled “Health addicted addictions.” Three female students all identified are shown holding citations for underage drinking in a second titled “Regrets and mistakes.”

More…

It’s a small local kerfuffle, but to me it says so much about about some parents’ desperation to preserve appearances at all costs and about how values are skewed when education becomes just a matter of test scores.

On the other hand ,I may be enirely wrong, and this is just a case of the unpopular girl with a case of sour grapes having a go at her imagined enemies: Most probably it’s a mixture of the two - but for the purposes of this post I’m running with the first interpretation, because it’s illustrates something for me about the way our common parenting cuilture is going.

For some parents their child’s performance is all about them and the front they put up to the world and I’ve been as guilty of that as any other parent at times. But for some it’s my child, right or wrong,no matter how wrong - and they’ll defend anything they do, anything at all, cover up anything, lie cheat and steal, just as long as their child gets the prizes.

They forget that their child couldhave 15 A levels or a perfect grade point average and still be a complete and utter asshole and a disgrace to humanity.

These kinds of parents either don’t know or don’t care to know what their children are actually doing so much as they care about how it looks. Many preach abstinence from sex and subtsances to their children. while indulging themselves in priivate and choosing not to see what their own associates and friends do. The most pious often turn out to be the least trustworthy.

This style pf parenting tends to make kids into suckups who are paragons of virtue to Mom & Dad but evil little terrors on their own time and we all know at least one of those either from school or from our own circle.

The deliberate blind-eyeism of parents can go very, very far - remember the OC rape case? The friends and families of the brutal high-school rapists who stalked, harassed and attacked their young female accuser for daring to speak out, not only about the rape but the school culture surrounding it?

Some parents will go as far as it takes, even murder, rather than have their little darlings’ exploits exposed and themselves thought of as ‘bad parents’. But, but…. they’re mostly middle class and white why should they ever have to face any consequences for anything? That’s for the little people!

I’m not saying that parental denial doesn’t occur amongst other ethnicities than whites - hardly - but there doesn’t seem to be a whole minor indusrry in covering up youthful misbehaviour and glossing it all over with smiley happyness and shiny going on with any others but the whitebread suburban types, so far as I can tell. Nope, for some high school students in some places it’s entirely different.

The blindeyeism shown by the white townsfolk of Jena, Luisiania to the actions of their cvhildren is a more extreme version of that shown by the Colorado parents and the yearbook, but both are aspects of the same blinkered attitude.

it’s an attitude that leads to the clamping down on sex and drug education classes, for instance, Rather ignorance than unpleasantness or difficulty : which leads to situations where half a graduating class has gonorrhea and the other a Ritalin habit, and a valedictorian who’s a ‘roid-fuelled mean-minded sadistic bully. But say so in the yearbook? Heaven forbid. Only think how bad that would look in church!

We’ve seen recently how these parents’ attitudes play out, with the whole Dr Laura and Deryk saga, and there are who knows how many others just like young Deryk, brought up in deliberate ignorance, coddled and protected by money and parental hypocrisy their whole lives.

Told they’re wonderful, talented and exceptional even if they’re dumb as bag of hammers and ugly with it, they’ve never actually had to face the consequences of their actions (I’m not talking about exposing under-18’s criminal records, they’re kids and deserve a second chance) because Mom or Dad can either put them in rehab, or find Jeebus again, or basically buy their way out of it.

Kids like these are now making their way into adult life and the public sphere and affecting the rest of us - in fact they’re here already, with predictable consequences.

There is a culture of casual, uninformed drugtaking, disrespect for women and violence in some schools and they’re not the usual easy scapegoats for white America and Middle England, underprivileged urban, ie black, schools - they’re supposedly nice, civilised suburban ‘learning centres’.

In the name of shielding their children and themselves from dealing with the “ickyness” of drugs, crime and sex ( “But we’re Christians! We don’t do that!” - Oh yes you do…) some parents and schools have inculcated the very things they wanted to avoid. You know how it is with kids: what you try and shield them from they run towards even more and by being hardline you don’t stop them, you just make them hypocrites.

Rather than acknowledge that violence, sex and drugs are real things their children have to deal with, helping their children become decent young adults by paying more taxes to fund sensible support and social education programmes for them, many parents are just desperate to paper it all over and pretend isn’t happening. But it is, and it has consequnces.

You might raise your eyebrows at me making the connection between a few high school skids in Colorado and the torturers of Abu Ghraib but the blindeyeism of a significant number of parents is rather like Bushco’s insistence that those torturers at Abu Ghraib were an aberration, outside the mainstream and condemned by the vast majority.

No they weren’t. Neither are the regular school shootings, assaults and rapes that occur to regularly for it to be coincidental. Not only that the polls in favour of torture said loud and clear that violence is an approved and accepted part of the culture. Schools are part of the culture too.

But public propensity to turn a blind eye to ugliness (”Ew, icky!”) to the likes of Abu Ghraib, school bullying and violence,. drugs and bade sex education, to pretend there’s no culture of rampant sexism, crime and violence, all in the name of putting up a good front to the world and not rocking the boat: it’s that that’s allowed Bushco to get away with it for so long.

USA uber alles, my child uber alles, nothing else matters.

Kids see this hypocrisy - do as say, not as we do, never have to deal with consequences, you can get away with anything if you have enough power - and become cynical. They learn that fighting, liying, cheating and and stealing is the way to get on in life and the worst of it is they’re not wrong.

So good for Hannah Fredrickson, in a way - I hope she continues her campaign to espose rank hypocrisy, (if that’s what she’s doing, rather than just on a revenge trip), right on into the mainstream media through the government.

That’s if some disgruntled teen’s mother doesn’rt shoor her first for ruining baby boy’s chances of the Presidency by mentioning his addictions and his driving convictions.

Oooh, no, silly me. Minor stuff like that’s no bar to high office these days.

Categories: Parenting, Wingnuts

1 Comment

More thoughs on the Toronto shootings and the roundup of gangsters « littleblackduck June 15th, 2007
[...] One of the biggest problems with parents, it appears to be, and as outlined in this Globe and Mail article, is flat-out denial. At least in those instances though, the parents were not involved in criminal activity themselves. However, according to one gang expert, Michael Chettleburgh, some of the gang members involved in recruiting younger members will often be uncles, cousins or older siblings. In such cases it makes it even harder for parents to do much apart from turn a blind eye. Familial ties and a not-misplaced sense of loyalty will often deter people from seeking outside help even if they were to want to. As this blog points out, blind not-my-kid parenting is not just a problem with poor families either. Where income disparity really does rear its ugly head is when the poor kids get rounded up.� The rich ones can get access to better lawyers and hide in ‘American Beauty’-land. [...]