Tag Archives: television

Have Threats of School Violence Become Unremarkable?

politics of education, school safety, , , ,
Police at Lyman Moore School
Police at Lyman Moore School

While looking for something else on the web, I stumbled across an article from last week in one of the little local free newspapers that cover the region. It seems that one of the three Middle Schools in town had an incident last Monday where someone found some sort of note in a bathroom threatening mass killings. The school locked down the entire building and the police came in and searched every locker and every bag while students — who were not allowed to use cell phones or make calls home — were kept in whatever classroom they were in at the start of it all.

When parents started getting wind of this, many of them naturally went to the school, where they were greeted by police wielding assault rifles keeping everyone away. Some hours later, they were allowed to see their children.

The fact that this school was locked down and they brought in police to facilitate searches is one thing, but the remarkable thing to me is that the little local newspaper is the only place in print that seems to have covered it. A couple of the local tv stations did stories on it, but our regional newspaper did not cover it, our local NPR station did not cover it, and the School Department blog does not mention it. (I searched by the school’s name and went through the week’s news at each site and was unable to find any mention of the event.) The news sites that did cover it did so only when it was taking place, and I have been unable to find any follow up about what happened or what their investigation turned up. Was it a ‘prank’? Was there a real threat?

Have school lockdowns become so common that they are no longer newsworthy to the bigger news sources? I fear that we are moving towards a world where these sorts of things are just part of the common social fabric, not because inquiring minds want to know, but because these events directly impact the sense of community in those schools, and how much students can concentrate on their studies and learn in those environments. Students who attend a school where lockdowns are routine and unremarkable will necessarily learn to distrust their community. And what happens when our culture at large is filled with people who grew up with that sort of distrust?

The ethics of TV ‘experiments’

advertising, language in the classroom, managing behavior, media literacy, school safety, teaching cultural competencies, Uncategorized, whites navigating racism, , ,

Macon, over at Stuff White People Do, picked up on the ABC show “What Would You Do?“, specifically an episode on racism in public settings and how people respond. It is in some ways reminiscent of some early ‘instigation research’ where researchers purposefully instigated some conflict to see how people would respond.

Macon tackles the issues of racism and white apathy, so I’ll largely leave that aspect to him, even though it is germane to this blog also.

Beyond that obvious issue, however, the concerns I immediately hit upon were those of human subjects in a research setting. All research that takes place which involves human subjects must be approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB). IRBs function under the Office of Human Research Protection (OHRP), which basically is checking to be sure that researchers are not doing anything unethical, as in the classic Tuskegee Siphilis Case (which ran from 1932 to 1972 and, interestingly, the last widow to receive reparation payments after the Tuskegee case just died about two months ago). So if all research has to have oversight when human subjects are used, several questions arise about what the host of this TV program describes as an “experiment”:

  • Who approved this ‘study’? Does it have any IRB oversight?
  • Have they even thought about informed consent? Doubtful considering how upset several participants were.
  • What about debriefing? Every time I watched the film crew follow one set of people out on the street to do a post-interview, I wondered about all the other customers who were not interviewed and debriefed and who just slipped out the side and wandered off into their lives, unaware that what they’d been through was a con.
  • What about the effect on people of color? This ‘experiment’ is ostensibly to see how people would (or would not) respond, but people of color have no need to have this sort of store-front racism shoved in their faces since they are, in fact, living this reality every day.
  • Were participants compensated for their time, their discomfort, their trauma?

One of the questions IRBs consider when looking at a potential piece of research that involves human subjects is whether it stands to increase knowledge. Aside from the fact that most all people of color can testify that this is the reality in stores everywhere, upscale or down, there is also quite a lot of research that shows this as well. So what do we learn from ABC’s ‘experiment’ that we didn’t know before?

Another IRB question is whether a given piece of research does harm. Watching the responses by some participants (and only the ones that they chose to show, even thought the voiceover cites ‘more than a hundred’ people they filmed), I think it’s fair to say that, yes, it did harm: many people were really upset with what they witnessed. And what about the people who left the store but didn’t get caught by the film crew…. many of them may be left with the idea that this behavior is acceptable and appropriate, especially by someone with authority (the store security guard), because that’s what the silence of bystanders encourages.

And by silence of bystanders, I mean both the white people in the store who said and did nothing, but also those people accosted by the film crew who said and did nothing to stop this sham.

Unfortunately, the silence of bystanders is one of the strongest reinforcements for bullies, domestic and dating violence perpetrators, and people everywhere who would hold power over others.

This is the reason why all schools should be talking about talking: what do you say or do when you see or hear bullying? If we’re not talking about it in schools, youths grow up to be the callous adults who say nothing in episodes of “What Would You Do?”, as well as in the pre-production meetings of shows like “What Would You Do?”, as well as in their day-to-day lives.

So how are we talking to youth about their moral and ethical responsibilities to each other in our culture?

Terror Toys

Toys and Play, , ,

So what do our children see and play with in today’s world? On TV, there is a Homeland Security reality program on ABC (yep, Disney owns that one too). Propaganda? The executive producer says it pretty clearly:

“I love investigative journalism, but that’s not what we’re doing,” he told The Reporter. “This show is heartening. It makes you feel good about these people who are doing their best to protect us.”

Well, if you were worried about all the guns kids play with, as they imitate superheros, Power Rangers, and other fictional characters, perhaps those, as fantasy, aren’t the worst things to worry about in playland. There are more realistic toys they could be playing with:

  • Lego has a Police Command Center, for which the description states “the police are keeping a watch from their mobile command center!”
  • Playmobil has both a Security Checkpoint with walk-through metal-detector, guard with a wand-metal-detector, and an x-ray machine for bags and luggage, as well as a Police Checkpoint, in which officers are “also equipped with a map, stop sign, and pistols.”

One interesting note here is that the Police Command Center has comments about how much their kids loved the toy and played with it for extended times. No irony there. But both of the other toys are full of ironic reviews that include comments the following. So where is the line between what is acceptable violence and what is not? Different for each of us I imagine….

  • This playset is one of the best purchases I have made for my three-year-old. In the past, when we have been stopped at roadblocks, or when during one of Daddy’s arrests, he would start crying uncontrollably. Now, after playing with this for the past several months, he is perfectly docile.
  • What better way to condition your kids to accept the police state and patriot act? Last thing one needs is your kids growing up to question authority!
  • Unfortunately, this product falls short …. There’s no brown figure for little Josh to profile, taser, and detain? Where are all the frightened plastic Heartlanders pointing at the brown figure as they whisper “terrorist?” Where are the hippy couple figures being denied boarding passes?

And if you really want to give the full effect to your kids, there are also SWAT teams and Police Stations with Jail Cells. One poster even suggested using their electric fencing in the Cow Pasture to elicit the full Guantanamo feel.

Here in Maine, where there are lots of guns, some parents vet the homes of their kids’ friends before allowing play-dates: “Are there guns in the house? Are they locked up? Loaded? Are kids taught gun safety?” Do we also ask about what sort of toys the kids play with? “Does your child play with guns?” A friend of mine has pointed out that differences in child-rearing come between friends much more than anything else in our lives. If your oldest, dearest friend allows his or her children to play with toys like these, do you allow your child to go play with them? Does your kids’ daycare facility or school prohibit toy guns? What about play guns, like using fingers?

As Lucinda Marshall says over on Feminist Peace Network in a blog post on these toys:

As difficult as it sometimes seemed to raise sons during the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Power Ranger years, clearly teaching children the difference between right and wrong has  become far more challenging as the toys and games pitched at them become blatant police state propaganda.

h/t to Alternet, which carried Lucinda’s post.

Does that darn teevee reflect our culture?

politics of education, teaching cultural competencies, ,

The January issue of Harper’s Magazine, which has been out several weeks, has just made it to the top of my magazine pile. The delightful Harper’s Index, which routinely shows about 40 factoids that reflect in various ways our current culture, is, for this issue nearly trebled in size. (Harper’s is worth the subscription for the Index alone, fwiw.)

In this Index, two statistics jumped out at me about the “number of incidents of torture on prime-time network TV shows”:

From 1995 to 2002: 110

From 2002 to 2007: 897

These are the Bush Doctrine formative years, with Donald Rumsfeld at the Department of Defense (01-06) (and Paul Wolfowitz as his Deputy (01-05)), and the rise of Extraordinary Rendition and Guantanamo detainees and U.S. use of torture and U.S. citizens willing to give up rights to perceive some semblance of safety.

Of course, then, US policy affects how we treat each other as human beings.

Not necessarily because people are imitating what they see on TV, but because people come to feel that violence is a permissible response, because people come to feel that they cannot and should not trust each other, because people come to feel that we are not all working for the collective good, but for the good of ‘our people’. But how does one define ‘our people’? US citizens? Republicans? Men? White people?

So then: does TV cause us to be violent, or is it part of that big cultural biofeedback loop where US policy affects cultural views which affect TV portrayals which affect cultural views which affect US policy?

We must be mindful of these forces when we teach civics and history, as well as how we talk about interpersonal relationships. Our politicians are certainly aware of how to harness these forces to change public perception as a fore-runner to changing policy. But it is dangerous to teach students that policy changes happen in a vacuum, just as it is dangerous to allow students to assume that just because they see it on TV, that is how people interact with each other. One of the most important things we can teach students is critical thinking and the ability to question information and form their own opinions, right along with being respectful of others and trying to be aware of what others’ experiences are.