Stop Looking Through the Rear View Mirror

I read somewhere recently that there was a survey sent to teachers in 100 different schools all over the country over 70 years ago asking them to list the biggest obstacles they faced in the classroom. Then much more recently someone got the idea to send the exact same survey out to the same 100 schools, asking them the same questions. Of course not all 100 of the schools were still in existence, but the results of the two surveys listed side by side was one of the most depressing things I had seen in a very long time.

The results from the 1950’s survey were as follows:

-Students chewing gum in class.

-Students talking in class.

-Students being too loud and running in the halls.

-Students not doing their homework in a timely manner.

-Students keeping a disorganized and messy desk.

The results from the 2015 survey were:

-Fighting at school

-Drug use at school

-Drug dealing at school

-Gang related violence

-Student assaults on teachers

-Sexual violence

Obviously, much has changed over the past 70 years. But then the author of the piece made an extrapolation from the data suggesting that civilization was on an irreversibly downward spiral, that drug use and violence would continue to become more prevalent by degrees and would ultimately destroy the world.

Ok. Slow down.

I don’t deny the validity of these survey results. Nobody would deny that we live in a much more violent world than we did in the 1950’s. But this notion that civilization is experiencing unprecedented degradation does not square with the facts of history. Has anyone ever heard of…Genghis Khan? Would you rather be alive in 2025 or the Middle Ages? You think health care sucks now, how would you like to have been in your prime in 1776 when the number one cause of death was simple diarrhea? For the vast majority of human history schooling was for only around 10% of the population. And as recently as the 1950’s referenced above the quality of education was massively inferior for African American students. Even today the pathologies described by teachers answering the 2015 survey are vastly different from one school to the next. 

I guess what bothers me about these type of stories is the assumption that we are experiencing uniquely challenging hurdles in a rapidly approaching dystopia that we are powerless to reverse. This is nonsense on stilts. Would I rather have been a teacher in a suburban school in 1955 or a teacher in an inner city school with a 40% truancy rate today? No contest. But I’ve got news for all you doomsayers out there…utopia has never existed. Don’t fall for the tired old saw that everything good in life is in the rear view mirror. Opportunities exist today that were never dreamed of 70 years ago. Yes, much of society seems to have lost its way, but there is nothing new under the sun. There are no obstacles in our way that have not been common to man going back centuries—greed, envy, hatred, lust, pride. We can and we will do better. I look at my two children and I must admit that they are smarter than I was at their age, certainly more empathetic, not nearly as obsessed with making money as I was in my 30’s. From this fact I take comfort.

Greater is he who is in us than he who is in the world.