The material pains that threaten, and when needed materialize, in
the institutional practices of schooling belong to a complex set of
receding layers, in ever long-term perspectives (threats, and promises,
are irrealis, about some possible world).
Punishment and reward, threat and treat/promise, are of a piece.
In the longer-term perspective the threat, and the real pain, are
those of poverty, homelessness, vulnerability to every danger and
pain for the unpropertied, the unprotected, without resource or
recourse: the spectre of "failure", of the "gutter". Unemployment
in an ungenerous society. Not even food stamps or welfare checks
because you have an outstanding police warrant because you feared
to appear in court on the appointed day to answer a charge by
a police officer who had to justify an unjustified arrest or
assault in his report, feared to return to lock-up, feared a
jail where you'd be beaten, raped, humiliated by either guards
or inmates or both ... These are not rare cases, but astoundingly
common ones for males under 30, especially if African-American
or some Spanish-speaking groups, and school failures (in the sense
of having failed / been failed by school). ... No safe place to
sleep, to shower, exploitation by the agents of the institutions
which we middle-class people believe are there as a safety net
to prevent the horrors of children turning to prostitution to
save their lives, of formerly gentle souls turning to theft, to
more violent crimes, to drugs of relief and thence to crimes to
support habits ...
These are the horror stories of another world to most of us,
but they are close enough to the lived experience of many
'students' to strike terror (a terror refused and denied by
necessity, but nonetheless real). And they are played up
enough in the middle-class media, and rumored around enough
in middle-class youth culture, and advertised in popular rap
music, kept visible enough as a warning to those whose lives
are not so close to the horror, and who want to keep it that
way. What happens to the middle-class child thrown out of
his (usually) only possible home because he dared to be gay
openly? or the child who defies, or resists incestual abuse,
and prefers to be beaten in silence rather than risk the worse
imagined, and real horror of the streets?
What are the nightmares of children really about? universal
archetypes of separation and castration and incest? or real
fears of ejection, laceration, and abuse? And does it take
participation in or on the fringes of the culture of poverty
or the culture of cruelty to raise these fears, or are
conscious and unconscious processes working in a milieu of
even distant, but only contingently distant, horror enough?
Children, teenagers, young adults ... driven, suicidal,
anorexic, fearful of failure ... why? because they fear they
will not live up to an ego ideal or a parental wish? or
because the dark shadows of our Enforcers fall over their
sleeping and waking?
Responses to such fears and real horrors are complex and
paradoxical. The response may not look like fear; indeed
we hope it will not. Often it defies the fear and the power,
refuses to try, to care about success/failure in the terms
dictated by an adult world of teachers, parents, counselors,
... What could so powerfully drive young people to apparently
act exactly counter to their obvious self-interest as they
do in 'resisting' schooling, parental values, and turning
to almost-certainly dead-end alternatives? Flirting with
a well-known and feared danger is the least of these. The
more complex responses we see, I think, all around us. And,
if parents, we too fear on their behalf, sometimes without
quite letting ourselves speak the name of what we fear
for them. We too are enmeshed in the system of control,
driven by fear to be more conservative for their sake.
And the treats? the rewards of success? They are trivial
inverses, never so grand in their superficial desirability
as to match the far greater horror of the opposites they
subtly suggest. Wealth is not necessary to keep us relatively
safe from excesses of pain, but poverty/failure is quite
enough to shatter us in them. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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