‘Top school problems’ are myths

Mr. Males challenges the notion that school problems were simpler in 1940.

A well-known “study” comparing the “top school problems” of 1940 and 1987 — pinned to many bulletin boards, reprinted in magazines and journals, brought up in discussions about how troubled students and the public schools are today — has received a great deal of publicity. As reprinted in “Dear Abby” (18 March 1988), the so-called study states that, in 1940, the worst school problems were (in order) talking, gum chewing, making noise, running in the halls, getting out of line, wearing improper clothing, and not putting paper in wastebaskets. Today, it says, top school problems are drug abuse, alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault.

There has been a thunderous demand for this ominous “study,” with thousands of inquiries being made to a variety of supposed sources: the California Department of Education, the Phi Delta Kappan, and the Fullerton, California, police department.

There’s only one problem: there is no such study. Neither the California Department of Education nor the Kappan (which publishes an annual survey on public perceptions that bears no resemblance to the ”top school problems” on this phantom list) ever conducted such a study. The only source for the dubious information appears to be a Fullerton police officer, now retired, whose supervisor knows “little to nothing” about it. In response to a 1991 inquiry, Sgt. Glenn Deveney, community services supervisor for the Fullerton police department, stated that this “study” was really one officer’s “informal survey” at a 1987 education conference.

Those who were old enough to do so were evidently asked to think back 50 years and to list what they thought were the worst school problems in 1940. Deveney said that the respondents may have believed what they were relating, but the accuracy of their memories is another matter. Rather than being a valid study, Deveney notes, it was “really more of a trip down memory lane.”

More correctly, fantasy lane. In 1940, 49% of all young people did not graduate from high school. The fundamental absurdity of comparing 1940 and 1987 is that “problem” students were often excluded from the “better public schools” back then.

If the public schools of 1992 kicked out pregnant girls; warehoused handicapped, learning-disabled, and troubled students away from public view; and excluded three-fourths of all minority and low-income students, we’d have a fair facsimile of the “public” high schools of 1940.

If the public schools of 1992 kicked out pregnant girls; warehoused handicapped, learning-disabled, and troubled students away from public view; and excluded three-fourths of all minority and low-income students, we’d have a fair facsimile of the “public” high schools of 1940.

Vital statistics and official reports show that, however halcyon those times are in our memories, 1940 was anything but “the good old days.” In 1940, 37,000 teenagers died from violence or disease (triple the teenage death rate in 1987); 10,000 teens died from suicides, homicides, and accidents; 335,000 teenage girls gave birth. The U.S. Public Health Service estimated four million cases of venereal disease annually; medical experts estimated 680,000 to one million illegal abortions every year. The government and the popular media warned of skyrocketing teenage drug and alcohol abuse, drunken driving deaths reached an all-time high, the FBI reported that the average age of criminals was 19, and eight teenagers (all of them black) were executed.

If educators of 1940 (or a few educators of 1987 striving to recall 1940) really thought that talking and gum chewing were the worst problems facing students, they were simply reflecting the ignorance of that segregated, stratified era — especially ignorance regarding the millions of young people not enrolled in school and regarding conditions on the “other side of the tracks.”

Today more than 90% of all teenagers are enrolled in high school, and 75% graduate on time, with the largest gains coming among stressed populations: minorities, students with handicaps and disabilities, pregnant girls, low-income youngsters. Illiteracy today is at one-fifth its 1940 level. College enrollment has quadrupled.

Student health is much improved; the life expectancy of a 16-year-old is six years longer today than it was in 1940. Those problems that have worsened among young people (and many only appear worse because of today’s better reporting and recognition) have also worsened among adults.

Curiously, many people seem eager to believe that today’s youths represent the worst in history and that today’s public schools are cauldrons of unheard-of violence and crime. Sgt. Deveney reports that the Fullerton police department’s telephone “has been ringing off the hook about this thing for three years. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Of the thousands of inquiries about the “study,” many have come from representatives of religious groups, and none have raised questions about the comparison’s accuracy, Deveney said.

Deploring the “troubled youth of today” and laying blame on the public schools is nothing new.

Deploring the “troubled youth of today” and laying blame on the public schools is also nothing new. For example, in 1913 the noted psychologist Lewis Terman lamented the rapid rise in “child suicides” (which he estimated at 2,000 per year) and noted that schools were “bitterly assailed as the causal agent.” The editors of Literary Digest cited America’s “appalling rate of child suicide” in 1921 and noted that many blame “education in schools” that puts “life on a purely utilitarian basis.”

Similar criticism was voiced by American Magazine in 1936 in a landmark report citing the public high schools’ role as a major cause of that day’s “mass youth problem.” School violence and drug problems were depicted in a series of government docudramas in 1939. The sharp rise in student promiscuity and the decline in “family values” from 1890 to 1940 were bemoaned by textbook authors Hornell Hart and Ella Hart in 1941. In 1953 the chairman of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency attributed widespread drug use and a high rate of violent crimes among youth (immortalized in Richard Brooks’ 1955 classic, Blackboard Jungle) to the failure of the schools to provide discipline, “values,” and “prevention.” The list goes on and on.

Innocent anecdotes and pastoral memories are almost never validated by a tough look at “the good old days.” Problems of young people and schools are openly acknowledged today. Popular but escapist comparisons with a romanticized past do not illustrate new school problems so much as a new awareness that has come with universal education.

Innocent anecdotes and pastoral memories are almost never validated by a tough look at “the good old days.”

The tendency of educators to go along with dire public perceptions is of even more concern. In July 1991 the National Association of State Boards of Education and the American Medical Association released the Code Blue report, which declared an “unprecedented adolescent health crisis,” in which, “for the first time in the history of this country, young people are less healthy and less prepared to take their places in society than were their parents.” Even a casual examination of the much higher rates of natural death, disease, violent death, illiteracy, drug use, pregnancy, and dropping out among youths of the late 1960s and early 1970s shows that this comparison, too, is patently absurd.

In many ways, the supposedly august Code Blue report — which again and again cites incorrect figures, compares incomparable documents (such as incomplete crime reports from 1950 and comprehensive ones from 1985), and consistently omits all contradictory information — does even more damage than the fictitious “Fullerton” study to the larger goals of promoting students’ health and self-esteem and building informed support for resolving educational problems. That officials and the public alike seem willing to accept and perpetuate the myth that young people today are more seriously troubled than those of the past is more a commentary on adult attitudes than on student well-being.

Citation: Males, M. (1992). ‘Top school problems’ are myths. Phi Delta Kappan, 74 (1), 54-55.