This worries me, because we can't fix a problem we don't have the courage to really acknowledge. Our schoolrooms are still full of great kids, sweet-natured and teacher-loving, but these days, every class has an ever increasing number of students carrying major psychological damage. I'll never forget a class of freshmen I had one year. Of the 27 students in that section, nine were seriously mentally disturbed. I know a teacher who's trying to deal with a student who has already thrown rocks through the principal's office windows and is currently threatening to burn down the school with a flamethrower. He's six years old.
It's been ten years since I've been in a public school classroom, but even back then, the horrible parenting I was seeing had me worried. I'll never forget the young man who chose to write his narrative essay about the night his father tried to strangle him. He was nervous about testifying at his dad's trial. Or the young woman whose father was willing to pay for the braces she needed as long as she would bring home friends for him to have sex with. And the young man, fatherless and troubled, who brought a hatchet to school to use on me if I made him give a speech. His terrified mother's warning saved both my life and his.