Dear reader,
This post is to notify you about something every self respecting decent person in our country should be acutely aware of. I remember my high school years clearly. I remember being yelled at for various breached and misdeeds. Things such as walking through the halls, eating my lunch on the lawn. Leaving class before the bell rang, when everyone was standing around waiting for the bell to ring. I was continually made aware of how little respect the authorities of the school had for any of the children going there. But this post is not to tell you about me. It is to talk about an attitude in America that treats children, as a recent article in Mother Jones Magazine puts it, as enemy combatants, reminiscent of Abu Graihb or Guantanamo Bay. It is not incidental that the United States public school system is based directly on the prison system, nor that for-profit prisons are now one of the most lucrative businesses in the world.
A School in Eastern Massachusetts called the Judge Rottenberg Center is the most extreme case of this idea. The 'school' boasts itself as a radical behavior modification program for children with extreme problems. Initially, the school was tailored to severely autistic and mentally retarded children. In recent years, it has expanded its program to include poorly behaved and violent teens who are not accepted anywhere else. These teens are usually from the inner cities, and thought the actual racial breakdown is unknown to me, the students I have heard referred to all have names like Luigi, Rolando, etc. This also, has never been incidental iwhen we look at mistreated people, people who get the brunt of the 'education system.'
The Rottenberg Center's methods are based generally on the idea of Pavlov's Dogs. Combinations of positive reinforcement and negative, (usually negative in Rottenberg's case) are used to modify inappropriate behaviors. The school uses varied methods to turn children away from bad behaviors: electric shocks, 'white noise helmets', pinching, muscle squeezing, strapping them face down on a bed, spread eagle for hours, and in extreme cases, days at a time, depriving them of proper meals, and forcing them to inhale ammonia fumes when they act inappropriately. The definition of inappropriate action is loose at Rottenberg. It can range anywhere from violent outbursts, to asking for a tissue. Mentally retarded students are inflicted with acute pain for chewing on themselves, banging their heads against the floor, etc. Nagging and complaining often result in acute electrocutions that leave former students with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Not uncommonly, the school's graduates wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweats, dreaming about electricity coursing through their bodies. While the school bills itself as a place for psychological treatment, yet to this day, none to the Rottenberg school's treatments have been proven by science to work at all. No psychotherapy is administered to it's students. They are not allowed to speak about their experience, express their emotions, or socialize with other students.
The same tactics are applied to their staff, who can be fired for failing to electrocute a student when the school's mastermind, Matthew Israel, has deemed it necessary. Staff are prohibited from socializing at work or expressing concern to one another about the treatment, and are monitored at all times by video camera to ensure their compliance. At times, one staff member will be forced to ask another about misgivings, in front of a video camera, and if the confronted employee does not respond as they should, they are immediately fired.
There have been several incidents which have led to the school being embroiled in lawsuits; in one case, a student who was strapped face down on a bed for days, while wearing a 'white noise helmet' and being repeatedly electrocuted, died after having a seizure. In another case, a student began screaming and complaining, and as a result was repeatedly pinched on the soles of her feet and forced to inhale ammonia to stop her negative outbursts. They later found that the students outbursts were caused by pain she was suffering from a perforated stomach, which she died of later that evening. In one case, a student was ordered to place his hands on a paddle, and when he removed his hands was automatically electrocuted once every second that his hands were not in contact with the paddle. He was shocked a total of about 5000 times that day. The school's founder and director, Dr. Matthew Israel, noted that "in that case, the treatment didn't seem to be working."
These lawsuits against the school have brought not litigation against the use of painful and inhumane punishments. Possibly coinciding with the school's tremendous profitability (it costs the state $220,000.00 a year per student) the school's lawyers have each time had charges thrown out, and in one case, the Chair of the Massachusetts board of Special Education lost his job for bringing the charges at all.
The Rottenberg school, while advertising itself to parents as place to treat their children psychologically, has no Therapy program for the students. Beyond this, there is no investigation into the specific causes of each students misbehavior, into the events in their past which might trigger them to act out violently, and all in all the schools therapy program is one-size fits all. One graduate later found himself in jail for drug abuse, and noted that jail was a walk in the park by comparison to the Rottenberg School. Yet Matthew Israel maintains that a part of his interest is to create a Utopian society. In my view, it would not be to rash to say that someone should modify Matthew Israel's beavior with a radical new treatment: life deprivation.
For more information
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock.html
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