It started with an adult from the neighborhood who showed up at school for lunch that day, without school permission. The local police officer whose beat was the high school campus did his duty and had the man leave the campus. But the man’s brother was a student there at lunch, and in reaction to the police action, the student pushed the police officer, and pushed again.
To help gain control of the scene, the police officer managed to handcuff the student. I will simply use the Riverside-based daily newspaper The Press-Enterprise on its page-one Saturday, January 28 edition to describe what happened next:
“A large group of students began shouting and surrounding the officer as he was taking the teen into custody.
“Junior Ryan Malachi said the resource officer slammed the student against a wall, setting off some of the fighting. School Dean Alvin Alvin De Johnette and another student got into a physical alteration, said Malachi and other students standing in the parking lot after school was dismissed.
“’He (De Johnette) pulled the shirt over my homeboy’s head. My homeboy swung at Mr. De Johnette,’” Malachi said, but it appears that no one was injured.
“The officer asked for backup as several fights started simultaneously between the students, Moreno Valley Police Lt. Bill Tyler said.
“Junior Shannon Halcromb said about six people ran into his geometry class after police told students to go into a classroom or they would be arrested.
“”There were so many cops. We were standing at the window.We saw a whole bunch of them with stun rods,” Halcromb said.
“Students also recounted motorcycle police riding onto school grounds, roaring through the campus’ common areas.
“Several students were wrestled to the ground and placed under arrest while struggling with officers.”
The article runs on from there, but you get the idea clearly. The Press Enterprise interviewed any student available who was hanging around and taking their words on face value that the police and the school dean seemed to come out of nowhere mainly to beat the students up. But I strongly suspect this was the last thing that the school dean and the local police had planned on doing that morning.
From my book, “Dangerous Learning,” I wrote that there were several underlying causes for this kind of incident, with the main reason that the culture of respect – and of goodness – is not something that is learned by most students in public schools today. I went on to interpolate that this lacking of introducing the culture of respect and goodness in our public schools is a central reason why the Californian kids finally leaving their Californian schools are increasingly staying unemployed and going to jails and prisons instead of jobs.
I am certainly not the first to say that the culture of goodness is a foundation of all real education. Plato – and Socrates – emphasized thousands of years ago that the effective teaching of goodness had to be the case to create a stable republic. I just happened to be rereading Plato’s “The Republic” when I ran into this story about this Moreno Valley high school riot.
At one early point in “The Republic,” Socrates teaches that the worst thing a teacher can do is hide or mangle the little goodness there is in the world so that the student emerges from school starved of goodness.
This reminded me of an assignment I had last year at a Riverside County high school that was not far from Canyon Springs High School. I was organizing papers from an earlier assignment that another teacher supervised when I noticed in these papers that all the students were writing about Jesus. At first I was shocked, as using any respectful mention of Jesus in public school today is considered about as rebellious against school authority as using the “F” word on campus. But then on longer notice I saw that the references were not at all respectful or peaceful towards Jesus.
The assignment was intended instead to transfer the supposed Christianity of cowboys who tortured Indians into empathizing with the Indians about what their first experience of “Christianity” felt like to them. So the students were instructed to write sentences like these, from the point of view of real tortured Indians:
“Jesus tore out my tongue and threw dirt in my mouth.” “Jesus cut off both my hands and threw me to the ground, so that I could only move away on my knees.” “Jesus set my hair on fire.”
Every high school student was instructed to write at least ten ways that “Jesus” had mutilated them, through the vicarious mutilations at the hands of these so-called “Christian” cowboys.
I could see at once there were three things wrong and anti-educational with this typical English assignment from a Riverside County public high school. First, any cowboy who tortured an Indian like this was not a Christian. Of course, being a Christian is defined by what you are and how you act, not even by what you say and how you say you act. In fact, in actual history, whatever protection the American Indian received at this time of American history came from actual American Christians, just as it was the American Christians who were the first abolitionists.
Secondly, a lesson like this is blatantly unconstitutional, gratuitously fomenting hatred via purposeful misinformation against the Christian students in the school. Parents of students who were forced into this assignment can surely take a class action suit against this school district for the breach here in the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, which gives Christians in the public schools the same protections as are given to any students, including atheists.
Finally, the true role of Jesus in history is that of an overwhelming legacy he left of goodness upon the world’s human behavior codes. Jesus was never a demon that possesses a criminal into torturing innocent people, so this depiction of Jesus in this school is as anti-educational as you can get. It is like trying to get away with teaching that Socrates or Gautama (the Buddha) were crime bosses, simply because a teacher doesn’t want to follow their teachings.
Today, the public schools in California seem to have settled on what they feel is the clearest course to separating church and state in their classrooms — to only present Christianity in a negative light. I had another experience of this recently in an alternative school among at-risk high-school students who seemed to know nothing about Christianity. So their first exposure to Christianity in this school was a reading assignment to study the pamphlet of a clearly insane witch-hunting minister who haunted the churches during the time of Cotton Mather, whose murderous disguises as a Christian led to his murdering uncounted women in his Massachusetts community.
Again, Socrates said that the most dangerous people in a republic are those who take away all the goodness in the world from young people, especially because true goodness is so rare and precious. As I found in all the experiences that went into my book in my book about “Dangerous Learning,” the inadequate amount of goodness in California high schools today is turning the schools into factories that are producing our community gangs. I feel very melancholy about Canyon Springs High School and its problems, which over a period of school fights within two days produced 15 arrests. To paraphrase what Voltaire said, when we force human beings away from God, then these human beings are forced to invent their own gods.
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled “Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California..” His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.