Discussion of Duggars and Caitlyn Jenner As How We Talk About Religion in Public Life Today, and a Question: Is There a Genetic Link Between Rigid, Patriarchal Religion and Abuse of Children?

Andrew O'Hehir argues that it's through public conversation about stories like those of the Duggars and Caitlyn Jenner that Americans now carry on political debate about the role of religion in American life and how sexual abuse is often tolerated, minimized, covered up within families. The old-fashioned kind of political exchanges carried on by means of the ballot box now engage primarily "the fearful, the crazy and the deeply, pathologically Caucasian (overlapping demographics, to be sure)" when the presidency is not at stake.

"What Good Fortune for Those in Power That People Do Not Think": Religion (of a Sort) and Justification of Police Brutality

Several observations culled from my file of notes from books I've read over the course of many years, which have helped me to see more fully and to understand better. To my way of thinking, what both of these authors have to say could well powerfully gloss discussions we've had here of late about the role of religion in the world — and the quandary religion often presents to LGBTI folks. Both Alice Miller and Philip Greven are addressing the strongly held belief of many Christian cultures that physical punishment is necessary for the right rearing of good children.

The Need for a National Commission to Address Child Abuse: A Checklist of Ten Notes

With the establishment of a royal commission to investigate child abuse (and its cover-up) in Australia, I've been going through a checklist of mental notes I've made about the issue of child abuse over the years.  I've blogged about most of these items.

Valuable New Website: Janet Heimlich's Religious Child Maltreatment Site

An outstanding new blog has just come to my attention.  I'd like to recommend it highly to readers.  The blog is Janet Heimlich's Religious Child Maltreatment site.  Heimlich has had a prestigious career as a journalist, and in recent years, has turned her considerable talents to issues of religion-fueled abuse of children.  She's just published a book on this subject entitled Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment, about which information is found at her website.

The Spiral of Violence: Alice Miller on Child Abuse as the Foundation of Social Violence

Earlier today, I wrote, 

Perhaps, in fact, there’s a line of continuity between slapping children in the face and sexually abusing them, and refusing to see Jewish citizens outside our window being carted off to gas chambers. 

Since at least one reader of my posting has questioned the relevance of the use of corporal punishment by the pope's brother to "anything," I'd like to offer the following reflections from the website of the noted Swiss child psychologist Alice Miller:

School Bullying and Workplace Bullying: The Links

Unfortunately, the news sometimes confirms one’s darkest suspicions, often in bizarre and unexpected ways. I blogged yesterday about the increase in violence in our schools (and our society at large) as a factor contributing to the rise of school bullying. At the end of the day, when I did a final scan of the news, I noticed a horrifying story from Waycross, Georgia.

It seems that in Waycross yesterday, a group of third-graders—at least nine pupils—were suspended from school after it was discovered that they planned to assault a teacher. News reports say that these children had a knife, duct tape, a heavy paperweight, and handcuffs, and had hatched a plot to knock the teacher down with the paperweight and then tie her up and knife her.

In the same news scan, I also ran across an article from central Florida, where I spent last year and read many stories of violence perpetrated by the young, particularly against the homeless in that region. Yesterday’s story reports that several thirteen-year old students at Deland Middle School have pled not guilty to charges that they intended to shoot classmates and teachers in a Columbine-style massacre.

The news report indicates that the students aired their plans on a myspace website, and were placed in custody after the plans became known. This apparently happened in mid-March.

These disturbing stories underscore two points I made in my blog yesterday: violence is an endemic problem in our schools, as in society at large. And younger and younger children, who have grown up with access to e-communication, are now using email and websites to extend the spiral of school violence even futher. We have a problem—we have a problem. And we need to do something about it.

Other Internet research I did yesterday adds to my conviction that the problem is ours, and that the solution to the problem is in our hands—not just in the hands of youth being bullied in schools or those doing the bullying. After posting about a possible link between Alice Miller’s psychoanalytic analysis of the soul murder of youth and school bullying, I decided to see if there is literature cited on websites to support this link.

I found a wealth of material. Most fascinating of all is a series of articles by New York Times reporter Tara Parker-Pope on workplace bullying. On 11 March, 24 March, and 25 March, the Times published articles (with web forums) by Ms. Parker-Pope entitled “Meet the Work Bully,” “Have You Been Bullied at Work?” and “When the Bully Sits in the Next Cubicle” (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/meet-the-work-bully/; http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/have-you-been-bullied-at-work/; and www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/health/25well.html?_r=1&oref=slogin).

Ms. Parker-Pope’s reports on workplace bullying build on information shared at the recent Seventh International Conference on Work, Stress and Health. The 24 March article is accompanied by a video in which (among others) Tom Witt of New York Healthy Workplace Advocates is featured. Witt defines workplace bullying as “repeated health-harming verbal abuse, psychological abuse, work interference, work sabotage.”

Reading Ms. Parker-Pope’s articles confirmed my intuition that we cannot address school bullying unless we begin to address the violence woven into our social fabric—the adult taken-for-granted violence that insinuates itself into the lives of third graders who have somehow learned to hatch an elaborate plot to knife a teacher. Brazilian theologian and pedagogical theorist Helder Camara writes about the spiral of violence: about how one act of violence inevitably results in another, so that, until someone somewhere stops the spiral, violence will always breed only more violence.

Camara and other Latin American theologians have also developed a sophisticated analysis of violence as “hard” and “soft” violence. Hard violence is easy to see: it results when someone takes a knife, a gun, or a fist, and assaults someone else.

Soft violence is more difficult to tease out, because it dwells throughout social systems as taken-for-granted domination and manipulation of others by authority figures who are deemed to be “over” the ones they assault through soft violence. Workplace bullying is a form of soft violence. Parker-Pope notes that this phenomenon runs throughout workplaces, and is often not noticed or addressed precisely because it is taken for granted.

There is also a price to be paid when one tries to stand up against workplace bullying. This soft form of violence is usually designed to be invisible to everyone except the object of the domination and manipulation, so that when the worker speaks out about what he/she has experienced, the whistle-blower is susceptible to disbelief, charges of being too sensitive, and accusations of being a professional troublemaker.

Most of us have experienced this kind of violence. It is endemic—and because it is endemic and taken for granted, it filters down from the lives of adults into the lives of children, where it often translates into the overt hard violence of school bullying. Parker-Pope cites statistics showing that more than a third of American workers report having been bullied in the workplace. Studies suggest that 40% of workplace bullies are women, and other women are often their target.

Reading Parker-Pope’s articles made me reflect on my own experiences of workplace bullying. I find some of these experiences still difficult to believe: that is, I find it hard to believe that adults deliberately seek to bully other adults, particularly in professional settings.

My experiences of workplace bullying have occurred exclusively in church-based educational institutions. I find it difficult to imagine that highly educated adults who ostensibly share a strong commitment to modeling adult behavior for students resort to childish tactics such as bullying, and that adults who work in faith-based institutions and profess a commitment to the ideals of church-based educational institutions would seek to use tactics of control, manipulation, domination, and assault to further their personal agendas.

My experiences of workplace bullying in both a Catholic and a United Methodist college have made me wonder, in fact, if bullying is actually worse in institutions dominated by a clerical culture—as both of these institutions (and many church-affiliated colleges) are. I have concluded, sadly, that not a few of the bullying techniques employed by leaders in these institutions are techniques they have learned from the leaders of their own churches, where “soft” violence is rampant in the dealings of church higher-ups with church underlings.

Some of my difficulty in believing that workplace bullying can actually occur in adult institutions (particularly ones led by educated people who profess faith) comes from my experience of being bullied in school as a youth—an experience about which I have written previously on this blog. The experience of being bullied can be instructive, when one survives it. It can alert the person who is bullied to the profile of bullies. It teaches the bullied young person to discern the signs of what makes bullies tick.

Early on in my experience of being bullied, I realized that bullies are stick-figure personalities. That is, they project images of themselves as omnipotent that do not match the reality of the bully. Bullies are actually pathetic, frightened, needing to bolster their self-esteem at the expense of others because they are afraid, at some deep level inside themselves, that they are not really the godlike powers they want others to believe them to be.

I learned early in my experience of being bullied to give no power—none at all!—to a person seeking to bully me. That person might assault me, either through the slurs and slanders of soft violence, or he might use hard violence to knock me to the gym floor. But what he lacks at a deep level—self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-confidence—I have the power to muster in myself.

I have the ability, I learned through experiences of school bullying, to know that whatever a bully does to me, he cannot reach my inmost self and make me believe what he wants me to believe about myself. In bullying me, he is exposing himself as the object of pity he wishes me to become.

My experience of school bullying taught me early on to remove myself from the power, from the emotional range and presence, of someone seeking to bully me. I learned that I had power on my side: the power to withdraw inside myself and see the world around me with a much clearer eye than that of my bully.

Because of these experiences, I have found it difficult to perceive when I was being bullied in the workplace, in faith-based educational institutions, as an adult. I had concluded that bullying is a playground tactic. I was not prepared to encounter it in the workplace—particularly not in church-sponsored colleges.

In the Catholic institution, though I sometimes ran a virtual gauntlet in the hallway of classroom buildings, where the old boys who saw themselves as the power brokers of the school would whisper ridiculous insults as I passed them, I did not perceive the full extent of the bullying—or its source—until a monk who is now abbot of the monastery that owns the college came to my house with the intent to bully me.

This was at a time in which there was an attempt to shut me down, to silence and discipline me, because I had made an issue out of the fact that my faculty mailbox was routinely being stuffed with threatening letters and other hate materials. When I went through the proper channels to request action regarding this matter, and encountered one roadblock after another, I simply decided to go public with my complaint. I did so because I knew the person responsible for the bullying—another faculty member, who had once mumbled to me in a hallway, ludicrously, that we were “agents” for two different ideologies contesting control of the Catholic church.

In writing a public letter, I wanted to make an end run around this childish attempt to silence me as a scholar and theologian, and to put such bullying beyond the pale, for the good of the college itself. I thought that, once brought into the light of day, the bullying tactics would appear so reprehensible and so juvenile that they would be ruled out of bounds in any educational community worth its salt.

My public letter was not well-received. After I sent it, the man who is now abbot came to my house and, sitting in a chair in my den, across the room from me, locked eyes with me, as he informed me that I was not to disturb the peace of the college by such letters in the future.

I was surprised at this behavior. I had never had a staring contest with another adult, let alone a priest, a monk, a fellow theologian. This seemed an . . . unusual . . . way to deal with an issue like stuffing of someone’s faculty mailbox with hate mail.

I was later to learn that these tactics were par for the course in the monastery that owned the college. If I told all the stories I have learned about this toxic behavior, which runs from the monastery through the college owned by this group of monks, I’d have to write a book. And people would then conclude that I had borrowed my material from Umberto Eco.

At the United Methodist college where I had similar experiences, once again, I did not recognize the phenomenon as bullying until a colleague who had experienced similar treatment from the same supervisor told me, “I learned long ago as an African-American woman to spot a bully. I know what’s going on with her [i.e., the supervisor]. I don’t let her have any power over me even when she tries to berate me and entrap me.”

Parker-Pope’s 24 March article contains a Workplace Aggression Research Questionnaire developed by researchers from the State University of New York and Wayne State University. Taking this quiz was eye-opening. It helped me frame the experience I had at the United Methodist university as classic bullying, and not merely aberrant behavior on the part of an out-of-control boss. In what follows, I’d like to share some of my own responses to the quiz questions, as a way of helping blog readers understand and name the phenomenon of workplace bullying—with the goal of addressing youth violence and school bullying.

The quiz asks if one has,

1. Been given little or no feedback about your performance?

with no evaluation at all. This is in spite of the clearly stated stipulations of the university’s accrediting body that faculty have to be given written evaluations with the right to respond to these evaluations. It is also in spite of the Social Principles of the United Methodist church, which state that workers are not to be harassed or to have their rights violated.

As I have also noted, I have in my possession a document in which my former supervisor communicated with members of her board of trustees at the time of my termination,

I never saw this evaluation, though I have been told it was shared with my subordinates. I certainly never had a chance to respond to it, though I protested the evaluation process itself, since I had been informed by my supervisor that the reason for this evaluator’s visit was not to evaluate me, and when I was evaluated by the evaluator, I noted in writing a number of outright untruths that had been told to me in the evaluation process.

2. Had others delay action on matters that were important to you?

This has been one of the hardest aspects of the bullying I experienced at the United Methodist institution to recognize—that is, it is difficult to recognize that a supervisor who professes to be concerned about the institution she leads would deliberately delay action on assignments given to me to complete on behalf of that university.

And yet this did happen to me repeatedly, so that I now have no option except to conclude that the pattern was deliberate. My last assignment before I was demoted was to write a grant proposal,

And, though there was strong pressure from the university’s accrediting body to revise the faculty handbook, and though I was charged with leading the revision process,

3. Been yelled at or shouted at in a hostile manner?

This was one of the most surprising aspects of the bullying I experienced at this United Methodist university. As a previous blog entry reports, on an occasion when I was asked my views about an action that the supervisor was taking in a steering committee meeting, when I stated that I had misgivings about that action,

And as I have also reported, in a subsequent meeting that she convened between me and my subordinate, at which she instructed the subordinate to inform me that I was being talked about by the university community, she called in, asked to be placed on speakerphone, and proceeded to

I still find it difficult to imagine that an adult could behave this way—

4. Had others consistently fail to return your telephone calls or respond to your memos or e-mail?

One of the interesting bullying techniques I experienced from this supervisor was a black-out of communication,

5. Had someone interfere with your work activities?

This is also one of the most surprising aspects of the workplace bullying I experienced at the United Methodist institution. When an employee interviewed on the video clip accompanying Parker-Pope’s 24 March article notes that, though she was producer of a t.v. show, she had been denied a phone, bells went off for me. I still have difficulty imagining that any adult supervisor—especially in a church-based institution—would deliberately craft such malicious techniques to set an employee up for failure. And yet this must be a more common technique of workplace bullying than I realize.

As I reported in a previous posting, at the United Methodist institution,

At the same time, I was charged with leading the university in a campus-wide civic engagement project.

6. Been lied to?

See #1, above. As this section indicates, an outside consultant was brought in to “evaluate” my work.

The consultant did not know me or my work. He spent only an hour or so with me. He made personal statements about my character and work that he could not possibly back up.

also contains a whopper of a lie regarding my work, which I have not shared publicly in any context. I am saving it to produce as evidence of defamation, in case legal action ever ensues. It is an untruth that is easy to counter with written evidence, so that I wonder why

7. Been accused of deliberately making an error?

Again, this is a kind of bullying that absolutely baffles me, but I now know it happens, since I was accused of having sought to sabotage

I was assigned to write some fifteen documents for that visit, and expected to document each of these carefully. Shortly before the visit occurred, I found that the documents I had written, with their appended exhibits, had been taken apart,

8. Been subjected to temper tantrums when disagreeing with someone?

See # 3 above.

9. Had attempts made to turn other employees against you?

A credible source has told me that after my termination, those who had reported to me were instructed

10. Had someone else take credit for your work or ideas?

See # 2 above. When the $15,000 grant request I wrote as my last assignment before I was demoted (I say “assignment,” but the proposal to write the grant request came from me) came through following my termination, one of the two faculty members given the job of “editing” the final draft took credit

11. Been reprimanded or “put down” in front of others?

See # 3 above. It was a persistent pattern with this supervisor to bring someone into
meetings in which she sought

The obverse of the use of witnesses to assist in her humiliation of me was the supervisor’s attempt to

What to make of such workplace bullying? First, I imagine that my description of what I went through in these two workplaces is not far removed from experiences others have had in the workplace. By sharing these experiences, we allow others to begin to recognize these patterns, and to challenge them. And we must challenge them, if we wish to address school bullying, since the bullying of the young is learned behavior that apes patterns youth learn from adults.

Parker-Pope notes that the ultimate game plan of much workplace bullying is to get the bullied worker to resign. The skilled workplace bully develops tactics that are designed to be difficult to complain about or to address legally, so that the bullied employee too frequently simply walks away as damaged goods, rather than fighting for his or her rights. Parker-Pope cites Gary Namie, founder of the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group based in Bellingham, Washington, who notes, “If the bully is a supervisor, victims may be stripped of critical duties, then accused of not doing their job” as a justification for running them away from the workplace.

Bullying in the workplace can become so intense that it causes the bullied worker to become suicidal. Parker-Pope indicates that researchers at the University of Manitoba recently reported that the emotional toll of workplace bullying is more severe than that of sexual harassment. She also notes that bullying by supervisors is often condoned by governing boards, since, in today’s corporate culture, bullying may be seen as a desirable manifestation of a tough management style.

I know of one case in which my previous supervisor

Parker-Pope’s articles do hold out hope that the tide may be turning regarding workplace bullying. She notes that a best-selling book by Robert I. Sutton, a professor of management and co-director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization at Stanford University, demonstrates that an institutional culture in which workplace bullying is allowed to go unchallenged undermines the effectiveness of the institution. Workplace bullying demoralizes workers, leading to absenteeism and high levels of turnover.

Why slog through all of this literature on workplace bullying? I think those of us committed to addressing the issue of school bullying have to do so, if we expect to make inroads in the culture of bullying among youth. That culture begins with us. There is a genetic correlation between taken-for-granted bullying in the adult world and bullying among the young.

In reading the blog postings accompanying Parker-Pope’s articles, I was heartened to read that at least one respondent also recognizes the link between Alice Miller’s work about the murder of the souls of youth, and bullying in the workplace. Once again: the culture of “acceptable” violence that too readily justifies school bullying begins with us. Adult acceptance of bullying leads to youth bullying. Churches, and educational institutions sponsored by churches, cannot address the phenomenon of school bullying (and they must do so, if they want to be credible witnesses to the values they proclaim) without recognizing that we are the bullies. Bullying is entrenched in the way churches do business, and it runs through church-sponsored educational institutions—which should be leading the charge against school bullying.

School Bullying: We Have Met the Bully; He Is Us

“Truth that makes a difference,” I wrote in my last blog entry. That’s the kind of truth I’m interested in discovering on this blog pilgrimage. That kind of truth requires doing battle—with oneself, first and foremost, so that one keeps pushing to expand one’s horizons when the human impulse is to close in on oneself and become comfortable with the familiar, with the well-worn little truths that comprise one’s grab-bag of certainties.

Discovering truth that makes a difference also requires collaborating with others who are battling for the truth. Truth is not just out there, to be plucked, like a fruit ripening on a tree. Truth has to be searched for and found. It has to be made. It has to be struggled for. Truth that makes a difference is the goal of dialogic exchange in which a community of truth seekers struggle together for the truth. Truth that makes a difference is agonistic: it is found at a certain cost, the cost of challenging the purveyors of misinformation that passes for truth in any society, the cost of struggling with oneself, and the cost of forming bonds of trust and collaboration with others.

Finding that kind of truth in the world in which we live is not easy. For one thing, many forces collude to rob us of the power of solidarity. Believe it or not, there are those—many “those”—who do not wish for us to find the truth. There are many power brokers for whom the solidarity of truth-seekers, the formation of communities of discourse seeking together the truth that makes a difference, is extremely threatening.

These power brokers do all they can to distort plain truth, so that the quest for truth is always fractured, always across a terrain full of crevices and boulders, never simple. They do all they can to sow seeds of suspicion among those who would, in the natural course of things, benefit from seeking together the truth that makes a difference. The power brokers who wish for the world to remain the same (since they benefit from how things are currently arranged), who try to stand astride history and shout stop—these power brokers do everything in their power to thwart the formation of communities of solidarity that band together to engage in a shared quest for truth that makes a difference.

I have been thinking about truth, solidarity, community, and social transformation lately, against the backdrop of questions about how to address school bullying. Even that conversation, about what seems such an obvious need, an urgent need, is fraught with complexity because of the inability of many of us to find common ground regarding issues of gender and education. The plain truth—that children ought not to be beaten into submission or to have their futures mortgaged because they do not conform to preconceived societal expectations about gender behavior—even this plain truth is not plain to many folks, because of political currents that have twisted and distorted our social lenses about gender roles and about the goals of education.

To be specific: I have been listening to responses of people in my own area to the bullying of Billy Wolfe in the Fayetteville, Arkansas, school system. And I have been dialoguing with e-friends who share my concern about school bullying. As I listen and engage in dialogue, I notice some key issues surfacing, which ought not to demand attention, but which have to be discussed, because the right-wing talk machine has been so successful for so long now in distorting the consciousness of Americans about gender issues and the education of our youth, that we cannot see plain truth, and cannot discover the truth that makes a difference, as we look at the phenomenon of school bullying.

Some of those to whom I have been listening lately are asking whether the phenomenon of school bullying really is any different now—any more pronounced—than it was in the past. After all, as they point out, in schools all over the world, bullying of the “weaker” by the “stronger” has been going on from time immemorial. Are things really any worse now? Isn’t the process of taking boys who are prone to wear their feelings on their shoulders and toughening them up good for everyone concerned—for society, which needs men to be men, and for the bullied boys themselves, since they will live in an adult world that expects men to be men?

It’s not that these assumptions are always vocalized outright in discussion of what happens to boys such as Billy Wolfe. But they are the kind of strong unexamined social assumptions that make addressing school bullying difficult in American culture today. These are the unvocalized justifications that many school administrators and some parents use to shrug off school bullying: it goes on all the time; it has always gone on; it’s salubrious practice for real life, particularly for the “too sensitive” boy. Lighten up. Boys will be boys. Don’t intervene in the benign social Darwinism of the school playground, unless you want to tip longstanding scales that keep our social mechanisms functioning, and cause social chaos.

My own take on the bullying problem is that it probably has always been there, but is more serious today for a number of reasons. First, there's the rise in violence in schools (and society at large), and the ready availability of weapons. Grudges that used to be settled by a fistfight are now settled with knives and guns. The growing tacit social acceptance of violence as a way to resolve disputes in adult life, as well as in the lives of the young, when combined with the availability of weapons and the willingness of school children to use them, raises school bullying to an entirely new level at this point in history.

Then, too, the Internet has made communication—including communication in which bullies egg each other on and organize to target an individual—frighteningly easier. As the story of Billy Wolfe (and other recent stories of school bullying) indicates, websites, email, and other tools of e-communication are now being used to make school bullying more “effective” by far than it ever could be in the pre-Internet age. Posting a child’s picture on a website and goading others to hate him allows more and more people to join in the blood-sport of chastising the “weak” link in social chains of power. It allows the bullying to become organized, to extend beyond schools into every area of a youth’s life. It produces a new level of refined cruelty, in which a taunt can pop up in an email at any time, or leap out from a webpage on which the bullied person clicks.

And, finally, I think that there's a heightened awareness of gender and sexual orientation issues, again, partly due to the Internet. Youth today are more aware of their sexual orientation or more willing to explore gender variance at ever younger ages. To a degree almost unimaginable to us who grew up in a world in which the flow of information was confined to print media or the relatively localized media of television and radio, the Internet allows for instant worldwide communication about issues of gender and sexuality that permits ready access to information unavailable to youth in the past.

For many of those who have a vested interest in seeing rigid societal thinking about gender roles shift, this heightened information flow has seemed promising. What I think many of us have not anticipated, however, is the effect of that information flow on the lives of youth exploring gender identity, in a world in which the same information flow permits those opposed to questioning of traditional gender roles to organize.

LGBT youth, and youth questioning traditional gender roles, are now in a double bind. In a way previously unimaginable, they have access to information regarding sexual orientation and gender issues never before so readily available to youth. They also have ready access to information about others who have fought through these issues and become role models for LGBT youth today.

But their bullies also have access to information that permits them to organize, to target, to extend the taunts and threats to every area of a youth’s life. LGBT youth today experience increasing backlash precisely because there is, at one level, increasing ease about coming out. The easier the process of coming out becomes—on the surface—the more difficult it simultaneously becomes, because of the intent of organized groups full of hate to counteract the easy transmission of information about gender and sexual orientation in the Internet age.

I speak deliberately of “organized groups full of hate.” The real bullies, the real villains in the school bullying tragedy, are not first and foremost the youth who kick, hit, taunt, or shoot. The real bullies are the parents, school administrators, church groups, bogus therapists, ex-gay ministries, the media, and manifold right-wing think tanks that disseminate ugly, false information about the gay “lifestyle” and about gender roles to youth inclined to bully.

The problem of school bullying won’t be resolved effectively until the real bullies are exposed and addressed. As Alice Miller’s stunning reflections on how Western culture treats youth note, we are a culture saturated with belief in our extraordinary concern for our youth, who at the same time constantly murder the souls of our young people. Miller’s life-long study of the societal issue of violence towards the young convinced her that the flip side of our sentimental belief that we do everything to protect the young is that we ultimately care very little about the well-being of youth. The too-much protestation in which we engage hides the sordid reality that we do not truly care a great deal about the well-being of our youth.

As a society, we have long been callous about acts of violence perpetrated against the young right in the family circle—the key locale in which young people suffer assault. We do very little to protect young people from what Miller calls “soul murder”—the death of hope, of belief in oneself and one’s potential, the belief that one’s life counts and will make a difference in the world. Miller concluded, after years of exhaustive psychotherapeutic research, that even when youth are not physically assaulted in our culture, their souls are often subjected to murder, because we do so little to safeguard and cultivate the souls of the young.

As an educator, I have become increasingly convinced that something is very awry in our educational system, and that this dislocation of the goals of our educational system is intimately related to the murder of the souls of our youth. We do a decent enough job (in some cases, in some areas, depending on income levels and social status) of educating young people’s heads. We do a dismal job of educating their hearts, of cultivating their souls.

We cannot, in fact, cultivate the souls of youth when we do not cultivate our own souls. I am not talking about the soul here in classic religious terms. I am talking about what is inmost in a human person, what makes that person tick, about what shines forth inside a human being to make that person different from any other human being.

Though for some people this language has specific religious reference, for others it is a useful way to describe humanistic goals without reference to a specific religious tradition or any religious tradition at all. The language of soul need not be left out of our school system and our educational objectives on the ground that it has religious roots. It is a language that is also spoken by those who want to build a better world without necessarily adverting to religion at all.

Our educational system cannot speak the language of soul, or address the murder of the souls of our youth, or stop the problem of school bullying, because our educational leaders themselves too often lack soul. I have thought this for a long time, as an educator. I thought about this problem of lack of soul with a renewed interest yesterday, as I read Patrik Johnson’s article “Rise of the ‘Rock Star’ School Superintendent" in the Christian Science Monitor at
www.csmonitor.com/2008/0331/p01s03-usgn.html.

Johnson reports on a troubling phenomenon in American education today: the ascendancy of a generation (and class) of highly paid bureaucratic “educators” who administer schools, but who have little apparent interest in or understanding of education itself, and of the classic humanistic goals of education. The name of the game in American education today is, frankly, to beat the testing game. Schools—at every level, from kindergarten through higher education—must demonstrate tangible results in the form of test scores.

This impulse in American higher education has resulted in a system of scamming by which schools do all in their power to up test scores, without caring much about what students actually learn—or about who students become, in the educational process. Even worse, the need to scam results in the hire of more and more educational administrators who are, frankly, simply, appallingly soulless.

These administrators thrive in climates in which they can balance fiscal account books, even when doing so requires the same scams that delude people into thinking that test scores are rising. They thrive in climates of obfuscation of the truth, of half-truths, of deliberate lies to governing boards that are, increasingly, comprised of hard-nosed business leaders and not educators.

These “educators” are also highly paid, disgracefully so. The Monitor reports on one candidate for a position in a suburban Atlanta school system, whose demands prior to hire include not merely a very cushy salary (many times more than a teacher is paid), but a Lincoln town car, a chauffeur, and a personal bodyguard.

I speak of what I know. I speak of what I have seen and heard with my own eyes and ears.

I know these “educators.” I have had to interact with them. I have tried to talk to them about educating youth, about shaping the character of future leaders, about cultivating the soul of youth. I have had no success in reaching these “educators.” Their interest is not in the soul. They are tone-deaf to the language of soul and character.

The increasing prevalence of these “rock-star” educators throughout the American system of education points to problems with the system itself—which is to say, problems with us. The Monitor article quotes Walter Fluker, executive director of the Leadership Center at Morehouse College in Atlanta, regarding what I am identifying as a loss of soul in American education today. Fluker says, "Leadership always is symptomatic, a warning sign of what's happening at deeper and more fundamental levels.”

I conclude from this observation that if the scam artists who are increasingly the rock-star “leaders” of our educational institutions thrive, it is because we allow them to thrive. The problem is us. We are the problem. We do not value our own souls or the souls of our youth.

Until we do so, we will not successfully make our schools places in which the souls of children—and the bodies of youth deemed gender-inappropriate—are safe from murder. We have met the enemy: he is us.