“We were walking up from night head count and we could hear screaming, that was…That was an every day, many times a day thing; you would be sitting in school or you would be trying to go to sleep and you would hear a kid being restrained and he would just be screaming his lungs out from pain and we were walking up the hallway and I looked into a room that the kid was being restrained in and Mr. Kay, the director of the facility, he, himself, was sitting on the kid’s back and pulling his arm up over his head to where his hand was right there.” This is the testimony of Aaron Kravig, speaking in an August 2002 case in which Gini Farmer sought a court order to have her 13-year-old son released from Tranquility Bay. What is Tranquility Bay? It is a “behavior modification center” in Jamaica. Parents of “troubled teenagers,” living right here in America, pay up to $40,000 a year to have their children kidnapped and taken to what is by all accounts little more than a concentration camp for children in which youths are subjected to physical and emotional abuse until they are “cured” (”The Last Resort,” Part 1 & Part 2).

I often hear people talk about the value that our society places on its children. We love our children, they say. Children are the future, they say. And all the while I can only think about what a lie this must be. Such cliches may help us sleep at night, but the truth is that our society cares nothing for the well-being of children. In my lifetime, I have witnessed what is essentially the death of childhood as we have come to know it.

Consider. If I as an adult were to be attacked by somebody, I could easily call the police and have that person arrested for assault. Not that such a thing is likely to happen. Such behavior is dealt with quickly and harshly among adults. Thus, I can roam the streets in relative security. Now what if I was a child? Would I be able to go to school with the same assurance of making it back home peacefully that I have as an adult? Unlikely. Violence is so common among children that one would be hard-pressed to find somebody who has not had to deal with a school bully at some point in his or her life. And what solution is the child left with? Sometimes he or she can seek the intervention of a teacher or some other authority figure. But in most cases there is little choice but to fight. And typically the punishment received by the attacker, if there even is a punishment, is minimal. After all, “boys will be boys.” How strange that adults, who have every advantage at their disposal, are immune to this sort of day-to-day aggression, and yet we excuse or even condone the exact same behavior when it is directed at a child who is relatively helpless.

The above story about Tranquility Bay is obviously an unusually harsh example of child mistreatment, at least unsual by American standards. But it does underscore what appears to be an institutionalized system of abusing or at least willingness to abuse children.

Due to an unusually long period of what is considered childhood, teenagers are placed in the particularly awkward position of having the responsibilities of adults without any of the power. And over time the age at which children are expected to start acting like adults has gradually been pushed back. But the coups de grace came during the 1990s when the media and fearful parents fell in love with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Symptoms of ADHD, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, include inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Thus, the NIMH effectively managed to describe every child on the planet. While they freely admit that “not everyone who is overly hyperactive, inattentive, or impulsive has ADHD,” this has not stopped the American public from latching on to the idea. According to CNN, 3.5 million prescriptions for Ritalin, a psychostimulant commonly used in the treatment of ADHD, were written in 1997. Thus, we have managed to turn childhood into a mental illness.

Why then do we send our children to school? I realized many years ago that it has very little to do with education. And if you don’t believe me, I dare you to remember one thing you learned from your 9th grade social studies class. Do you even remember what social studies class you had in 9th grade? Certainly there is some learning that occurs. But beyond the 4th grade there really is not much crucial information being taught.

So why do we have schools if not to teach? The answer lies in both the needs of the parents and the needs of society. Today it is not uncommon for both parents in a household to work. This leads to the question of who watches the children? In this way the school and all of its after-school programs become a convenient state run daycare center. Parents can drop off their children in the morning and forget about them. Throw in some buses, and they don’t even have to do that much.

A much bigger part of the answer, though, lies in the school system itself. Students are indeed learning, just not academics. Instead, schools are creating a future labor force. It is an investment that society intends to collect on later. First, children are divided into separate, often competing groups. For instance, a school might have “mainstream” students versus “gifted” students. Thus, any anger students may have is directed inward toward each other. Once in class, children are repeatedly told, often quite explicitly, that their success in life depends on their performance as students. Of course, not everyone is going to succeed because not every child learns at the same pace. So it is extremely difficult for those who do not perform well to succeed in spite of any effort they might put into it. Between the repeated predictions of their failure and the difficulty in turning their performance around, these students are given little incentive to even try succeeding, and they soon become caught up in the inner politics of the school. Upon graduating, these students provide the massive workforce that is required by a civilized society. And those students who continue on to greater success become the management and professionals required to lead this new workforce.

When children are viewed as investments rather than loved ones, it’s easy to see why our society would treat them they way it does. It’s okay to be a little rough with them because that’s how you test any new product. And if one of them breaks, we have plenty more where that came from.

The management of a privately run boarding school, Tranquility Bay, located in Jamaica, regrets to announce that one of its female students had a tragic accident on Friday, August 10, 2001 at around 6:00 in the evening. The student was in class when she unexpectedly and without warning, ran out of the classroom and jumped off the second story balcony of the classroom. She landed in such an unusual manner as to cause fatal injury. The girl was a brand new student and it remains very unclear as to what her motives were.