Reports are coming in from Oregon, Wisconsin, Georgia, and from places far, far away, like England: there's chaos in the classrooms worthy of dedicating the evening news and special programming to examine the phenomenon. Students are disrupting classes to the extent that the other students are in danger. They're overturning desks, running all over the building, screaming, and even throwing desks through windows. Not after school, but during school.
They're hitting other students, choking other students, throwing things at them, destroying laptops by slamming them on their desks over and over again. But it's not just their fellow students--they're hitting and slapping the teachers, calling them every name you can think of and then one more. Teachers are daily enduring bite marks, scratches, punches. The students steal from the teacher, taking the supplies she's bought for them, things like pencils and whatever else she has in her desk.
In Oregon, there's a protocol--the teacher can't put his or her hands on the disruptive and the rebellious student, no matter what he's doing. There's no expulsion. If they have to be escorted to the principal's office, it's not long before they're back in the same class and the chaos continues without penalty, without consequences. In some instances, the destruction of the classroom is so bad that it looks like a Texas tornado has come through the room--every desk overturned, bulletin boards ripped down, and the paraphernalia of the classroom on the floor and all over the place.
You might be saying, "I knew it was bad but not that bad in our high schools." But you'd be wrong, wrong, wrong. What you've just read isn't a description of our high schools. We're talking elementary schools in Oregon, Wisconsin, Georgia, and England. As a matter of fact, it's all over the map and all under-reported, swept under the rug and hushed up. And the teachers say the chaos happens every day without fail. They're having to deal with a pattern they see every working day. They're quitting in droves.
Oh, they've had meetings trying to figure out what to do. The solutions they've come up with always involve "We need more money to place more people trained to deal with such behavior, more people in the classroom than just the teacher." Their solutions don't mention the spiritual.
Could it be that what's going on is a Romans 1 situation? In Romans 1, Paul says that when a society has rejected God, very bad things will start showing up in that culture and one of those things is that the children will become "disobedient."
What we're seeing is just what Paul said and it's chaotic.
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