Puppets Speaking in Hollow Voices: Children in a Cloud of Pop Culture

“Want to see me make a pencil disappear?”

This is a quotation from a gruesome scene in “The Dark Knight,” a violent Batman movie, involving the Joker, a pencil, and a victim’s eye socket. When you hear a third grader quote this line and then announce that he’s seen the movie twice over the weekend, you may wonder, again, what’s wrong with some parents.

I am observing a third grade teacher, a good caring teacher with a class of sixteen sweet students. But yesterday, a rainy Monday, nearly half the class entered jittery, speaking in hollow voices, and acting out movie scenes and video game scenarios with which they had spent the weekend.

Most of them were boys. One seemed to be a puppet, suspended by invisible strings in a cloud of pop culture, unable to use his voice or body without reference to the mostly violent images in his mind. Another was passive; his handshake reminded me of the dead fish handshake of a profound alcoholic I used to know. Another couldn’t approach a classmate without kicking at his groin, smacking his bottom, or slapping his face.

The students who had not spent the weekend this way watch, closely, learning second-hand—I think of the effects of second-hand smoke—about a culture for which none of them is ready. I’m not sure I’m ready for it—engaging with it requires developing calluses on my soul that I increasingly begrudge.

It may be tempting to think of these boys as brats or brutes, but they’re not to blame. They can’t help themselves. And they seem in other ways to be among the more sensitive students in the class—tougher home lives, more delicate constitutions. They--and their parents, who could know better--are the victims of a natural selection (or unnatural selection) for insensitivity.

I wish these students’ parents could sit in the back of the room, as I am doing, and watch. I doubt they see this at home. There’s no audience, no expectation of school-appropriate behavior. They can always order a child outside, or to his room. They can always turn the TV on again.

Life may be faster, more complex, and more challenging than in the past, leaving parents and teachers feeling at a loss. But perhaps life isn’t actually faster or more complex. Perhaps its simpler and not challenging enough. Maybe there are hours and hours of nothing real to do, a lack of meaningful work, a lack of real demands.

Another illusion of the apparent pace and complexity of life is the illusion that ethical questions are harder and more complex—perhaps too complex for normal people and better left to academic or government experts. But, just as education is, at heart, as simple as the relationship between a teacher and a student, ethical questions are, at heart, as simple as the choices that a person makes and doesn’t make.

This is not to deny the thorniness of stem cell research and abortion and gun control. But their thorniness is due to our uncertain knowledge and understanding, not to our inadequate ethics. Guns in the abstract may seem to pose moral and political dilemmas, but a gun in my hand involves absolutely clear moral choice.

By Tuesday, the effects of the weekend are less noticeable. The teacher tells me that by Friday she feels like she can really teach again. And then the kids go home for the weekend.