We need more Joe Clarks
The public school system needs about 10,000 more Joe Clarks, who agrees?
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MovieChat Forums > Lean on Me (1989) Discussion > We need more Joe Clarks
I definitely do. I never believed in corporal punishment until I taught in the Paterson school district...
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Yes I agree. One thing I learned in a business management course, there are three types of authority. There is autocratic, then a autocratic-democratic hybrid, then democratic. Autocratic works best when the people under you don't really know what they are doing, either from ignorance or inexperience. You have to take total charge and make all major decisions. Democratic works best when the people under you are knowledgable and experienced. You get their input and make collaboration the basis for decision making.
When Charlie Pell became the football coach at UF, he ran the football team like a boot camp. This was the autocratic method or mode which would have been fine for an inexperienced squad. The squad or players he had though were really good players who knew their stuff. Consequently their performance really declined under this method. In that case a hybrid or democratic approach would have worked best. Galen Hall replaced Charlie as head coach and took a democratic approach and the UF football team performed a whole lot better. If memory serves they went on to win a national championship.
The situation at the elementary school seemed a whole lot better so there I think Joe took a democratic approach. At Eastside, the autocratic approach was the only feasible one. It was a true dystopia and would require a strong hand to get things under control. It was obvious that the adults there had no idea how to govern that school.
There is one more thing. An excellent book on education I happened to read noted that schools should serve the students and not students the schools. Joe was absolutely right to allow that girl to take auto mechanics like she wanted instead of being forced to take home economics.
I definitely think so. If there was a Joe Clark in every school I'm sure we wouldn't have these school shootings we need a principal that is willing to take the chance and leave bad guys out of schools or suspend ones that don't want to learn, deal drugs, or etc.
shareThere is one more thing. An excellent book on education I happened to read noted that schools should serve the students and not students the schools. Joe was absolutely right to allow that girl to take auto mechanics like she wanted instead of being forced to take home economics.How does kicking out 300 students 'serve them'? share
It didn't. It did serve the rest of the student body by keeping them from being stabbed, shot, raped, or assaulted. It also spared the teachers and anybody else who worked there including Joe Clark himself from experiencing these things themselves.
Joe Clark simply got rid of people who really didn't care to be in school in the first place.
Now that they haven't got an education what are they going to do? Stop committing crime? Are they more likely to commit crime without any schooling or less?
By the way, I do think Joe Clark was portrayed quite sympathetically in the film, but the decisions he made and the hysterical way his opponents were portrayed was not balanced.
Also, are you saying all 300 kids who were kicked out were rapists and murderers?
Harvey, the last thing people like these 300 kids are interested in is books and learning. I am simply amazed at how many people went to really nice High Schools where they didn't have enemies or risked getting stabbed or shot.
I was stabbed in High School so I know how bad they can be or get. From my readings on Eastside High, even some gang members feared being sent there because of the sheer mayhem that went on.
That guy getting his head bashed in at the beginning of the movie? That was the principal before Joe Clark and you can see where his type of tolerance for these types of kids got him. This happened in real-life and the guy ended up with permanent brain damage.
You can cry all you want for the 300 thugs that got expelled, I am not going to.
How do you know what type of school I went to? As it happens I went to a school where kids were violent and threatened me. However, I had to leave because I had a mental illness and the school wasn't willing to accommodate it, despite the fact I'd never had any disciplinary problems including detentions or suspensions, and despite being one of the top students, academically speaking, in the school. Being kicked out of school for no good reason ruined my life so forgive me if I have some sympathy for other victims of this short-term fix. The irony is that upon being kicked out I had to go to a centre with kids who were even nastier and more dangerous than the ones at school. This is the Joe Clarke system and if I met him I'd tell him straight to his face because unlike others I'm no middle class ivory tower type. I suffered the consequences of self-righteous pr*cks like Clarke.
But go ahead, tell me how I'm 'wrong' to be angry my education was unfairly disrupted!
Harvey, I wasn't talking about you as I knew absolutely nothing about you or what kind of school you went to. I was talking about people I have met who mentioned they had no enemies or faced no violence in high school.
The very people Joe Clark kicked out seemed to be the very kind who were giving you a hard time, who made your life in high school a real hell.
These kids if you can call them that were not top students, trying hard, or anything like that. I'm sure the violent, aggressive kids did not help your situation any.
There is a reason we keep criminal's separated from the rest of society for at least some time, if they were violent enough they simply aren't allowed to integrate back in, ever.
Becoming the victim of a violent crime can change your life, the way you think and behave as well. Joe Clark was simply trying to protect the good kids from the bad.
Thanks for your reasonable response.
However, my mantra, in view of my experiences and the fact I was lumped with other kids the system had given up with, including some violent kids, is to always give people a second, third and fourth chance. You write a kid off they're not just going to disappear. They've got to go somewhere else, and you can be as sure as hell that if they've been a problem-child in a school environment they're still going to be a problem child in a non-academic environment.
Well, Joe did become a director at the Essex County Detention House. It was a juvenile detention center for youths accused of murder, rape, drug dealing, etc.
The irony that these youths represented the kind of people he had expelled from Eastside High was not lost on him. He instituted a policy of buzz haircuts, church services, and mentoring from clergy for the detainees. He also mandated schooling for them, banning packages to detainees ( common drug entry method ) and a dress code for visitors no matter who or what they were ( that rankled a lot of high-ups ).
He did get in trouble for shackling 12 youths to their beds for two days after they threw feces and urine at some security guards during a church service. As he explained it, these were gang leaders who were abusing the staff and other detainees ( physically assaulting them ). He wasn't going to let this violent minority terrorize the majority.
As one person in the Essex County government put it, this was a real house of horrors. In a lot of ways, that was how Eastside High was described before Joe Clark.
I have read where pretty much every policy that Joe had put in place at Eastside High was reversed after he left, and in a few years Eastside was as bad as it had ever been.
If you read one of my previous post in this thread, I explained how the autocratic approach in terms of governance isn't always the best. It really depends on what kind of people, what kind of situation you are dealing with.
Sometimes that approach is the worst approach you could take.
In the movie, Joe seemed to give off a much softer vibe when he was the principal at that elementary school. The kids were nice, the school was clean so there I think Joe took a democratic approach.
It sounds like the principal you had took an autocratic approach when it may not have been justified, or else just a mindless approach.
When I was going to a community college, there were two black guys who were accused of having committed some crime, but evidence came up which was verified by the police which totally cleared them. Some administrator however cited some arcane rule that a student could be expelled for even being suspected of a crime. So he was going to expel them and when there was an uproar and a petition was started to allow them to stay, he threatened to expel any student who signed that petition.
Well, that created an even greater uproar and yes, I signed the petition as did many others. The two black guys did get expelled by this jerk, but he was too much of a coward to expel the rest of us who signed that petition.
You do what you can, but sometimes evil or stupidity simply wins.
It's that type of approach that I really object to eddysl12. Expelling kids without any evidence of wrongdoing. Your administrator sounds like a hateful jerk.
In my case, because of my family's work circumstances I had to move a bit as a kid, so the principal in my new school didn't know me very well but in the short time I was there I managed to win the school's top merit prize on two successive occasions, I was doing very well academically being placed in the top classes on the basis of test results (and because I was new to the school, I had to sit additional tests before being placed in the right class), and was involved in various extra-curricular activities even showing parents around the school during an open day a few weeks after I joined the school. But my principal still chose to get rid of me when he discovered I suffered from a mental illness, and on previous occasions he had ignored me when I informed him of a kid who'd threatened me, and he gave me the wrong results in one of my top classes before retracting the results and advising me that my results were actually much higher (I can't be sure, but I think he was testing me/playing with me to see how I'd react to receiving results well short of my expectations, and as it transpired, my actual achievements). Anyway, suffice to say, this principal's decision to expel me from the school messed-up my life for good. Whatever else I achieve from now on, I'll always fall short of what I could have attained had I received a proper high school education.
That is one of the reasons I have a big problem with excluding kids, even kids who 'deserve' to be excluded. It's a short-term fix that messes people's lives up, and after what happened to me, I'm sorry, but I have no love for the system and couldn't really care less about the 'good kids' who are deemed worthy enough of remaining on the school roll. I was a 'good kid', more so that many, and look what happened to me!
It's understandable that the subject of a principal expelling kids would hit a raw nerve for you. I don't think anybody can help but resent a group of people that they are deemed not worthy of belonging to.
People in positions of authority can abuse that authority. After a minister tried to take over my life for his own purposes, I learned to not trust ministers or organized religion.
You do only get so many opportunities and people can simply destroy the one chance you have to turn your life around as this minister did to me if they take the wrong approach.
Sometimes you are between a rock and a hard place and nobody has a clue how to help you so you have to work it out yourself. That's fair enough, people do have problems that you don't have a clue how to solve. The problem is when you see them succeeding on their own and then act like you are the one who created that success or else that success is some kind of miracle.
This is very hard to explain because my church basically got invaded by some real religious crazies and they led by my minister decided to make me the center of their attention. This was 30 years ago and I still don't have an answer for some very strange behavior directed at myself.
There may be other opportunities but like in my case they may take 10 years or more to surface.
Suffice it to say the word minister or miracle conjures up some bad memories for me, as I'm sure the word principal or expel does for you.
That you eddys112. Despite our initial disagreement, you are ironically one of the most supportive and helpful people I have spoken to either online or in 'real life' for a good few weeks, on any subject.
I should make it clear, I don't dislike all principals or even particularly feel bad about the word. It's those principals who exclude young people in large numbers, for often poor reasons, who I object to. I can sympathise with your experiences about ministers though and why you feel particularly edgy about the words 'minister' and 'miracle'.
Objectively speaking, it's true that Joe Clark probably was a good guy who excluded the type of people who shouldn't have been in high school to begin with (i.e. troublemakers with no interest in studying). The problem is, for someone with my experience it concerns me that films like this sent out the message that exclusion is (always) the answer. People may think I'm being selfish and self-absorbed in relating everything to my own experiences, but I do think my own experiences were a lot more unfortunate in terms of education than those people who would object. Thus, I do think my issues about this film, and films that propagate similar messages (i.e. exclusion is the best option), are valid.
Many people will look at this film and think that all exclusions are justified based on the actions of Joe Clark, and in my experience that simply isn't true.
People can get the wrong impression from a character in a movie or TV show. In the movie "The Devil wears Prada", some people think the character Miranda Priestly is a correct one, that is they approve of the way she treated the character Andy.
As a boss, Miranda gives Andy ridiculous and impossible assignments and demands that she fulfill them. To me this is just wrong. As a boss you should only give people under you assignments that you yourself are capable of doing. What she expected of Andy was just plain abuse.
A tough but proper authoritative character in my opinion was the character Dr. Kerry Weaver on ER. While she was shrill, abrasive, and gruff, she was also correct in her goals.
Apparently the doctors in the ER had been lording themselves over the Jr staff, making them run personal errands for them with the understanding that the doctors could get them fired if they didn't. When Weaver came in she told the doctors that this was going to stop, and naturally they didn't like it.
She also wasn't going to let them hog the ER with a patient who had been brain dead for 45 minutes while others who could be saved had to wait.
Sometimes it takes a gruff and unlikable boss to end abusive treatment by subordinates whose power or title's have gone to their heads. Dr. Peter Benton and Dr. Donald Anspaugh were also two gruff and basically non-smiling Doctors who supported what Kerry was doing.
There is a difference, a big one, between being tough and being mean or cruel.
I do think sometimes people can confuse the two.
Eddys...you win :)
"Mankind cannot solve the world's problems. Mankind is the problem."
Are they more likely to commit crime without any schooling or less?
They'd already stayed in high school up to their 20s, they were just taking up valuable time and resources for ACTUAL students. share
I was an ACTUAL student who constantly won academic commendations and never got a detention or suspension, and was moreover, involved in various extra-curricular activities but some self styled Joe Clark a hole thought he'd kick me out because I had a mental health problem he didn't understand. But I guess you'd approve of that as long as the majority got the proper teaching, right? Even though the majority at my school weren't half as conscientious or high achieving as I'd been.
shareHmmm, did he kick out 300 other students with you who had stayed in school until they were 20 and never even passed?
shareHmmm, did he kick out 300 other students with you who had stayed in school until they were 20 and never even passed?Is that your only glib response to my experience?!
You seem so intent in punishing people rather than understanding them you don't even care about the people who should be benefitting from rigorous school policy (i.e. hard-working, academic students like I was).
Plus, there is a serious deficit in adult education and skills. How is kicking out 300 kids before they're ready to graduate going to help that problem? You're just sending them into the streets to either die, live off welfare, or worse, turn to crime because they have no other way of making money. But hey, apathy and hatred are always easier and more comforting responses to problems. Actually dealing with the problem and getting stuck in takes hard work, courage and patience. Shame those great qualities are in short supply. share
You're just sending them into the streets to either die, live off welfare, or worse, turn to crime because they have no other way of making money.
And tell us how a principal is going to make a 20 year old who's already dealing drugs for a profit say 'hey, maybe I should apply myself and start studying for the first time in the SEVEN years I've been in high school and turn my life around to get an honest job making a fraction of what I am now'?
You know what, they DID have a choice once they got kicked out. The fat kid that came back, he was among them kicked out, but guess what? Mr. Clark let him back in, didn't he? And he started to make something of himself, didn't he? So all any of those so unjustly expelled had to do was come back and state a case WHY they should be let back in and show they WERE going to bother studying and learning. But apparently the other 299 were not interested in stupid stuff like education. share
Agreed...and I love your signature. :)
"Mankind cannot solve the world's problems. Mankind is the problem."
Yes! Infact I was in ROTC in HS. They were very strict! But they also had free reign to teach what they wanted, and get in your face if they had too and play hard. But they taught a lot about "Real life" not this programmed crap teachers try and pass by as knowledge.
Catholic, which I was until I reached the age of reason" George Carlin, R.I.P.
Yes i agree his ways are pretty,but they are pretty effective. I wonder if there would be less school violence if they were more principal clarks
I use to own this town Now my life's been turned upside down Just a phase I'm going through