The details involving two savage beatings of Philadelphia teachers by their "students" (a word I use advisedly), make me question whether the words "education" and "school" mean what they're supposed to mean.

I've previously written about the most recent incident in which a teacher's neck was broken by a student whose iPod had been confiscated temporarily. The Inquirer's Daniel Rubin has more:

....One moment Burd, 60, was in the hallway of Germantown High with a 17-year-old senior whose iPod he had confiscated in class. The next moment he was in the ambulance.

Maybe that's a memory he doesn't need. Then he won't have to replay the assault. A hall camera caught the incident: two students hitting him, sending him crashing into a locker. He struck his head, leaving a deep gash in his scalp and snapping two vertebrae.

[...]

Three times during Algebra II the boy had pulled out the digital music player, and three times Burd had threatened to confiscate it.

The rules say that when a student uses a phone or music player in the classroom, the teacher is to hand the device over to the school police. But Burd always returned it at the end of the period.

"All I want to do is teach," he says. "And they want to listen to music. But they play it so loud I hear it in the front of the room and the other kids are bopping to the beat."

The boy's explosion makes no sense. He was doing good work, had ability, even if it was his second time taking the class.

Good work?

Ability?

As what? As an enforcer for Tony Soprano?

OK, sorry I interrupted. I just want to understand.

"He's a bright kid. I had a rapport with him. I don't know where [the rage] came from. I don't understand, and I find it frustrating because I care about these kids. They're angry at something that has nothing to do with you."

Reading on, it becomes quite clear that violent, disruptive kids have to be tolerated, and that teachers are no more allowed to get rid of them than jailers are allowed to discharge inmates for being disruptive:

"It's way worse than people know," Lelah Marie, who teaches Spanish at Paul Robeson High, said by phone. "We are living in one universe and they are in another, where the kids have all sorts of tiny MP3 players and phones. They take calls in class, and do not stop talking."

It's an everyday battle.

"The district has a policy of no electronics in class. We're supposed to take them away, but kids won't give them up. One kid will take it and pass it along to others... .

"They're so distracted by this stuff. You want to make some contact with the kids, but they really dislike you when you do."

I'm reminded again of Kim du Toit's post about feral kids:

...High school kids, unsupervised, are the most feral little beasts on the planet, and we saw no reason why we should subject our kids to that ordeal. The most common response to that statement was usually, "It makes them tougher" or "They learn how to cope with a hostile environment, like they may encounter in the adult world".

Specious nonsense. In the outside world, when you are immersed in a "hostile environment" (work, university, whatever), you have the means to leave it. That's not the case in high school, where you are coerced into staying together with no options to separate yourself from your tormentors.

Daniel Rubin leaves us with the teacher feeling overwhelmed:

Today, Burd is scheduled for surgery. The doctors plan to rebuild his neck using parts of his hip. He's not ready to think about whether he'll step inside Germantown High again, let alone teach another class.

"The idea I had my neck broken by a student," he says, "is overwhelming."

In today's Inquirer, there's an interview with another teacher who thought he was going to teach music, but got his jaw broken instead:

While he tried to teach jazz, Klein said, students made phone calls in class, brought in bags of fast food, and listened to their own music on "electronic devices."

The school handbook tells teachers to call parents if students cause problems in class. After Klein made the calls, four of his five classes settled down.

Today's piece continues:

But on Friday, Oct. 27, a student in his worst class - third period - told him to stop calling parents or he would regret it.

The next Monday, as students changed classes between third and fourth periods, a student sprayed Klein head to toe with a water-filled school fire extinguisher.

At the same time the next day, a student sprayed Klein again.

Then on Wednesday, he said, another student threatened to kill him and "f- him up" after school for allegedly causing a friend to be suspended.

And on Thursday, four students Klein had never seen before walked into his classroom at the end of third period. They surrounded him and began picking up papers from his desk and boasting: "There is nothing you can do about this, cracker."

There was indeed nothing he could do, and his feral charges knew it:

Throughout the days of the harassment and threats, Klein said, he went to the school's security office to report them and fill out the required forms.

When Klein arrived the morning of Friday, Nov. 3, he told the security guard at the school's metal detector that he had had enough and would seek a transfer to another school.

At 10:40 a.m. that day, Klein said, a student he didn't recognize came into his room at the end of third period while other students were in the room. Klein asked his name and directed him to leave. "It was clear he was looking for a confrontation," he recalled.

Klein stepped into the hallway to see whether he could spot a school police officer who was often nearby, but no one was there.

The student walked around and in front of him and squared off like a boxer, Klein said. The student began laughing and taunting Klein with his fists.

"He was jumping around like he was going to hit him me."

Instinctively, Klein said, he put up his hands.

"That's the last thing I remember," he said.

As for his future as a prison guard teacher, Klein doesn't seem very optimistic:

Klein said he did not know whether he would return to a Philadelphia classroom.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," he said. "I'm living a nightmare ... and the worst of it is that it happened in a public school."

A school is a place of education. Philadelphia "schools" turn out illiterate graduates, and they are violent and dangerous places which force good children who want to learn to be subjected to the tender mercies of violent thugs.

When a teacher is beaten nearly to death, it makes the newspapers. Innocent children have to cope any way they can, and if they are abused or beaten, they'll be taken about as seriously as an abused inmate. I suppose you could say (as du Toit pointed out) that "It makes them tougher." You might even say that "They learn how to cope with a hostile environment, like they may encounter in the adult world." True on both accounts.

But is it education? Is it fair to call these places schools? Is it fair to characterize these young thugs as "students" and their unprotected custodians as "teachers"?

I don't think so.

The dishonesty involved is sometimes overwhelming.