Is for Arson , livre ebook

A Is for Arson
A History of Vandalism in American Education
Campbell F. Scribner
Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
For my parents
Teachers and school administrators are working earnestly and sincerely each day in an attempt to build constructive attitudes on the part of young people toward such things as respect for property … but it is exceedingly difficult at times to determine the reasoning of this type of young person.
Los Angeles Board of Education, 1956
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Few Words on Senseless Destruction
Part I
Essay: Vandalism as Political Resistance
1. Populism and Property Destruction, 1790–1890
2. Modern Education and Its Discontents, 1890–1930
3. Diagnosing Delinquency, 1930–60
4. Vandalism and the Security State, 1960–2000
Part II
Essay: Vandalism as Self-Fashioning
5. Books and Boredom
6. Desks and Nostalgia
7. Walls and the Taboo
8. Windows and Euphoria
Part III
Essay: Vandalism and the Historical Sublime
9. Shards
Epilogue: Reflections on Unruliness and Education
Notes
Bibliographic Essay
Index Acknowledgments Introduction: A Few Words on Senseless Destruction Part I Essay: Vandalism as Political Resistance 1. Populism and Property Destruction, 1790–1890 2. Modern Education and Its Discontents, 1890–1930 3. Diagnosing Delinquency, 1930–60 4. Vandalism and the Security State, 1960–2000 Part II Essay: Vandalism as Self-Fashioning 5. Books and Boredom 6. Desks and Nostalgia 7. Walls and the Taboo 8. Windows and Euphoria Part III Essay: Vandalism and the Historical Sublime 9. Shards Epilogue: Reflections on Unruliness and Education Notes Bibliographic Essay Index
Acknowledgments
Much of this book was written during the stress of a worldwide pandemic, and it would not have been possible without the support of family, friends, and colleagues.
Most of all, I need to thank my wife, Stephanie, and my mother, Carroll, for their innumerable gifts of time and childcare, as well as taking an interest in the details of the book, which allowed me to talk through many of the arguments. I also need to thank Alvah and Seneca for tolerating my occasionally distracted parenting over the past few years, and for being great kids!
Special thanks to Jonathan Zimmerman, Tracy Steffes, and three anonymous readers for offering patient feedback on the manuscript throughout the review process, and Sarah Grossman and the staff at Cornell University Press for being so supportive and prompt during an expedited production process.
Several colleagues offered thoughtful feedback on preliminary excerpts from the book. Victoria Cain, in particular, gave insightful and sensitive commentary on two separate conference panels, as did fellow panelists Adam Laats and Andrew Grunzke. This project was supported by a generous postdoctoral fellowship from the Spencer Foundation and the National Academy of Education, and in addition to informal interactions at that National Academy of Education conference, the fellowship allowed in-depth discussions with Ansley Erickson and Margaret Nash, who helped improve the early chapters.
Other friends have now been listening to me talk about kids breaking things for years on end, and I have benefited immensely from their questions and comments. All gratitude to Ethan Hutt, Robbie Gross, Frank Honts, Britt Tevis, Christine Lamberson, Nick Kryczka, Kyle Steele, Derek Taira, and Amato Nocera. And at the University of Maryland, in particular, I have appreciated the support of innumerable colleagues, including Barbara Finkelstein, Betty Malen, Claudia Galindo, Sophia Rodriguez, David Blazar, Jing Liu, Lisa Eaker, Sarah McGrew, Alison Jovanovic, and Lena Morreale-Scott. Thanks, as well, to Bill Reese, Adam Nelson, Walter Stern, and John Rudolph for having me out to speak at the University of Wisconsin the day before lockdowns began.
When colleagues discover that you are working on a new project, many also reach out with resources that they have come across in their own work, and these little details can prove immensely helpful along the way. My thanks to Bob Hampel for sharing an anecdote about chair wrecking; to Louis Mercer, for articles on vandalism and police officers in Chicago schools; to Jesse Chanin, for sharing the articles about children vandalizing their New Orleans school; to Michael Glass, for sending along helpful articles about arson on Long Island; and to Aaron Fountain, for sharing information on Latino student strikes.
A number of archivists and research assistants also helped make this book possible. Indispensable archival support came from Laura Wacowicz and the staff of the American Antiquarian Society; Vakil Smallen and the George Washington University Special Collections staff; the staff at the Wisconsin Historical Society; and Carol Smith, the archivist at the Philadelphia Contributorship, for help with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century insurance rates. Research assistance came from Amy Franzen, who photocopied voluminous records at the UCLA archives, as well as a number of graduate students at the University of Maryland, including Camille Fair-Bumbray, Erin Janulis, Justine Lee, Kavitha Kasargod-Staub, and Kayla Bill. Joel Miller went above and beyond in finding resources at the Baltimore City Archives, Neil Dhingra and Chris Hurst provided insightful commentary on early drafts and ideas, and Alisha Butler did a wonderful job generating ARC-GIS maps.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge extensive institutional support from the University of Maryland, including early teaching releases and a competitive Research and Scholarship Award, both of which facilitated the early stages of writing.
Introduction
A Few Words on Senseless Destruction
I have a confession to make. When I was in fifth grade I brought a box cutter from home and slashed up the back seat of my school bus. I am not really sure why I did it. I was a quiet and bookish kid, I liked the bus driver, and although an apathetic student I did not have any particular hostility toward the school. The act was senseless in a way that I found mystifying even at the time. What on earth could have possessed me? That was what the principal wanted to know as well, although he asked in a tone of exasperation rather than genuine wonder. He was on the edge of retirement and I can only imagine how many cases like mine he had confronted over his career. Broken windows and gouged desks. Ink and whiteout on the walls. Now a butchered bus seat. He sighed as he assigned me a detention and sent me back to class. The wantonness and waste that make individual acts of vandalism so frustrating must become even more incomprehensible over the years. Vandals seem to act on pure impulse, in ways that defy explanation or prevention. Who knows why do they do it?
There is a lot riding on that question. In the United States, vandals destroy over $600 million worth of school property every year, diverting scarce resources for maintenance and repair. Racist and sexist graffiti are pervasive, and there can be links between vandalism and other forms of criminal behavior, such as gang activity. Studies suggest that degraded school facilities make many students feel unsafe and can significantly impede learning. 1 Given these negative associations, there is an understandable expectation that schools should do something about vandalism. But what can they do? It is difficult to respond to a problem without a clear understanding of its source, and property destruction, a phenomenon with complex causes, is usually answered with narrow and ineffective remedies. In 1978, Vernon Allen and David Greenberger wrote that “current theoretical accounts of vandalism could be extensively criticized,” and they singled out the scholarship on school vandalism as “acutely embarrassing.” 2 Their criticism remains true today. Research on the issue is varied to the point of incoherence. Some characterize vandalism as violence, requiring stricter forms of deterrence and punishment. Others attribute it to problems in the school or society at large, best addressed by antipoverty programs, antiracist pedagogy, beautification projects, or new forms of community governance. Still others interpret vandalism as a developmental pathology, demanding therapeutic intervention. Social scientists pinball between new theories without advancing a comprehensive view of the issue, or narrow their selection of cases in ways that overdetermine its causes. Like the parable of the blind men with the elephant, different modes of inquiry have come to wildly different conclusions, making vandalism not only a practical but a conceptual problem.
Perhaps the confusion is to be expected, for vandals do not speak with a single voice. They are not always children, do not necessarily come from either dominant or marginalized groups, and do not all engage in the same forms of destruction. Vandalism cuts across demographic lines and afflicts every kind of educational institution, from one-room schoolhouses to large urban high schools. There are many reasons to light a fire or scratch a wall, and to describe an act as vandalism can obscure what is in fact an array of behaviors and motivations. Thus, any consideration of why individuals deface schools must draw from a range of academic disciplines—criminology, psychology, even philosophy—while at the same time preserving an element of fundamental uncertainty, an acknowledgment that the sources of destruction will sometimes remain unknowable.
This book sifts through centuries of debris to uncover multiple meanings of school vandalism. By taking a longer view of the issue, it hopes not only to move past the sensationalism of contemporary media reports but to expand the boundaries of existing scholarship, which remains narrow and poorly integrated. It does so in a somewhat unorthodox way. Rather than a single chronological narrative, it offers three parallel accounts of proper