[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 91 (Thursday, June 24, 1999)]
[House]
[Page H4882]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  SMALLER SCHOOLS FOR BETTER EDUCATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, right after the Columbine shootings I 
mentioned as one of the many causes of some of these problems the fact 
that many of our high schools are simply too big. We have done a good 
job in getting class sizes down, but we made a bad mistake going from 
small neighborhood or community-based high schools to centralized, 
consolidated mega-sized high schools.
  Columbine had almost 2,000 students. Most young people can handle 
this, but some feel they have to resort to weird or sometimes even 
dangerous behavior to get noticed or get attention in a school where 
they are little more than a number.
  In a small school, a young person has a better chance of making a 
team or being a leader in a club or a cheerleader or being elected to 
the student council or standing out in some positive way. I wish we did 
not have to have a high school of more than 500 students. Young people 
will be much better off going to a smaller school even if they had to 
go into an older building or where fewer courses were offered.
  Bill Kauffman, writing in the new issue of Chronicles Magazine has 
some very interesting comments concerning the need for smaller schools 
and the shootings in Colorado, and this is a very lengthy quote, but I 
think it is worth listening to. Writing about our mobile and anonymous 
society he said,

                              {time}  1715

  ``Harris was an Army brat, spawn of a bizarre subculture that prizes 
rootlessness and places transience next to godliness. He grew up on a 
series of Socialist reservations. The family's final move was from 
Plattsburgh, New York, to Littleton, 2,000 miles distant. There he 
became just another brick in the wall of the inhumanly large Columbine 
High, whose 1,950 students were connected by a web so attenuated that 
dozens might fall through the cracks without the principal even knowing 
their names.
  ``Impersonal education factories like Columbine were a domestic 
innovation of the Cold War. The consolidation of small and rural 
schools into centralized warehouses was given its greatest push by 
Harvard President James B. Conant, who, subsidized by the Carnegie 
Corporation, produced a series of postwar reports arguing for the 
`elimination of the small high school.'
  Mr. Kaufman continued, ``According to Conant, defenders of human-
scale education were still living in a dream world which knew neither 
nuclear weapons nor Soviet imperialism. They believe they can live and 
prosper in an isolated, insulated United States.'' Conant, the 
barbarian, triumphed: The number of school districts plummeted from 
83,000 in 1950 to 18,000 in 1970. Mr. Kaufman said, ``Brutish kids will 
always make fun of others, but in a small school, parents or other 
adults have a fighting chance to enforce at least a minimal code of 
respect. And children in small, settled communities grow up with each 
other; by high school they almost certainly will have been to each 
other's homes and birthday parties and been on each other's ball clubs. 
Each student is essential to the small rural or neighborhood school; 
sports teams and the school play and a handful of clubs, 4-H rather 
than a model U.N., depend upon widespread participation. In a stable, 
which is to say blessedly immobile, community, kids know one another, 
and while to know Eric and Dylan may not have been to love them, the 
ties of human sympathy and lifelong friendship with at least some of 
their classmates might have braked the homicidal slide.''
  So, Mr. Speaker, I would say again, we need to go back to smaller 
high schools, even if in older buildings or even with fewer courses.
  Let me mention one other thing, Mr. Speaker. Insight Magazine, a 
publication of the Washington Times, had a cover story a few days ago 
which said, almost all of these school shootings over the last 2 or 3 
years have been done by young people who were taking or had recently 
taken very strong, mood-altering drugs such as Ritalin or Prozac.
  I remember another article in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, which said 
we were prescribing Ritalin in the United States at six times the rate 
of any other industrialized Nation.
  This article quoted a former top official of the DEA who said Ritalin 
had the same properties as cocaine and some of the strongest illegal 
narcotics. One study I heard about said Ritalin was most often taken by 
young boys who had both parents working full time.
  I know some of this may be necessary, but I question whether we need 
it at six times the rate of other industrialized nations. Some of it 
may be essential, but some of these children may be just boys crying 
out for more attention.
  We certainly should not be turning our children into drug addicts.
  To sum up, Mr. Speaker, we need smaller schools and fewer drugs and 
more time and attention for our children.

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