Class plan

Mini-lecture: "mental hygiene": the forgotten history that left outsized legacies
- Spotlight #1: Juvenile delinquency: what can we learn from Broadway musicals?
- Spotlight #2: Troubled children: what can we learn from teacher training books?

BREAK

Experiencing "learning with the lights off": your choices and why
All-class film excerpt viewing with discussion
MLK 1968: "Proud to be maladjusted" -- rethinking a legacy

Mini-project group: what has happened to the "troubled child" in schools today?

Pt 1: Courts and law enforcement: the invention of the juvenile delinquent

"Officer Krupke," from West Side story, 1961

Wolcott, David B. "Cops and Kids." Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban America (2005), Just read pp. 1-7.

Part 2: Schools: how we learned to be "well-adjusted"

Cohen, Sol. "The Mental Hygiene Movement, ‘Personality,’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century American Education.” Counterpoints 76 (1999): 227–48.
Crow, L. D., & Crow, A. (1963). Mental hygiene for teachers: a book of readings. New York: MacMillan. Please look at this book with curiosity and care. Read the ToC, note the vocabulary terms used, read the introductory articles. Find other elements that intrigue you Come in ready to share

"Mental hygiene" films: learning with the lights off

Ken Smith,Mental Hygiene: Classroom Films, 1945-1970. Blast Books, 1999. Please read pp. 11-34.
Then browse the "reviews" of films starting on p. 112. Choose two to watch yourself by clicking on the lived linked image below (not all will be online, but many will)

The hidden politics of being well- adjusted: Martin Luther King Jr "Proud to be maladjusted," 1967

“…Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is the word maladjusted. It is the ring and cry of modern child psychology and certainly we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. We all want to live a well-adjusted life in order to avoid the neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But I must honestly say there are some things in our nation and the world to which I am proud to be maladjusted and wish all men of goodwill would be maladjusted until the good society is realized.

"I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to a religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, leaving millions of people smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence…

.".we need maladjusted men and women where these problems are concerned. It may well be that our whole world is need of the formation of a new organization, the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day cried the words that echoed across the centuries, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who had the vision to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free. As maladjusted as that great Virginian Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery, could scratch words across the pages of history, words lifted to cosmic proportions, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” As maladjusted as Jesus Christ, who could say to the men and women around the Galilean hills, “Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you. Pray for them that despitefully use you.” And through such maladjustment, we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.”

Group mini-project: Who are the "maladjusted" today? Spotlight on ADHD management in today's school system