Doctors are sometimes forced, due to the zealous practice of litigation, the king of American sports, to practice “defensive medicine.” They may prescribe tests and medicines that are not needed because of the protective doctrine known as “CYA.”
The right of victims of medical malpractice should not be abridged, but the power to make frivolous and malicious allegations ought to be checked.
But the morbid faith of the “free enterprise system” is imprinted on most Americans and thus they embrace the new opportunism. If you can win a settlement then go for it; if you get what you’re after, then morality was on your side. So even that minority of doctors whose primary motive is truly to heal is strong-armed by the system into putting assets management ahead of pure science. And of course the patient, who in our land is just a type of consumer, suffers because of it.
Well, there’s a similar phenomenon called “defensive education.” In a way it’s even more insidious than defensive medicine because it forces teachers and any other staff members who have direct contact with kids to filter and suppress their impulses to show humanity and reign-in or second-guess what those new-age folks call “random acts of kindness.”
This kind of clinical self-consciousness became a survival tactic incumbent on anyone who has a private life and career to protect. With the ascendancy of the present Department of Education, which unlike the P.D. or most other agencies, seems hell-bent on suspecting the worst of it members and leaving them to twist in the wind on the smallest pretext or allegation from any source, we must watch our back. Their core values are exemplified by the feudal TRCs (“rubber rooms”).
If you break up a fight between two students and one of the combatants is or claims on the advice of a parent, best friend, or other interested party or agent, to have been injured by you, you may get into some deep hydra-headed trouble, especially if the principal is tickled by the idea.
Even if you didn’t hurt the kid at all or at least not deliberately, and you intervened to save a child from the assault of a brute twice their size and strength, the city’s corporation council will probably not represent you if you are sued because your title and job description does not authorize you to intervene in fights. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, after all!
In some cases you might be railroaded into a TRC and ultimately faced with a fine or possible termination.
Sometimes a crisis of conscience is unavoidable. You will choose to live dangerously and do the right thing because your soul compels you, even at the risk of security. But that’s not for everyone and why should it be?
Each day teachers encounter countless scenarios that curb their spontaneity to make a kind gesture or pay an innocent compliment. But we must still take the chance. Devotion to the “whole child” is the magnet that pulled us into teaching and we must practice what we do, like a medical specialty, though defensively and with a pinch of prudent paranoia.
