This is a marvelous book about a distressingly destructive subject. Its author, Campbell F. Scribner, associate professor of education policy at the University of Maryland, is both wise and sensible enough to avoid firm answers to the why and wherefore of children and adults wreaking havoc on American schools to the tune of $600 million annually. He’s disarmingly candid about the history at issue, which at the outset he sums up in five words: “Americans regularly ransacked their schools” (p. 12). What there is more of, it turns out, is irony. One has to smile, for example, when toward the book’s end he writes that “children’s tendency to break things remains surprisingly hard to characterize” (p. 140). Although Scribner demonstrates the inherent difficulties, he just as effectively establishes that there has been simply no end to the characterizations. And it’s the characterizations that shape this historical record.
It is as if the smoking ruins and shattered glass serve as Rorschach inkblots for the theorizing classes, safely removed from the stench and mess. From Jane Addams to Philip Zimbardo, patterns are perceived and explanations offered. One wonders how John Dewey missed the opportunity to weigh in, while being delighted to see John Updike and J. D. Salinger did not. So, while theories—educational, political, psychiatric, psychological, and sociological—abound, it is to Scribner’s credit that he still manages to find more to this enigma than has been so readily characterized by so many.
The result is a book that is not so much a history of vandalism in American education as a Euro-American intellectual tour of the “philosophical significance of vandalism” (p. 98). Scribner sets out to provide cultural breadth to vandalism with Nietzsche’s fin de siècle celebration of “self-assured recklessness” involving “building and destroying” (p. 141). He can be historically exacting, as with the “first ecological account of delinquency” postulated at the University of Chicago in 1927 (p. 64). He can play detective in tracing the 1940s American applications of Freud’s death instinct to the school leaders who sought to counter such instincts through, as Scribner cites, “healthy outlets of fun and aggression” (p. 73). But then he can also cast doubts by asking whether wholesome extracurriculars “could really sublimate the death instinct,” let alone curb the desecration of public property (p. 73).
Scribner follows this conceptual trail into the 1960s, with Herbert Marcuse’s questioning of whether affluent societies need repress such libidinal instincts, out of an exaggerated concern for juvenile delinquency, while ignoring the real and present danger that Marcuse found in the “mature delinquency” associated with “ever more powerful missiles, rockets, bombs.”Footnote 1
Yet the response to vandalism in the decades that followed the 1960s was a repressively intolerant hardening of American schools, brought on, in part, by the insurance industry that grew up around the elaborate “actuarial techniques” intended to preserve public property (p. 49). It tended to turn schools into, as Scribner notes, a “crime proof fortress” with security guards, floodlights, and alarm systems (p. 92). This not only added to the costs associated with school vandalism, it added to the managerial takeover of the educational enterprise.
As for acts of vandalism, they can take on an almost cartoonish form in, say, children dynamiting a school because, they later told authorities, “vacation [had] not been long enough” (p. 47). Or, in a few shocking instances, they are plainly tragic, with school fires costing the lives of hundreds of children and teachers in the first half of the twentieth century. This gave me pause, turning the countless fire drills of my student and teacher days into something of a memorial exercise for those who didn’t make it out of the burning schools. In fact, I should warn readers that Scribner will not only have you reflecting on fire drills, but will very likely have you recalling your own forgotten act(s) of vandalism, however minor, if not publicly confessing to it, as he does. If it was but a single instance (for which I won’t play snitch), he disarmingly admits being mystified on the reason why he did the act, at the time and now, even after writing what is perhaps the book on the topic.
Scribner seems drawn to education’s breaking points, judging by what might be taken as his earlier companion work, Spare the Rod: Punishment and the Moral Community of Schools (2021), with Bryan Warnick.Footnote 2 Yet he must have struggled with vandalism, as a historian confronted by the “indeterminacy of anecdotes” (p. 153). Faced with the “at once abundant, disparate, and incomplete” evidence surrounding vandalism, as well as a literature on the topic that had been previously judged “acutely embarrassing,” he makes a brilliant move in organizing the book into two sections devoted to those who theorize the “senseless destruction,” followed by a third on the sublime impossibility of doing so (pp. 35, 2, 1).
The first section is devoted to those, such as Du Bois and Foucault, who see vandalism as an act of political resistance and defiance, and for which he has little trouble finding vandalism incidents aplenty that bear this out. Most notably in terms of this quicksilver history, he traces the reign of “racial terrorism” behind the torching of Black schools in the American South during Reconstruction (p. 78). Working from imperfect records, he assembles an arresting map of schools damaged or destroyed in county after county. He follows this destructive thread through to the civil rights movement, where it takes on strange twists. At some point, White supremacists began to recognize that it only undermined their own “separate but equal” claim, as Scribner dryly notes, “when schools for Black students kept bursting into flames” (p. 80). School integration initiatives, of course, only brought further burnings, with the disturbing addition of bus bombings. The larger historical pattern here—one of the few that marks vandalism clearly—involved waves of destruction that not only “targeted students and communities of color” but that disproportionately exposed them to the increasing criminalization of vandalism (p. 95).
The book’s second section turns to those who treat vandalism as a form of self-fashioning, which Scriber finds expressed through the marginalia left in books, the inscriptions carved into desktops, the “hidden transcripts” of latrinalia (p. 132)—with his reading of Fromm and Erikson suggesting that we might begin to “reimagine the bathroom as a place of maturation and self-realization” (p. 134)—and the endless array of cracked and broken glass, to which Scribner also brings wit: “A windowpane enchants the senses, and never more so than when one is holding a brick” (p. 138). But then, in the book’s third and final section, he comes close to vandalizing his own trade. He first reflects on the extent to which vandalism approaches the historical sublime, which involves “the irrational, impenetrable element of the past” that defies the historian’s tidy narratives (p. 149). And then he offers twenty or so quoted acts of vandalism scattered across the pages without any sense of order. Scribner offers these “shards” with a becoming humility, treating them as necessary lest the book’s two earlier parts “would simply make too much sense” (p. 154).
One finishes the book thinking that this is all that can be reasonably said about the vandalizing of schools, whether those acts are inspired by institutional violence, neglect, contempt, or are “unexplained and perhaps inexplicable” (p. 149). In this, I feel that Scribner’s book honors “children’s seemingly casual capacity for anarchy,” however little that capacity is “seemingly” or seemly (p. 48). It credits the “hidden spaces in childhood” (p. 163), for which he is especially well equipped to poetically realize with, for instance, “the sulfurous joy of lighting matches” (p. 97). Although he is not above recommending that we emphasize growth and restitution in addressing vandalism, in the end he bracingly proposes that we best view the topic falling within “the many aspects of schooling [that] remain outside our understanding and control” (p. 164). Again, by that ironic turn, this book aids our understanding of one such aspect.
