Simpler Times

Yesterday’s discussion of The Battle Hymn of the Republic took me to the Wikipedia page for The Burning of the School and thence to the Teacher Taunts page, which records some of the songs schoolchildren used to sing among themselves. See if you notice any consistent themes:

To the tune of “Oh My Darling Clementine”:

Build a bonfire out of schoolbooks,
Put the teacher on the top,
Put the prefects in the middle
And we’ll burn the bloody lot.

To the tune of “Deck The Halls”:

Deck the halls with gasoline
fa la la la la la la la la
Light a match and watch it gleam
fa la la la la la la la la
Watch the school burn down to ashes
Fa la la la la la la la la
Aren’t you glad you played with matches
fa la la la la la la la la

To the tune of “Round and Round” (which I’ve never heard of):

Drop a bomb and it goes down, down, down,
Till it hits the school with a happy sound.
All the teachers Will go round, round, round,
While the school is burning to the ground.

And to the tune of Battle Hymn:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school,
We have tortured all the teachers, we have broken every rule,
We’re marching down the hall to hang the principal,
Us kids are marching on!

Glory, glory, halleujah!
Teacher beat me with a ruler,
I knocked her to the floor with a loaded forty-four,
And that teacher don’t teach no more!

To the tune of “On Top Of Old Smokey”:

On top of old smokey
All covered in blood
I shot my poor teacher
with a .44 slug

I shot her for pleasure
I shot her for fear
I shot her for drinking
My Budweiser beer

I went to her funeral
I went to her grave
Some people threw flowers
But I threw grenades

I looked in her coffin
She wasn’t quite dead
So I took a machete
And cut off her head

They took me to prison
Put me in a cell
So I grabbed a bazooka
And blew them to hell

To the tune of “Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay”:

Tah-rah-rah-boom-si-ay
We have no school today
Our teacher passed away
We shot her yesterday
We threw her in the bay
She scared the sharks away
Tah-rah-rah-boom-si-ay
We have no school today

And y’know, I haven’t thought about it in years, but when I was young, my dad used to sing some of these to me. I definitely remember “Glory glory hallelujah, teacher hit me with a ruler”, though I don’t think he sung the rest of it.

But I never heard them at my own school. Nor did I hear new songs that replaced them. Maybe these kinds of songs are fading away, some aspect of children’s street culture that one or another of the changes of the modern world have choked off.

[EDIT: Several others around my age did hear them.]

I’ve previously pointed out that social psychology includes a lot of crummy theories based on streetlight psychology. We like to think that if children use toy guns, or hear about guns on TV, or are allowed to draw violent pictures or write violent stories, that’s going to turn them into school shooters. Or how if any kid uses the word “shoot” and “school” on the same day they need to be dragged to the counselor for a full psychological assessment and maybe suspended for good measure. Yet in the past, children basically did nothing except sing about the bloody ways they were going to kill their teachers all day, and where were all their school shootings?

…is what I’d like to say. But looking through Wikipedia it seems like there were in fact quite a few school shootings. Not more than there are today, probably somewhat fewer, but without doing some kind of official count and adjusting for population and firearm access it’d be hard to tell for sure.

So I’ll use this to belabor a different hobby horse of mine.

A while back, I had a good debate with nostalgebraist. I thought that because social science was difficult and not always trustworthy, we should investigate social science extra carefully. He – I hope I’m getting his position right – thought we should trust social science less and default more toward our intuition and conventional wisdom and common sense of what is obviously true.

In a sense this is good Bayesian reasoning – if the evidence isn’t very strong, stick with the prior. I only object because today’s conventional wisdom is too often yesterday’s pop social science, the social science that has reached fixation so that nobody remembers its origins in social science anymore. This is such a strong effect that it’s almost impossible to notice; you just think it’s the way the world Really Is. My example was the parts of The Nurture Assumption which argue that the belief that parenting styles affect a child’s outcomes and personality is very new, the outcome of 20th century pop social science, something that would have seemed weird and innovative to George Washington, let alone Julius Caesar.

(this relates a lot to what I call reading philosophy backwards – reading a philosopher not to learn new unexpected insights, but to see which supposedly obvious features of ‘the culture’ are actually just things some dead German guy thought up one day)

But judging from these songs, people in my dad’s generation saw nothing wrong with hordes of children singing all lunch hour about how they were going to shoot their teachers with .44s, then light the principal on fire and burn the school – except maybe that it was disrespectful, or that children should be seen and not heard.

Here were kids singing about shooting the teacher, and then there were a couple of kids actually shooting teachers, but no one saw any reason to connect these two data points. And if you tried, you would be confronted with formidable evidence against – these were popular songs, sung by popular children in happy boisterous groups, and the school shooters were usually these sad loners who were left out of all the fun “kill the teacher” songs.

If you were to tell my dad’s teachers that all these songs about shooting teachers were causing or contributing to school shootings, I think they might have said something like “Well, that’s a new and audacious social psychological theory. I hope you have proof.”