Practicalmadness

If you get links forwarded to you by co-workers or friends or keep up with the news, you may have heard a story about some high school girls in Gloucester, MA who decided as a group to start having babies and raise them together, one going so far as to find a 24-year-old homeless dude to knock her up. You may also know that there’s now some doubt about certain details of that story. The school’s principal had said there was a “pregnancy pact” (and he’s also the source for the homeless dude thing), but inquiries by school and city authorities have found no evidence of such a pact. So the tenor of the coverage has shifted, from “OMG there are girls getting pregnant!” to “OMG a white guy lied about girls getting pregnant!”

So, questions of veracity aside, why were these girls allegedly knocking themselves up? Apparently, it’s because globalization has sucked all love and meaning out of their quietly failing fishing town, and this is a rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light kind of thing.

That’s fine, I guess, but one can’t help but wonder whether this graph speaks to the real reason why these young women couldn’t wait a few years to fill the gaping, baby-shaped void in their lives:

The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. “We’re proud to help the mothers stay in school,” says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.

It’s interesting that this should show up on my radar the same day as this funny funny blog post describing a really terrible job offer with no salary, demanding hours and a generally unpleasant working environment. (Let me ruin the joke for you: the author is describing his daughter’s elementary school.) The post was linked from the Twitter streams of three different software developers, either in the context of ‘that’s totally why I’m homeschooling my kid’ or ‘that’s totally why I dropped out of college.’

To attempt a full explanation for why American public schools are so profoundly fucked up is, alas, beyond the scope of this writing. So instead, please allow me to raise the following questions:

• What kind of insane world have we created for our children where high schools have day care centers?

• Did it not occur to anyone that that was a symptom of some deep, terrifying social malaise, if not such a nuclear explosion of meta-ness as to threaten the very fabric of the space-time continuum?

• What kind of death-defying mental acrobatics are required to look at that situation and think, ‘wow, we have finally solved the problem of unwed single mothers with unstable home lives dropping out of school’?

Free day care is what those of us in the armchair economics game call a “strong incentive,” especially when paired with free room and board from one’s parents. Toss in some media-blaming — do we really need round-the-clock coverage of Brad & Angelina’s babies? Of Jessica Alba’s baby bump? — and it seems obvious why these girls got pregnant: because society made it look glamorous, and the school made it seem cheap.