If you’re anything like me, and you work alone with nobody but a dog around, then this is the kind of story that will make you say bad words out loud. Maybe out very loud. The rest of you, prepare to mutter under your breath:
In the politically correct world we are now forced to live in, courtesy of the progressive left, a second-grade student at Mary Blair Elementary School in Loveland, Colo., has been suspended for throwing an “imaginary grenade.”
“The 7-year-old says he was trying to save the world. But school administrators say he broke a key rule during his pretend play,” KDVR-TV reported.
What is the key rule? No real or play fighting.
We’re doomed. I don’t know what else to conclude, other than we’re doomed.
A kid can’t throw a pretend grenade. A while back, a 12-year-old girl was taken away from her school — in handcuffs — for the crime of doodling on her desk. The Cookie Monster has been neutered to the point where he must lecture kids that “cookies are a sometimes food.” We’re smashing every last bit of creativity and imagination and fantasy out of our kids on the altar of Safety and Conformity.
The next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates is out on a playground somewhere this morning, being suspended or expelled for “thinking different.”
We’re doomed.
Ever hear the quote:
“The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”?
Meaning that the process that lead to British battlefield superiority first began as childhood games which formed the characters of the people who would become leaders of the country.
What kind of character are we forming in our schools? Are we forming character or destroying any sense of character in those that attend these “little monster” academies?
When I was in seventh grade, we had a teacher who had us mock fight a trench warfare battle from WWII in an unused classroom. We were throwing paper grenades, shooting paper guns, and dragging the wounded back to the ‘trench’.
What the hell has happened.
That sounds awesome and a lot better than carting around an egg for a few weeks.
You’re not kidding, TD! I wish my 7th grade was like That Thing’s! By then, in my school, the graduates of “progressive” college education departments were making their presence known.
For a history class report I demonstrated the effect of napalm on a grass hut — with fire-starter gel, a miniature hut, and some matches.
Yes, we were outside of the school building.
Chicken.
Glenn Renyolds has it right: sending your children to public school is an act of child abuse.
Progressive liberals and their political correctness is the gift that keeps on giving. If one didn’t know better one would think liberals dote on Orwell’s “1984″ like Conservatives are said to dote on Ayn Rand. The difference is that people who like Rand’s novels crowd around what she promotes, not the opposite.
In the Orwellian world of the Left, Christians are intolerant weirdos who suck all the fun out of life. However, my teachers who were nuns at Catholic school come off like laid back hippies compared to today’s smothering PC climate. Liberals even actually use the phrase “zero-tolerance” for those who doubt they are intolerant.
Nuns at my grade school kept a very firm hand over us. Having said that, it was light years away from this cloying PC perfume liberals stink of. The nuns didn’t like us standing on a ledge 10 ft above the ground and being handed the rope from the flag pole while we swung around like Tarzan, but if we’d mimicked throwing hand grenades, it would’ve been invisible.
I can’t imagine who would handcuff a kid for doodling but I do believe such people would handcuff squirrels for chittering if they could. I once read an introduction to a history of The Crusades that said there was an air of madness in Europe around 1095. There certainly is that in America today. The Crusade is against ourselves for having created America in the first place. Perhaps Hollywood can begin a “Let’s-Go-Back-To-Europe” campaign, so we can leave America to chittering squirrels and First Nationers or whatever faddist pug-ugly phrase liberals use to describe “Those-Who-Are-Not-Different-And-Yet-Are.”
When I was somewhere around the 2nd grade, in 1968, I had a classmate named Ernest whose Dad had been in the German Army in World War II. My Dad had flown in a B-26 bomber for the USA in that war. In school, I drew a picture of my Dad’s plane dropping a bomb on Ernest’s Dad. We both giggled about it, and then I think Ernest drew a picture of his Dad shooting down the B-26. More giggling, and probably some talk about which one of our dads could beat the other one up, and which army was actually better in WW II. Somehow, we remained on very friendly terms, and I remember Ernest inviting me over to his house more than once after that, where I met his Dad. Ernest and I both often played with toy soldiers, and toy guns. Somehow, I never assaulted Ernest, or Ernest’s Dad, or anyone else (except someone in Pittsburgh who attacked me on the street).
Our “betters” today have no understanding of human nature, especially of the male variety.
I love this story. Thank you.
You’re welcome Stephen!
I wish I had a son. I’d love to teach him the joys of model airplanes and tanks, toy soldiers, battle dioramas, old movies such as “Battleground,” etc. Are such things legal anymore?!
I do have a small nephew, but my crazed, feminist sister has turned him into a long-haired, ballet-loving wussy boy, despite my occasional friendly rough-housing with him. Knowing male biology, maybe there’s still hope for him once he leaves the harpy’s nest.
In one of his many publications Mark Steyn relates an anecdote of a child being given a sword and a shield; the mother objected to the sword and took it away. The child was last seen practicing “cowering” in the driveway with the shield.
On a slightly related note; I was at the park with my children and the neighborhood children and their nannies. One (fat) child was admonished not to run. Flabbergasted I asked the nanny why; “He might fall down and hurt himself!” I countered that was how he was going to learn to get back up again, but she was not raising a child, she was “on the job” and her purpose was to have an unhurt child at the end of the day.
I don’t think this mentality ends well.
Don’t worry, the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates is a nine year old girl or boy whose amazing imagination is being nurtured by their homeschooling parents. When we first started homeschooling our sons, people would consistently ask the same question; “Aren’t you worried about socialization?” My response was usually, “Yes. we are, which is why we DON’T send them to public schools.” Uninformed people think that homeschooled children are locked in the house all day. Nothing could be further from the truth, our kids were in Tae Kwon Do, swim team, community theater, Lego robotics, and volunteered at the library and a local nursing home. As the old joke goes, the difference between people in prison and children in public school is that the prisioners aren’t forced to read books written by the warden.
Oops, that’s “prisoners”.
Pretty soon Paintball will be banned because it mimics warfare.
When I was in High School in the 70′s, we had a skeet and trap team as well as a rifle team. Students on the team carried their weapons on campus, where the principal had a walk in safe, where they were kept until needed for practice.
We also had an ROTC unit. The ROTC Unit had a drill team that carried M-1′s which were stored on campus in the Gym inside the building engineers office.
Imagine.
Arbitrary punishments on things/values society has in general not ratified yet, or has actually said “no” to, are a form of cruel and unusual punishment due to their Kafkaesque “thought crime” nature, and are thus unconstitutional. The “cruel” part comes from punishing someone doing something society thinks or has thought is perfectly legit, but an administrator thinks there is a better idea of what society should be, and though he hasn’t bothered to get buy-in from society, he acts as if he has.
The amount of pushback these punishments get should be a prime indicator they are viewed as cruel, for they are clearly “shocking the consvience” of society.
This is what happens when there is too much inbreeding in the “Silly sapiens” set in their cubicle huts.It reduces the amount of Neanderthal DNA to a level that is below what is needed to survive.
When I was in High School in Colorado in the mid 1980s, I was in a frontier history class where the class field trip was to a firing range to shoot a variety of weapons, including replica black powder rifles and pistols and then compared them with a couple of modern weapons, including a .44 magnum. We all had a great time and learned much about the time period and technological advances. A girl who had professed to be afraid of the weapons and reluctantly tried them turned out to be the best shot. None of us came back with a desire to shoot up our classmates.
Sure couldn’t do that today.