Here’s a Canadian with a biting sense of humor. She reveals the left wingers for what they are.
I blame the Burning Schoolhouse.
Canadians are perversely proud that our most popular backyard firework is unavailable in the United States. More like a science-fair volcano than a proper pyrotechnic, the homely Burning Schoolhouse merely spews a two-foot flame that lasts half a minute if you’re lucky.
But every May Two-Four for generations, Canadian kids have cherished those measly 30 sacred seconds, indulging in socially sanctioned fantasies of third-degree carnage.
You won’t hear this from Michael Moore, but modern school shootings are a Canadian invention, too, and I don’t just mean 1989’s “Montreal Massacre.” Despite the absence of a so-called “gun culture,” we spawned the first Adam Lanzas back in the mid-1970s, getting a twenty-plus-year head start on Columbine.
Don’t be fooled by those low body counts circa 1975. Look at the number of wounded, too. In both instances—unlike most American school shootings in the 1970s—those Canucks were would-be spree killers, targeting more than just a hated teacher or classmate.
I’m only kidding about blaming a tacky once-a-year firecracker display, but in the wake of Sandy Hook, would-be reformers are deadly serious. From the gun grabbers to those who want to lock up loonies, they’re all foolishly looking for a solution through the wrong end of the telescope.
It’s obvious that the way to end school shootings is to forget about the “shootings” part and focus on the first word instead.
We need to abolish schools.
A survey of popular culture indicates that attitudes about compulsory public education have drastically devolved. Children have always hated school, but the Our Gang kids only “played hooky” from class, they didn’t shoot it up. The “juvies” in Blackboard Jungle (1955) just smash up some classical-music records and manhandle a teacher (who probably liked it).
The sea change dates back to—you’ll never guess—1968, when Lindsay Anderson’s film …if climaxed with an armed student rebellion at an English public school.
A multitude of Tom Brown-turns-John Brown fiction pieces followed. “School’s been blown to pieces,” Alice Cooper growled triumphantly in 1972. Then came Massacre at Central High (1976), Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979), and the ingenious satire Heathers (1988). School in countless American films is depicted as a conformist concentration camp with a marching band.
Today, two multi-million-dollar entertainment franchises, Twilight and The Hunger Games, revolve around teens fighting each other to the death—but God forbid gun-phobic, video-game-banning suburban moms question their own reading habits, right?
No, I’m not blaming pop culture, either. Movies and music reflect the zeitgeist as much as they influence it; attempting to guess exactly when they do which is as easy as guessing which wire to snip when defusing a bomb.
Some trace our troubles to the outlawing of school prayer. I’ll grant those well-meaning folks points for getting their dates right, since those Supreme Court decisions came down in 1963 and 1964.
But prayer wasn’t the only thing swept aside, as Latin-literate older readers don’t need me to tell them.
Here’s a former substitute teacher:
I then made it my business, when finding an older teacher, to ask if education had been “dumbed down.”…Algebra teachers informed me that every year they were forced to eliminate problem sets that previous years had mastered. English teachers who once taught Shakespeare and Dante were now reduced to leading seniors through Orwell’s Animal Farm….
We could do much worse than Animal Farm. The trouble is, most teachers imply that the pigs on two legs are right-wingers. Not coincidentally, former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers (see “1968,” above) is now revered as a pedagogical guru even by the president.
Camille Paglia is aghast that her college freshmen don’t know who Adam and Eve and Moses are, and haven’t even the sense to pretend to be embarrassed about it.
The easier we made school for kids, turning classrooms into laboratories of compulsory leftist social engineering, the more kids hated it—some to the point of homicide.
Abolishing the public-education system has no downside. A few million obese, incompetent, corrupt, vicious teachers and parasitical bureaucrats will finally be fired.
The conservative establishment’s dream of abolishing the Department of Education will come true.
Homeschooling is superior anyhow. Mothers will be able to do it because the taxes skimmed off the top of their salaries will no longer be needed to prop up said department.
Real and imaginary social problems such as chickenhawk teachers, anti-gay “bullying,” pro-gay sex education, the drugging of “hyperactive” boys, busing, high-school football concussions, and girls dressing like prostitutes for the prom will vanish.
Decades hence, our offspring will listen in disbelief when we tell them we used to pay billions of dollars to warehouse children in “gun-free zones” overseen by morons; that 21st-century kids were groomed for 19th-century jobs and came out functionally illiterate but experts nonetheless on the subjects of Kwanzaa, “safe” sex, and something called global warming.
Then every Gen-X grandparent will pat the shocked little rug rat on the head and say reassuringly, “Our love is God; let’s go get a slushie.”
http://takimag.com/article/ban_schools_not_guns_kathy_shaidle/print#ixzz2GYej0x7z
Eddie says:
A refreshing viewpoint. Schools are obsolete…but, unfortunately, monolithic institutions never die a natural death.
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30th December 2012 at 1:13 pm
KaD says:
Or maybe there’s a better middle ground-bring back the one room neighborhood schoolhouse. Or online learning from home. For traditional public schools that ‘graduate’ kids who are functionally illiterate (not to mention mentally illiterate) there is no downside to a complete shutdown.
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30th December 2012 at 1:27 pm
AWD says:
“The easier we made school for kids, turning classrooms into laboratories of compulsory leftist social engineering, the more kids hated it—some to the point of homicide.”
“Abolishing the public-education system has no downside. A few million obese, incompetent, corrupt, vicious teachers and parasitical bureaucrats will finally be fired.”
Brilliant solution. Now, how to get the progressive liberal shithead brainwashers out of the college and university system.
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30th December 2012 at 1:42 pm
sangell says:
The modern public school system developed in an era of two parent families with the father working a stable job that created stable neighborhoods. The fragmentation of families and the loss of stable employment makes that model no longer fit for purpose. It was one thing to have large junior high and high schools when parents ran the neighborhoods and teachers ran the schools and the lines of communication between the two were open and working. It doesn’t work anymore except in the most favored rural and affluent neighborhoods.
What has happened is a Lord of the Flies adolescent culture taking root in most junior and high schools as the link between family, neighborhood and school has decayed. Behavior that once would have been immediately reported back and forth along formal and informal social network that once existed no longer is and thus goes uncorrected. The adolescent becomes emboldened by the lack of sanctions imposed on anti-social behavior and even gains prestige amongst his peers the more extreme his/her feral behavior becomes. Thus a Lord of the Flies culture develops amongst these large populations of adolescents that teachers and parent/s have little influence on.
I once came across a photo collection of segregated schools in the Jim Crow South. Black kids were really poor then and their schools little more than clapboard buildings with pot belled stoves in the classroom but the girls wore dresses and the boys were neat with shirts tucked into trousers. No Air Jordan sneakers, no butt cracks exposed, no baseball caps on backwards either and you just know those poor black kids could read and do math at far higher levels than the kids of today.
I encourage everyone to vote against any and all education bond issues and school taxes for only be making the public schools so bad no decent parent would dare put their children in them can we break this horrible monopoly that is slowly destroying generation after generation of children.
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30th December 2012 at 2:05 pm
Chicago999444 says:
Slight correction: The Supreme Court decision banning school prayer came down in 1954, not 1964.
It was flatly, absolutely forbidden for our schools to bring religion into the classroom or lead their pupils in prayer when I was a little boomer in school 1958-70. My mother was completely on board with the ban and so were most other parents, who did not want their kids being indoctrinated with religions that were not necessarily those of the parents. My mother quaked at the thought of her babes being infected with Catholicism and our Catholic neighbors were very sure that they didn’t want their kids led in prayer by a Protestant woman.
The idea was that schools existed to give kids academic skills, but only parents could convey moral values.
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30th December 2012 at 2:38 pm
AWD says:
BAN PEOPLE NOT GUNS!
Weak liberals want gun control but everyone knows this will solve nothing. Weak liberals are a menace to society. They are nothing but useful idiots without brains in their heads.
Strong communism is the only answer. Communists have nothing against the constitution or the second amendment. We support the constitution. We support the right to bear arms! We support human freedom! Weak liberalism’s solutions to society’s problems never work because weak liberalism never addresses the core central problems of society. Instead they ban inanimate objects, undermine constitutional rights, and frighten the bourgeoisie with their childish fetishes.
Society’s problem is with the sort of people that buy and own guns. Strong communism demands control of these people. To better protect society and preserve our constitutional right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness we need strong people control laws.
Strong communism has nothing against gun ownership; we are against the kind of people that own guns. These kind of people are dangerous anti-social fascists whose pathologies of individualism undermine the social fabric of their communities endangering everyone with hooliganism and criminality. Everyone understands this but weak liberals have no stomach for real solutions to society’s problems. Strong communism demands real solutions. Strong communism demands we end problems. Strong communism will make society safe. We need people control now!
Strong communism demands: ban people not guns!
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30th December 2012 at 3:12 pm
IndenturedServant says:
“The idea was that schools existed to give kids academic skills, but only parents could convey moral values.”
Major fail on BOTH accounts!
I_S
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30th December 2012 at 4:05 pm
Oscar Mannheim says:
@Chi The key school prayer case was Engel vs Vitale and it was 1962, not ’52. I remember well the recitation of the 23rd (KJ version) Psalm and prayer during my elementary school years (1952-1958). I remember too that Catholic kids did not finish the Lord’s Prayer with the verse “for Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever” but simply crossed themselves after “and lead us not into temptation”, muttering “Amen” under their breaths. Jewish kids stayed silent, as I recall, but stood with the rest. Everyone was civilized, well-behaved, and we were fortunate in the community not to have the pushy, embittered, self-righteous sort of would-be social-engineers who would eventually destroy Western culture and civilization owing to the gullibility and passivity of the populace that could have maintained them simply by keeping the commies out of education. Way too late now: the West is so dumbed-down now that the young are easily manipulated unless their parents are fanatical about educating them outside the indoctrination factories.
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30th December 2012 at 4:11 pm
backwardsevolution says:
Schools are great places to instill indoctrination and conformity. How else are you going to mold the drones?
Personally speaking, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by my child’s Socials textbook. It’s a different reading of history than I got. It’s not blatant, but you can easily read between the lines about why wars were started, etc. Maybe it’s because I can read between the lines; others may not be able to.
“Abolishing the public-education system has no downside. A few million obese, incompetent, corrupt, vicious teachers and parasitical bureaucrats will finally be fired.” This has not been my experience. My kids’ teachers at the high school level (with very few exceptions) have been nothing but excellent. And the curriculum has been tough, much, much harder than I ever had it.
Home schooling? OMG, children taught by the very parents who consider themselves exceptional, who elected Bush and Obama? Are you kidding me? That’d be like the blind leading the blind.
Good on-line schooling would be great, but who is going to create the curriculum? What’s it going to say? How many welfare mommas are going to insist their children take a seat at 9:00 a.m.?
I don’t have the answers. I just know what happened when mental institutions were shut down. I fear the same might happen here.
Perhaps we’d end up with the same amount of successful kids, but at a much-reduced cost.
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30th December 2012 at 4:20 pm
big Tom says:
maybe local control like there was 75=100 years ago is the answer. stop sending education money to the state/fed level and go back to the local township schools where the township people pay the teacher/s and the teachers are accountable for educating the kids to local standards and expectations, . locally , the school boards are having what little power remaining taken away
the one room schools of the old rural townships seem to have produced real leaders for the country rather than parrots that cannot think for themselves past re election
then maybe with local change moving up through the nation level, we may have a chance of devolving back to what this country used to stand for , God honor integrity self determination and the pursuit of happiness , not the pursuit of equal happy meals for all,
mediocrity is the new normal
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30th December 2012 at 5:17 pm
T says:
Read this it is enlightening.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
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30th December 2012 at 5:31 pm
Anonymous says:
School didnt make Lanza a nut-job.
Genetics did.
And let us not forget the fact his mother didnt secure the weapons her son stole.
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30th December 2012 at 10:47 pm
Novista says:
Anonymous
Two assumptions, unless you have reliable links.
On the second, you’d think that the arms rooms of hq co, Ft McNair would have been secure — but when I was there, two .45 1911As disappeared in the dead of night without a trace. Having had various security roles, army and civilian, I can assure you that nothing is 100% secure.
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30th December 2012 at 9:23 pm
Ban Schools, Not Guns | Flyover-Press.com says:
[...] A Canadian Solution to the Gun Problem (theburningplatform.com) [...]
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30th December 2012 at 7:48 am