Posted on 05/28/2002 7:55:57 PM PDT by Starmaker
It is quite common, and often entertaining, to hear talk radio stars such as Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage blast political correctness. One strain of political correctness is an attempt to feminize men. The best way to do this is to start them when they are young. Schools are accused of trying to take all of the natural precocious quality or feistiness out of boys. The boy who is naturally aggressive or macho has to be changed. This is all great material for the talk show types. Unfortunately, it does happen in real life, unfortunately I have seen it with my own eyes, and I don´t like what I see.
Please don´t get the wrong impression. I would never be mistaken for John Wayne. Unless, I am getting too little exercise and eat too much, I weigh in at less than 140 pounds. I have not been in a fist fight since before I entered my teen years. I work as an accountant and don´t own any guns. However, I do consider protecting my family part of my role as a man. My ten year old son will hopefully play that same role with his family in the future. Part of the process of a boy growing up is to have other kids try to push him around and for him to learn how to stand up for himself. It has always been a rite of manhood which a boy passes or is subject to a lifetime of being pushed around and ridiculed.
The public schools have always had a problem understanding this. Some of that is to be expected. After all the public education establishment is responsible for the safety of the children. The first rule of every bureaucracy is to avoid a scandal, lawsuit, or negative publicity. Even in less strange times, there was always a danger that the schoolyard fight would escalate into something resulting in a serious injury to a kid. It was easier for teachers to tell kids to let teachers know if they are being picked on by another kid. Of course we all know what opinion other students have of a kid who complains to a teacher about being picked on.
Well last week my son came home with a behavior note because he got into a shoving match with another kid. He claimed the other kid started it, but we all know that ten year olds are not big on taking responsibility for their actions. I asked him what the teacher suggested he do under these circumstances. Her answer was to tell a teacher if someone pushes him. Teachers are supposed to understand kids. They are the ones who tell us they need to teach kids about condoms because kids will have sex anyway. You would think they could figure out that boys will push each other until someone refuses to be pushed. You would think they understand that the kid who complains to the teachers about being picked on by another kid will be the subject of scorn and ridicule by the other kids.
I wanted to respond to this behavior note. I wanted to let the teacher know that we are not teaching our son to be violent; however, we do not plan to let him think that he should be pushed around. I have explained to him that every person is their own first line of defense. The police largely investigate crimes and arrest the criminals. They do not anticipate crimes and prevent them in most cases. I wanted to let the teacher know that we are raising a boy who we expect to become a man, not a perpetual boy, or a feminized man, or a man who is androgynous. My son vehemently did not want me to respond to the teacher. There could be several explanations for this. Maybe he was guilty of more than he told us about. Maybe it is natural for kids not to want their parents to fight their battles for them. Maybe they don´t want their parents and teachers comparing too many notes. Or maybe, he already has learned that it is easier to go along than fight political correctness.
I decided not to make an issue of this. We live in a world where there are lots of things to argue about, especially if you are opinionated. It is not pleasant or advantageous to constantly be involved in disputes. One has to pick his fights. This one was not worth fighting over, it was just a behavior note and nobody really knows who started the fight.
Several years ago my son was seven and attending private school. He was new in the school as was a young girl his age. They became natural rivals for some reason. One of the other boys told my son that he planned to invite this young girl to his birthday party. My son told him, that if she was going to be at his party, he should have a BB gun to protect himself. Some teacher overheard the conversation. He was very shortly brought to the Principal´s office. I was mildly amused by this ridiculous overreaction by the school. This was a seven year old boy who had never held a gun, who did not get in trouble at school, who barely understood what he was talking about. Unfortunately, it was also shortly after the Columbine tragedy.
We received a call from the Principal. She told my wife that she knew my son, and did not want to make a big deal over it. (At the end of the year he scored the highest grade on the standardized math tests and she was rolling out a red carpet for him.) She did point out that if this was a large public school where she did not know the kids individually she would have had to suspend him. Luckily, I did not get the phone call, as I probably would have told her that I would have filed a lawsuit against a school that treated a kid like that. I also suspected that she might have been exaggerating in order to extol the superiority of private school, a little self serving tale telling perhaps. Unfortunately, she was being quite honest. This does happen. Friends in our former home town of Santa Cruz told us that a kid who mentioned guns in an offhand manner at school was suspended after being escorted out of the school grounds by a Deputy Sheriff. The Sheriff´s Department must not have had a single crime to investigate or control if they had time to crack down on children who pose no threat to anyone. The same educators, who constantly squeeze taxpayers by invoking their caring about children, see no problem with traumatizing little children for no reason. They were not complaining when little Elian Gonzalez had his child custody case settled by a swat team that raided the home where he was staying and pulled him out at gunpoint. That is their idea of sensitivity, I suppose. It is also somehow sensitive for uniformed police to yank a kid out of school for the kind of talk that young boys have engaged in forever.
There are other stories of kids who point their finger mimicking a pistol getting suspended from school. Part of this is an extreme overreaction to school shootings. However, it also seems like an attempt to mold young boys into their idea of what a man should be. In their view a man should look to government to protect, feed, and clothe him and his family. He should not take care of himself and his family. We see government very quickly and aggressively prosecute a man such as Bernhard Goetz who defended himself with a gun on a New York subway against five vicious young punks. We see a campaign starting up against home schooling. The educational establishment has the nerve to accuse parents of doing a poor job of educating children when the public schools are in a free fall of test grades and other objective results and when home schooled children are constantly winning spelling bees and other competitions.
We have been through private school. Unfortunately private schools are not totally viable in our area. The public schools have a good reputation so there is little demand for private school. The teachers´ unions have succeeded in convincing the public that teachers are underpaid and that the answer to the woes of public school results is to throw unlimited amounts of money at the public schools. The private school my son attended did not have enough kids for a separate fourth, fifth, or sixth grade class. There was a constant turnover of teachers. Part of the problem was that a teacher going from the private school to the public school could achieve a very large pay raise. The private schools cannot compete with the salaries that the public schools are paying now. They are also partially infected by political correctness and the need to feminize boys Home schooling is not really viable for us for a number of reasons that I cannot go into. So we have to live within a very flawed system. We have to tell our son not to believe some of what he hears at school.
The same kind of stupidity that leads teachers to blame all kids who fight leads to the logic that there is no moral difference between defending your nation and murdering children in another nation. It is the path to building a nation such as France that specializes in surrender. It is the attitude that will lead us to give up too early on the war on terrorism. If we lose the war on terrorism, we might find ourselves in a dark age beyond what we can imagine. Can we expect young boys who grow up in this environment to become the men who will defend their country? If they learn to turn their problems over to teachers who cannot deal with them, why not turn our national problems over to the United Nations, European Union, or some other variety of degenerated community? Why not trust that Iraq can be controlled by letting some inspectors who have to kiss the backside of the Iraqi dictator? We live in a world where citizens will have to make very tough decisions if our way of life is going to survive. Beating the manliness out of boys is not going to be the first step in that direction.
To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Philip at Phisaf530@aol.com .
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