Americans orchestrating own doom

Scripps Howard News Service ^ | 10/22/6 | DALE MCFEATTERS

[SmithL]

The dispatches arrived in a bunch and pointed too much to the same conclusion to be coincidence. The conclusion: We're doomed. And it's not al-Qaida doing us in. We're doing it to ourselves.

In what is surely the tip of the social iceberg, a New England grade school has joined schools across the country in prohibiting the kids from playing tag at recess.

Touch football is also banned. The schools are growingly - and legitimately - fearful of lawsuits over playground accidents by litigious parents. Seesaws and jungle gyms have long since disappeared from playgrounds.

But there is probably more at work here than just fear of the courtroom: the kids' feelings. Remember a few years ago when the schools started banning dodge ball? The problem was, dodge ball was exclusionary, the point being to knock people out of the game at great risk to their positive self-image.

The problem of unsupervised games and skinned knees may be self-solving because surveys show recesses are shriveling, with the schools arguing they need that time to prepare their students for the tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act.

So how's that working out?

Not so hot, according to a Brookings Institution study. It found that, while American eighth-graders professed enjoyment of math and confidence in their math skills, they didn't perform as well as foreign eighth-graders, who were not so happy and confident.

Summed up one account: "Even the least confident students in Singapore outscored the most confident Americans."

Countries like the United States that teach math by trying to relate it to daily life using real-life examples have the worst scores. There's a two-word explanation for that: binomial theorem. When was the last time you had occasion in daily life to use that basic first step in introductory algebra? The more math you learn, the more remote it is from real life.

The final threads of this tapestry of doom came together when the Associated Press filed a story about an NFL program to help combat the epidemic of childhood obesity, a condition caused in part, the experts say, by a lack of exercise like, oh, say, playing tag or dodge ball.

The program aims to work physical activity into the classroom. Reported the AP:

"New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning dropped by a Manhattan public school this week where he showed eighth-graders how to add some exercise to their math class. He had them perform squats, then count their own heart rates for 15 seconds and multiply by four to calculate their heartbeats per minute."

So here we have eighth-graders - 13-year-olds - being challenged to count into the double digits and then multiply that number by four.

A science lesson would teach the dangers of cholesterol and the importance of healthy hearts by having the kids play - get this - tag. Imagine what it will do to the self-esteem of an eighth-grader who in a classroom game of tag is chosen to be cholesterol, heart-clogging fat.

We will ask ourselves how we got to be so fat and stupid. And the answer will come: Education.

We're doomed.

Indeed, the descendants of the flinty New Englanders who chased the British redcoats from Lexington Green and Concord Bridge back to Boston are prohibited from playing all unsupervised "chasing games."

There is likely some advantage in approaching a difficult task with humility and trepidation, but we do lead the world, however, in instilling self-esteem.

If you're really good, there are only about five other people in the world you can talk to, and none of them, very likely, is a Singaporean eighth-grader.

[sageb1]

"in instilling self-esteem"

As a right, rather than something that is earned.

[Spirochete]

When the pussification of America is complete, I'll be like Stallone in "Demolition Man". The one-eyed man is king in the land of the blind.

[DCPatriot]

Jay Leno had a funny observation about the abrupt end to the game of tag.

Imagine the self esteem of the poor b*stard that was the last one tagged "IT".

HE/SHE must go thru the rest of their lives being "IT".

[marc costanzo]

>>When the pussification of America is complete, I'll be like Stallone in "Demolition Man". The one-eyed man is king in the land of the blind.<<

You mean in that future world were 'CONTACT SPORTS' have been banned because they are too agressive - -

That future was described by the character played by Wesley Snipes as a "pussy-whipped [faggot], Brady Bunch version of itself"

The word: faggot, was in the movie when it was first released in theaters, then it was edited out .

[sageb1]

"HE/SHE must go thru the rest of their lives being "IT"."

And my reply would be...."Get over IT." ;)

[Hetty_Fauxvert]

Indeed, the descendants of the flinty New Englanders who chased the British redcoats from Lexington Green and Concord Bridge back to Boston are prohibited from playing all unsupervised "chasing games."

What kind of panty-waist kids are we raising these days? Heck, our ancestors are getting more exercise than the kids these days, from all the spinning they're doing in their graves!

Home-schooling is looking better all the time.

[Xenophon450]

This has been going on for some time. Sad state of affairs, but it is all part of a bigger plan. Make the population fat, lazy, and well in effect stupid but have a sense of high importance so that they may be strung around like a brutish oaf, to do the malevolent, much more charismatic and intelligent, individual's bidding.

[sizzlemeister]

I love articles like this because they're so true - at least in a sense. We can point fingers at the unions and liberals for watering down education in this country, and we'd be mostly correct, but at the end of the day WE ALL are to blame.

Our past, the blood, sweat and tears of our forefathers, who only tried to "make a better life" for their children, us, has become our decadence. Technology, market and societal advancement (although I don't necessarily mean that as a positive), and work ethic, have led us to become tired, easy to manipulate, dismissive, and as such FAT and STUPID. Yes, FAT and STUPID.

Where are all the kids playing football in vacant lots? Where are all the kids playing street hockey? I don't see it in my bucolic little corner of the country. I'd gladly wait for the kids to get the net out of the way of my car as long as they were playing outside. No, their ears are glued to their stupid cellphones, walking up and down my neighborhood streets late at night coping feels of one-another, spewing filth and practicing the art of seduction at 13.

Why? Because for 40 years the democrats wanted to create a society of sheep who fall for their brainless manipulations and "require" government direction at every step in their lives? Well, yes, but, WHERE WERE YOU? How did you vote? Did you care? Did you say something, write a letter, perhaps, *gasp* PROTEST? Now we have to clean this mess up. But we can't yet, now we have China, Iran, N. Korea, and Russia, eyeing us up, calculating our weaknesses - Russia and China are fairly quiet, most likely the ones controlling the experiments against us, and there's NO QUESTION their pawns, Iraq and N. Korea, are the "media" being used to conduct these experiments on US. Right? Do we take of "terrorism" (and I'm not suggesting terrorism is not real or an immediate threat, but I AM suggesting that its present scope is not the product of its own momentum) and then take care of home?

NO! Ignoring the issues of our weaknesses as a society NOW will lead to a failure to prevail in ALL AREAS of our future survival as a nation. We must put more stock in the clarion calls an articles like this are. We must use this skill we've all developed to multi-task for pleasure and commerce to repair and fortify our society!

[SpaceBar]

All things operate on cycles, social and political trends are not immune. The pendulum will only swing so far.

[FARS]

check out this article on AntiMullah about how we should wake up.


http://noiri.blogspot.com/2006/10/learn-america-learn-and-fast.html

[durasell]

The one-eyed man is king in the land of the blind.



Uh no, he's usually diagnosed as a pyschotic and shot full of thorazine, but have fun anyway.

[BigSkyFreeper]

The only people that need to wake up are every friggen Democrat and all these cut-and-run conservatives.

They can all beat us over the head about tax cuts and tax hikes and more money for this and less money for that, but all that matters not if we're all dead.

[TheLion]

I had the good fortune to be a kid in the 50's. Since we didn't have any goodies like computers and cell phones, we played outside all the time. You name it, and we probably played it.

I was only in the house to eat, sleep or to do homework. We were outside, even in the winter.

We got to know our neighbors and built strong relationships with other kids. We also learned the value of hard work and practice to improve one's sporting skills.

Probably caused my mom a headache cleaning all those clothes. Most moms didn't have to work in those days. She could stay around and keep an eye on us.

Since most kids don't get down in the dirt every day, their immune systems are probably suffering along with their self esteem and self worth.

[odds]

Thanks for the ping and I'll check out the article on the site.

I think this is and has been culturally specific.

I don't have specific stats but, generally speaking, I believe some Asian countries such as Japan, China and Singapore (even a European country such as Germany) are much more concrete-oriented & 'perscriptive' - subjects such as high level math and physics are much more valued and encouraged. The U.S. is more abstract-oriented in comparison.

[GoLightly]

Wow! That is a real eye opener.

[UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide]

Succinctly: A few kids have got to get crippled or DIE in exuberant traditional physical activities in order to raise a generation worth a crap.

[nathanbedford]

Two years ago, in January 2002, I published this comment which you might find relevant to this article. It attempts to treat of the liberal compulsion to jerk every lever in their quest not just for the betterment of man's condition but for the perfectibility of man himself. In the long run, these preposterous excesses are not really the result of fears over litigation, they are the inevitable consequences of the liberal mindset which sees your child in school as only another chicken in a Skinner box.

GOD AND MAN IN THE SKINNER BOX

Attending college in the 60's, I was exposed to the writings of BF Skinner in a mandatory Psychology 101 class. At the time I was struck by the time and energy the department devoted to this man and his theories. Essentially, he put a chicken in a box and taught it to play baseball by rewarding it with feed. When the chicken pressed a lever on cue, or ran a base, it got a pellet. Skinner was able to train animals to a remarkable degree with this method of positive reinforcement. He also demonstrated that negative reinforcement, such as electric shocks, was not as effective as positive reinforcement in controlling animal behavior.

So far, Skinner has not done the world much harm and perhaps he has even contributed something useful if you are Siegfried and Roy. But it soon became clear that Skinner and my psych professors had ambitions grander than dog and pony shows when they required a reading of Skinner's Walden Two. Here Skinner extrapolates his findings from chickens to people and causes real mischief. Essentially, he postulates that the humsn animal is a TABULA RASA, neither good nor evil, which can be conditioned into good behavior. There are no evil people just poorly conditioned behavior. All that is required to have generations of well behaved human chickens is a grand enough Skinner box to positively reinforce positive behavior. Of course, it does not take a socialist to see that it would take more than a village, indeed it would take a federal burocracy, to build and maintain a big enough box.

The mischief comes in when this thinking invades the penal (whoops, I mean corrections)system or the educational establishment and so on. Praeger, in his wonderful essay, has alluded to the effects on education of this baleful presumption about the nature of man. He is absolutely right when he says: you a mess of Wu

No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not. (Praeger's comment in an article which prompted this post)

This is why liberals loathe believing christians. This is why liberals are collectivists and conservatives are individualists. This is why the Democrat party slices and dices the electorate into groups. This is why Patty Murray said what she said. The old adage that liberals love mankind in the abstract and as a group (read African-Americans) but despise them on an individual level finds its origins here. This is why believing Christians and believing Jews are finding that they hold much in common and have a common philosophical enemy in secular Jews and goyische pagans. The application of this insight is almost endless.

[BIGLOOK]

Very interesting article.

The appalling lack of education occurring in this country and wrongheadedness of the politically correct crowd invites capitulation to criminal and anarchist behavior. The example of South Africa is a good one.

(Long ago I found a history book on South Africa which contradicted the more modern claims of the tribal claims as indigenous peoples. The Dutch and later. the English settled a huge area sparsely populated by the Hottentots and Bushmen. Migrations from the north began one hundred years later.)

[lesser_satan]

Is it really even possible for a "faggot" to be "pussy whipped"? It seems to me the whole notion of being "pussy whipped" presupposes the condition of having the aforementioned portion of the female anatomy conditionally withheld until some task the aforementioned female wishes one to perform is fulfilled, hence holding no sway over someone who is of the homosexual persuasion.