"Fat, drunk, and stupid is how we want you to go through life son."
Posted on 10/21/2006 10:38:35 PM PDT by 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.
This is what happens when you have an education system run by morons.
Murder-Death-Kill, huh?
Most people know (even if subconsciously) that all their fellow earth travelers can be both "good" and "bad" at any given moment in time. (I just had to throw a wrench in perfection, LOL.)
Social and political views should reflect the use of Skinner as a carrot and Freud as a stick to be effective.
Forget the negative consequences (the rod) and spoil the child.
I'm only on here for a minute, this morning, and ran into your post.
I hope you don't mind, I've put it on my homepage : )
"Fat, drunk, and stupid is how we want you to go through life son."
That's an interesting idea; survival of the educationally fittest, in essence, based on the "evolution" of the educational system, when in reality, it has been the devolution of the educational system. But who are the fittest? Many will come from home schooling!
A burger flipper ought to be able to figure out a bill when the register is broken. Perhaps even the tax (from a table, not too hard.) A few can do this. Most can't.
How can they even hope to get promoted to a headwaiter as the requires remembering people's names and likes over various visits.
Summed up one account: "Even the least confident students in Singapore outscored the most confident Americans."
And guess what?
Their class sizes are BIGGER than 18-20 students!
You're being mislead there to fill their coffers for a new baby grand piano, heated sidewalks, a new orchestra pit for high schoolers or a new facade for the building to make it look nicer! Anything else but on legitimate EDUCATION.
#14 Sounds like MY childhood!
We had a ball!! Just as you say ... I agree with all you wrote. I'd gladly give up a cell phone, text messaging, PC's and color TV for my daughter to have my wonderful childhood. Also Mom stayed HOME. They weren't off fighting wars. That was for the men. People actually went to church on Sunday - the whole family!
Nah, I wouldn't trade MY childhood for todays view of childhood.
While people were lining up for the buses, I simply told my wife and son that I'd meet them over there because it was a perfect autumn morning and I wanted to get some fresh air.
Everybody lined up for the buses thought I was nuts as I simply crossed the street and started walking. I beat my family there by about 20 minutes and then on the way back to the auditorium, I beat them there too. Bear in mind that it was a 45 minute to one hour wait to board the buses!
Out of the several thousand people who came to this open house, I was the only one of them that decided to walk to the campus and back from the auditorium. To me, it was nothing at all. But for most others, you might as well have told them you were going to be hiking the Appalachian trail.
The point is, most people today would never think of walking a mile someplace. Maybe that is why we are all so fat.
Perfect analogy of what is wrong with the extremes of Western society. Some long to get fat and lazy or help someone else get as fat as the other guy.
Be careful of what you wish for, you just might get it.
Witness France, paying anti-western, Christianophobic, murders and thugs to do their "work" for them.
Oh Rome! I see you more clearly by the day.
We can thank the NEA for that mess. Once teachers start teaching, it's almost impossible to get rid of bad ones and kids are paying the price.
Absolutely and utterly true.
I spent almost 30 years watching book taught engineers go all lame when what was 'supposed to happen' didn't. And (really), creating a huge, SS, nut, with non-standard threads, to solve a perfectly not complex assembly. (He thought it was eligant, it rusted anyway)
My personal favorite was the guy who raised his hand after an hours long design review and shyly announced that "all we wanted was a cherry picker".
My childhood took place in the 1980s -- during the Reagan years -- and was similar to what you describe. Lots of bike riding and playing outside. Computers were pretty primitive and there was no internet. We played with those plasic green army guys and had cap guns that looked like real guns (gasp! can you imagine?). Phones still had cords and rotary dials and weren't much good for standing on street corners with. In a lot of ways, it wasn't too different from the 1950s, I don't think.
Several of my elementary school teachers were women in their fifties. They would have been in their twenties when they began their teaching careers, which would've begun in the 1950s. So these were some of the same women who taught your generation. Your generation and mine have them in common.
It's funny being a GenXer because we have these Leave It to Beaver early childhoods playing wiffleball in the street and that kind of thing (but with feminist, divorcee moms yelling for us to come home in the evenings) followed quickly by highschool years that included the internet and Bill Clinton. A lot changed between 1979 and 1992 (my school years).
The country is doomed. I was shoveling snow at 6 this morning and about a dozen kids came out from the house opposite and commented that I was up late. I must say that they had no idea that they were also in this scene.
It's already happened, the welfare system.
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