Tag: Education

You Can Almost Taste His Eager Anticipation

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Tim Blair posts today on the topic of “Peak Oil” – a subject near and dear to the heart of at least one of my regular readers. Tim quotes the New York Times (!) pooh-poohing the idea that oil production has peaked or will very soon:

“Within the last decade, technology advances have made it possible to unlock more oil from old fields, and, at the same time, higher oil prices have made it economical for companies to go after reserves that are harder to reach. With plenty of oil still left in familiar locations, forecasts that the world’s reserves are drying out have given way to predictions that more oil can be found than ever before …

“‘It’s the fifth time to my count that we’ve gone through a period when it seemed the end of oil was near and people were talking about the exhaustion of resources,’ said Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of oil, who cited similar concerns in the 1880s, after both world wars and in the 1970s. ‘Back then we were going to fly off the oil mountain. Instead we had a boom and oil went to $10 instead of $100.'”

But, as Tim notes, “Incredibly, abundance denialists simply won’t accept the oil consensus.”

Like this guy I found in the Tucson Weekly guest editorial slot for last week. You have to read this:

Expect the beginning of the end of Tucson as we know it to arrive next year

By GUY MCPHERSON

For a writer, there are few experiences more thrilling than words that generate action. I was therefore elated when the group Sustainable Tucson grew from my column about the impending Tucson apocalypse (Guest Commentary, April 27, 2006).

Lest you think low gas prices are cause for apathy, I’m calling for more action.

Considerable evidence indicates we passed the world oil peak near the end of 2005. Oil supply follows a bell-shaped curve, so we have been easing down for slightly more than a year.

Now that we’ve burned the inexpensive half of our planetary endowment of oil, we need to prepare ourselves to fall off the oil-supply cliff. This will occur in 2008. The economic, societal and political implications are profound, and discussion of them is curiously lacking from the mainstream media.

I thought these gloom-n-doomers had learned better than to pick dates – especially dates within their forseeable lifetimes – for the sky to come crashing down. After all, Paul Ehrlich predicted in 1968 that by the 70’s or 80’s hundreds of millions of people would inevitably starve to death because we simply wouldn’t be able to grow or distribute enough food to feed them.

Uh, Paul? It’s 2007. No mass famine.

Of course, Mr. McPherson is just a little ahead of the latest curve, since there are a bunch of people running around with their hair on fire, shouting that “we have ten years to save the planet!”

Hey! If McPherson is right, “Peak Oil” will shut down entire economies of every nation around the world! And in 2008!

Whoopee! We’re all saved!

Well, not all of us:

A series of recessions triggered by the high price of gasoline will be followed, within a decade, by a depression that will make the Great Depression seem like the good old days.

We will not recover from this depression before runaway greenhouse effects doom our species to extinction.

Apparently not any of us…

At the very least, we can expect oil prices to exceed $400 per barrel within a decade. At those oil prices, you can kiss goodbye the days of happy motoring, the use of fossil fuels to deliver water and air conditioning to Tucson, and the U.S. dollar.

Mr. McPherson, I’ll make a bet with you. If by 2018 oil is $400 a barrel, I’ll pay you $1,000. But if it’s under $150, you owe me $100,000. Deal?

In light of this knowledge, and the cheerful demeanor with which I pass it along, people often ask my advice as they plan for life without fossil fuels. (All energy sources are derivatives of oil, so expensive oil signals the end of our ability to extract and deliver coal, natural gas and uranium, and seriously impedes our ability to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels.)

“In light of this knowledge“ – the guy’s Cassandra! But pay attention to the rest of this:

In an attempt to further the much-needed discussion about the looming post-carbon era, I offer the following Tucson-centric perspective.

This country’s ever-expanding economy since World War II, coupled with a profound sense of denial, suggests that relatively few people are prepared for the post-carbon era. As a result, you can expect increasing civil unrest in the decade ahead. The rule of law is likely to give way to anarchy. Local heroes are desperately needed.

Do not expect corporations or elected officials to bail us out. Rather, the collapse of the economy will render them meaningless. The federal government, and then the state government, will join Wal-Mart in simply fading away from your life. We will need plenty of local heroes to step into the breach. If you are honest, compassionate and interested in serving others, this city needs you.

In the very near future, you can expect to see a much smaller population than currently resides in Tucson. If you are committed to remaining in Tucson–and if you don’t own a horse, you won’t have much choice in five years or so–your task is a daunting one. You will have to secure your water supply by harvesting water. You will need enough water to grow your own food, too: $400 oil spells the end of Safeway and Trader Joe’s, and disruptions in the delivery of food, water and electricity to the Old Pueblo will begin next year. Bombing Iran will exacerbate these problems, but I’d rather not think about that.

As an enlightened citizen, you’ll be forced to live in two worlds. You’ll work and play in your “normal” life, saving money for a rainy day and supporting those you love. But in the back of your mind, you’ll know about the new world ahead, and you’ll be planning to be part of a smaller community that lives close to the earth. You’ll be learning how to harvest rainwater, grow your own food and live with far fewer resources.

As you plan for your own personal post-carbon future, please advocate for the city’s nascent efforts in sustainability. Implore city leaders to prepare for the days, less than a decade from now, when we have no fuel for private automobiles, no food-delivery system for the 3,000-mile Caesar salad on which we have come to depend and no water pumped across the desert to feed our insatiable desires.

This guy is looking forward to the End Times – something I thought only Fundamentalist Christians got accused of. I think he’s watched the “Mad Max” movies too many times. “Local heroes”? Does he have a leather suit, a knee brace, and a sawed-off in his closet?

I wonder if he’s stockpiled any arms and ammo?

Nah, probably not. He’ll be depending on other people to be the “local heroes.” His kind always do.

Now, the worst part of this whole thing?

Guy McPherson is a professor of natural resources at the University of Arizona and author of many books, including Killing the Natives: Has the American Dream Become a Nightmare? and Letters to a Young Academic.

The only people who can consistently function outside reality are the insane in asylums and tenured professors in theirs. It would be funny if only this guy wasn’t teaching our kids.

How did we grow a generation of people in which such a large percentage hate their own civilization? Can anyone answer that?

Edited to add:

Commenter “M. Smith in Phoenix, AZ” inquired:

Please tell me you saw the OTHER “Guest Commentary” that he wrote in April of last year? If not, scroll to the bottom of the Tucson Weekly page and his other article is the last link. The money paragraphs are 2, 3 and 10.

This guy needs to be dragged out into the desert and left to fend for himself, just to see how in touch he really is with his local eco-system.

I hadn’t, but at his urging I read the piece in question.

My comment in reply:

I see he’s moved up his timetable.

And I notice that he’s still living in Tucson.

I guess tenure is more important to him than surviving “The Greatest Depression.”

Or he really doesn’t believe his own bullshit.

Three guesses as to what my take on that is, and the first two don’t count.

Indoctrination

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A couple of posts below I linked to An Infuriating Man, an essay by Leo Rosten about economist Milton Friedman. In the post between this one and that one, I mentioned that I fairly recently read the book Conversations with Eric Sevareid: Interviews with Notable Americans. It so happens that Leo Rosten was one of Mr. Sevareid’s guests, and that transcript was one in the book. Taped on August 24, 1975, Sevareid introduces Rosten:

“Wisdom,” according to Leo Rosten, “is only the capacity to confront intolerable ideas, with composure. Most men debase the pursuit of happiness by transforming it into a foolish pursuit of fun. But where was it promised that the purpose of life is to be happy? To me, the most important thing in life is to matter, to count, to stand for something. In short, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.”

—

Leo Rosten has taught at Yale, Stanford, Columbia and the University of California. In addition to all else, he’s an astute economist trained at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. He belongs to an interesting intellectual mutation. He was a New Deal liberal in Franklin Roosevelt’s day; today he’s a neo-conservative. From old liberal to new conservative is paradoxically a function of aging and changing society. Neo-conservatives don’t believe that education or government can determine the total picture of American society.

This is the earliest reference I have seen of the term “neo-conservative.” I was a little surprised that it dates back to at least 1975.

The interview begins:

Rosten: We didn’t assume thirty years ago that the schools could solve all our problems. We never assumed that politics could solve them. In fact, this country was based on the commanding idea that the politicians should do and what the government should do is make it possible for people to pursue happiness. Now the disenchanted say, “Make me happy!” Schools can’t make anyone happy.

Sevareid: What happened? Some of the Supreme Court decisions, some of the rules from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, from the federal government, are going to instruct every high school in every local community what boys and girls can do, what sports they can play at together, and what can or can’t be done in the locker room. (Title IX passed in 1972.) This would have made Alexander Hamilton and Ben Franklin turn in their graves. Why shouldn’t local communities have something to say about how children are educated?

Rosten: I think the tide has to turn. The story of the growth of federal power is one of the most lamentable in American history. I think historians of the future will mark 1932 as one of the black years of American history – not that Roosevelt was a bad President, not that he didn’t do extraordinary things. His greatest talent was that of a politician. He cemented a society that was falling to pieces in very ugly ways. But what he did was start the pattern by which instead of fixing your community’s bridge you wrote to your Congressman and asked him to get Congress to appropriate $28,000 for your bridge – a pattern by which everything is taken care of by federal money. What’s wrong with this is that it prevents the most powerful engine mankind has ever known, the free market, from working.

I think we are now beginning to learn that it is foolish to assume that people in Washington know better how to run Alameda County that the men who are farming in Alameda County.

I don’t think the lesson stuck.

Rosten on the press:

Sevareid: A long time ago, during the 1930’s, you wrote the first real sociological study of the Washington press corps. A lot has changed since then. It’s now a vast herd of people. The tone has changed. The press has itself become a great controversial issue. What’s the big difference now?

Rosten: The decline of newspapers, the decline of local papers, the pabulumized news leads me to read weekly journals more than ever because they at least put things into perspective. The kind of person who now goes into journalism may also be different.

Now even the weeklies are pabulum, and the dailies are dying from decreasing readership.

Sevareid: The Watergate adventures have something to do with it. Press people have been lured and forced out of their normal roles to a degree. They’ve become actors in the play themselves. They’re writing about each other. There also is a new level of howling monkeys at news conferences. They’ve given the press a pretty bad image with lots of people. Some reporters seem to think they’re prosecuting attorneys at every encounter with officials. They don’t understand that civility is not the enemy of freedom; it’s an ally.

Rosten: I have the feeling that the editorial pages of this country, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, are repeating the cliches of the 1940’s and 1950’s. “If a government program fails it’s because not enough money was put into it. Let’s put more money into it!” And more and more money is poured down the rat hole.

Or, as Steven Den Beste put it, cognitive dissonance leading to “escalation of failure.”

And, finally, Leo Rosten on education:

Sevareid: Leo, you’ve written about everything, thought about everything, studied everything. You’re a great generalist, which is not much in fashion any more. What’s happened to the knowledge industry? Sociologists, economists, psychologists, psychiatrists, seem rather bankrupt. Have we overburdened the human mind with too many facts? Vocabulary seems to have outrun knowledge, which has outrun wisdom. Where do we turn?

Rosten: We’ve always gone on the assumption (a good one) that education will liberate the human mind or the human spirit. There’s a second assumption that’s forgotten. Some people are meant to be educated and to learn and to enjoy the uses of the mind. Some people are meant to paint. Some people are meant to draw castles in the sand and make them into sculpture. Some people love to prune trees and gardens. What we have done is assume that everyone can potentially become an intellectual. We’ve confused learning with schooling.

It’s absolutely absurd that in this country today there should be seven million youngsters going to college. There are not seven million people who want to read Plato or Aristotle or Montesquieu. And there’s no reason why they should. We have failed to see that there aren’t enough jobs for those who learn esoteric things. For a while there was a big fling on learning Swahili in New York. Lots of kids were studying it because it was part of the Black movement, the idea of Black identity, Black liberation. It so happens that Swahili was the language of the Arab slave traders. In any event, what good does it do to know Swahili? I don’t mean “good” simply in terms of economics. What sort of good does it do?

When you’re young, when your mind and spirit are like a sponge, there is no better time to learn certain things and there is no worse time to learn certain things. I would abolish the study of some courses except for students aged thirty and above.

I was lucky as a child of the depression. I couldn’t get a job for three years. I was lonely and miserable. At the end of those three years, because I was desperate, I went back to school. I was older than my classmates, I had learned something. I had learned how hard it is to walk all day long, trying to earn a dollar. I had learned how important it is to save, to appraise people, to figure out if this or that guy can be trusted or not trusted. This is what life and the world are about.

We’re practically using the colleges as a dump into which to put youngsters we do not know what to do with. There are today 45 million people between the age of roughly 7 and 24. Their parents don’t know what to do with them. They want them to go to college and they often think that they’re being trained for jobs. But they’re not getting training for useful employment.

Someone has said that education is what remains after everything you’ve learned is forgotten. The purpose of educating young people is not only to illuminate their spirit and enrich their memory bank but to teach them the pleasures of thinking and reading. How do you use the mind? As a teacher, I always was astonished by the number of people in the classroom who wanted to learn as against those who just wanted to pass. I took pride in my ability to communicate. Generally “communicate” meant one thing. Now the young think “communicate” means “Agree with me!”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

But here’s the kicker:

Rosten: The student rebellions of the 1960’s exposed the fact that our entire educational system has forgotten the most important thing it can do prior to college: indoctrinate. I believe in the indoctrination of moral values. There’s a lot to be said for being good and kind and decent. You owe a duty to those who have taken care of you. You owe a duty to whatever it is that God or fate gave you – to use your brain or your heart. It’s senseless to whine, to blame society for every grievance, or to assume that the presence of a hammer means you have to go out to smash things.

The young want everything. They think they can get everything swiftly and painlessly. They are far too confident. They don’t know what their problems are, not really. They talk too much. They demand too much. Their ideas have not been tempered by the hard facts of reality. They’re idealists, but they don’t sense that it’s the easiest thing in the world to be an idealist. It doesn’t take any brains. This was said by Aristotle 2300 years ago. Mencken once said that an idealist is someone who, upon observing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, assumes that it will also make better soup.

To some extent, Rosten sounds like all elders complaining about youths:

Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders, and love chatter in places of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers. – Socrates

I am ambivalent on the topic of “indoctrination.” My problem is with what that indoctrination entails. Rosten objects to the failure of the educational system to indoctrinate moral values. I’d say it still does. It just doesn’t indoctrinate goodness, kindness, and decency anymore. It indoctrinates “multicuturalism,” “tolerance,” “sensitivity,” “fairness,” “socialism,” and “self-esteem.” It fails to instruct in history, civics, ethics, mathematics, English, or for that matter, job skills. The education system receives “young skulls full of mush” and processes them right on through, sending them into the world with what Ayn Rand described as “a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears.”

The reasons for this are myriad. Diane Ravitch puts part of the blame (convincingly) on the textbook companies who are loath to put anything in a text that someone, anyone, might find offensive. I put a large part of the blame on the influx of socialist True Believers into the ranks of educators since the time of John Dewey. As far as public schools are concerned, we’ve abandoned the idea that education can liberate the human mind or human spirit. Schools are now warehouses, run by administrators terrified of lawsuits and too many teachers who are literally tyrannized by their charges and their parents. Indoctrination still goes on, though. Read this lovely little op-ed by Mark Bradley, a history teacher from Sacramento. I bet his classes are popular!

It would seem that if you want some good indoctrination, your only choices are homeschooling or private – often ecumenical – schools.

Indoctrination of children is not necessarily a bad thing, but somewhere along the line we stopped paying attention to what was and what wasn’t getting poured into their heads, and it started long before 1975.

Saul Cornell Receives a Professional Whuppin’

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(h/t: Geek with a .45 who emailed me the link!)

Professor of Law Stephen Halbrook has apparently had his fill of Associate Professor of History Saul Cornell and his attempt to rewrite history in the effort to convince people that the Second Amendment wasn’t written to protect an individual right to arms.

For those unfamiliar, Associate Professor Cornell is the director of the “Second Amendment Research Center” at Ohio State University – a “research center” established with funds from the rabidly anti-gun Joyce Foundation. Yet Associate Professor Cornell presents himself as an unbiased academic, merely out to explain to we poor, unwashed, ignorant savages what the Second Amendment to the Constitution really means. He writes op-eds that end up in newspapers all over the country, and he has recently published a book has received glowing reviews from gun-grabbers. I’ve written several pieces here on Associate Professor Cornell, including a rebuttal to an email he sent me in response to my first piece. See:

Dept. of They Never Ever Stop

Professor Saul Cornell Responds, and So Do I

Saul Cornell, Unbiased Researcher

and, most recently, The Jabberwocky World of Saul Cornell.

While I’m merely an amateur, Stephen Halbrook is a professional. His curriculum vitae:

Attorney at Law, Fairfax, Va.; Ph.D. Florida State University, J.D. Georgetown University; former philosophy professor, Tuskegee University, Howard University, George Mason University. Books include The Founders’ Second Amendment (forthcoming); That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right (1984, 2000); A Right to Bear Arms: State & Federal Bills of Rights & Constitutional Guarantees (1989); Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, & the Right to Bear Arms (1998); Firearms Law Deskbook (2006). Argued Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997), and other Supreme Court cases.

So when Professor Halbrook talks about law, especially firearms law, one ought to listen. Professor Halbrook has written a 25-page rebuttal (a PDF file, about half of it footnotes) to Cornell’s recent presentation of “St. George Tucker and the Second Amendment: Original Understandings and Modern Misunderstandings” at a symposium at the William and Mary College of Law. Once again, Professor Cornell has twisted history to meet his agenda. Like others of his ilk, he selectively quotes, baldly misstates, and deliberately omits material that conclusively disproves the ideas he attempts to foist off on his unsuspecting, credulous victims readers.

I’m not going to quote too extensively from Professor Halbrook’s truly devastating rebuttal but let me give you a little of the flavor of it:

While humble people generally think that they are among “the people,” a segment of the not-so-humble appear to disagree when it comes to the right of “the people” to keep and bear arms.

—

Debunking the individual-rights “hijackers” of the Second Amendment, Professor Cornell refers to “the often-quoted passage describing it [the Second Amendment] as the ‘palladium of liberty’” at least five times, but strangely fails to provide the actual quotation or to acknowledge its contents. It would be worthwhile to do so at the outset in order to determine the extent of the constitutional hijacking by scholars who read the Second Amendment as protecting individual rights.

—

As with Tucker, Cornell studiously avoids mention of the content of Story’s analysis of the Second Amendment, much less does he quote any of Story’s “palladium of liberty” statement.

—

Having left the reader in the dark about what Tucker and Story actually said on “the palladium of liberty,” Cornell asserts that for both: “Protection of states’ rights, not individual rights, was the issue that had prompted the inclusion of the Second Amendment.”

—

Cornell refers to this statement of Tucker, but fails to quote it, and asserts that it does “not address the question of individual self defense.”

—

Tucker made further references to infringement of the individual right to bear arms which Cornell fails to mention.

—

As usual, Cornell avoids the embarrassing quotations.

—

Cornell’s rendition of Tucker is long on Cornell’s characterizations and citations to recent law review articles supporting the “collective rights” view of the Second Amendment, but woefully short on Tucker’s actual words. This pattern also arises regarding Tucker’s views on judicial review.

—

Cornell refers to the page number, but neither quotes the passage nor summarizes its content.

Halbrook corrects Cornell’s omissions, and proves conclusively that what Cornell is selling is unadulterated bullshit.

When I wrote Why Ballistic Fingerprinting Doesn’t (and Won’t) Work, I noted

What they say (and this is overwhelmingly true for these groups) is only partly (in this case, minimally) true. There’s a whole lot of information they neglect, gloss over, bury, and avoid.

Associate Professor Cornell is another example of this sad fact. Professor Halbrook hammers that point home until Cornell’s reputation ought to be nothing but a thin, putrid smear. However, as is common for the type, I’m sure Associate Professor Cornell will continue with cockroach resilience, writing more op-eds and more books filled with omissions, distortions, and outright lies.

And we, amateurs and professionals alike, will keep exposing him.

The Jabberwocky World of Saul Cornell.

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Here he is again! Associate professor of History Saul Cornell of Ohio State University and its “Second Amendment Research Center at the John Glenn Institute” has published a new tome on the topic of just what the Second Amendment doesn’t protect. Unsurprisingly, it’s getting rave reviews (I seem to remember that Michael Bellisile’s Arming America got glowing reviews, too….) Entitled A Well Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America (working title, Armed in the Holy Cause of Liberty: Guns and the American Constitution – but I guess that one was a little too… provocative?) Associate professor Cornell attempts to shed just a little unbiased light on the subject.

Or, at least, that’s what he wants you to believe.

Clayton Cramer does his typical masterful job of dissecting the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s laudatory op-ed/book review with, you know, facts and citations that indicate just how far off in never-never-land Associate professor Cornell really is.

Clayton opens:

Saul Cornell Is Suddenly No Longer a Partisan on Gun Control

At least, that’s what this editorial from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune claims…

—

Any of you who are familiar with Professor Cornell’s work can start the insane giggling right now–yeah, he’s not really on one side or the other, nor is he trying to disarm the masses.

Numerous other bloggers have noted that the “Second Amendment Research Center at the John Glenn Institute” is largely funded by the extremely anti-gun Joyce Foundation (see this post, and this post, and this one.)

But Associate professor Cornell? “He’s neither antigun nor progun. He really isn’t a gun guy at all. His thing is history.”

Right. Cue hysterical laughter.

But as I said in my first response to the good Associate professor,

He doesn’t have to be right, he just has to be convincing. The ill-informed who read this piece think “Hey, he’s an authority, he must be right.” That’s why his side has to keep repeating the big lies.

Clayton notes the same thing I did:

It just gets more and more “alternate universe” the deeper I read

As I said in my reply to Associate professor Cornell’s email:

You, an historian, have taken it upon yourself to distort history – something that you yourself claim is unacceptable. You claim that the Justice department’s recognition of the “standard model” of the Second Amendment is somehow “well beyond” a “living document” re-interpretation. I’m sorry, Professor, but if you actually believe that you’re delusional, and if you know better you’re a bald-faced liar. I honestly cannot tell which.

I think I have a better handle on that question now.

I think we all do, at least those of us who are paying attention.

But what about the general readership of the Strib?

THAT is the fight we have to fight each and every day.

It’s Not Much, but Nerf™land Pushes Back

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about schools in England that were banning the paper airplane because of fears of student injury, another school that had removed its swingset because it “faced the sun” and they were concerned about kids blinding themselves, and other similar idiocy.

Well, it looks like somebody over there has had enough, and they’re not alone. Wendy McElroy, proprietor of ifeminist.com and a Fox News columnist, has written a piece about a book recently published there:

New Book Revives Lost Notions of Boyhood

The Dangerous Book for Boys by the British brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden is a practical manual that returns boys to the wonder and almost lost world of tree houses and pirate flags. It celebrates the art of teaching an old mutt new tricks and accepts skinned knees as an acceptable risk for running through fields with the same dog yapping along.

As of July 3, The Dangerous Book is the number one seller on Amazon UK and it is holding steady at about 7,000 on Amazon in the U.S., where it was published on June 5. The Australian News reports that the book “has made it to the top five of…Amazon [Australia], after just a week.”

Those results make publishers take notice. But social commentators are also reacting with both applause and condemnation.

Condemnation arises because The Dangerous Book breaks the dominant and politically correct stereotype for children’s books. It presents boys as being deeply different than girls in terms of their interests and pursuits. Although it is highly probable that bookstores will sell the book to girls who then will go on to practice skimming stones, nevertheless the genders are separated within the book’s pages.

Read the whole thing. Wendy isn’t your typical feminist.

An interesting note, Clayton Cramer (not a fan of Amazon.com) reports that Amazon here in the U.S. no longer lists The Dangerous Book for Boys on its website. The excuse is beyond lame.

Other media sources have responded to The Dangerous Book, for example this op-ed from the The Sunday Times, June 17:

Every so often the lofty minarets of publishing find themselves shaken by a seismic crack from down below. The sound — deeply liberating in the age of the pre-digested blockbuster — is that of the book-buying public spontaneously making its presence felt: one of those infrequent but hugely intriguing instances of word-of-mouth buzz picking up on some hitherto under-publicised item and sending it storming up the bestseller list without the people who administer the book trade really noticing.

The latest example of this encouraging trend is a work entitled The Dangerous Book For Boys by the brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden — Conn is a well-known historical novelist — which was overlooked by the literary editors and the three-for-two promotions but is currently number one on the Amazon chart.

Undoubtedly it is being bought not only by boys but by their fathers as a splendidly politically incorrect guide to both boyhood and fatherhood.

Got up in gilt and scarlet covers, stoutly hardbacked and looking for all the world like a juvenile Christmas present from around the time of King Edward VII’s coronation, The Dangerous Book For Boys declares its intent from the opening page.

“In this age of video games and mobile phones there must still be a place for knots, tree houses and stories of incredible courage,” the authors maintain. “Men and boys today are the same as they always were, and interested in the same things . . . We hope in years to come that this will be a book to dig out of the attic and give to a couple of kids staring at a pile of wood and wondering what to do with it.”

I liked this part particularly:

Clearly, over the next few months The Dangerous Book For Boys, however misleading the promise of its title, is set to play a bumper role in Taylor family life.

Behind its success lurk some shrewd cultural deductions that, here in the bright dawn of the technology-driven 21st century, hardly ever occur to people down at the sharp end of the child-rearing process.

The most obvious is the absolute feebleness of what gets taught in schools these days.

Unsurprisingly:

The drawback to the Iggulden project, of course, is that it is completely opposed to practically every development (and developer) currently at work in the British educational process. Not many modern curriculums, after all, feature lists of British kings and queens, troop deployments at Balaclava and the nature of the pluperfect tense.

On the practical side, it goes without saying that the average headmaster would probably have a fit if anyone suggested that his male pupils ought, for the purpose of drawing them closer to their fathers, be taught how to gut a rabbit.

He (or she) would probably be deeply disturbed, too, by the sight of the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson — quoted by the Igguldens — summarising the achievements of the British Empire (downsides are mentioned too) or a list of recommended reading that includes the original James Bond books and the Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser.

Even Al-Guardian can’t be too negative about the book:

The book is beautifully accomplished, from its instructions about hunting and cooking a rabbit to its diagrams explaining how to wrap a parcel in brown paper and string. (“Not a very ‘dangerous’ activity, it’s true, but … extremely satisfying.”) But does the chord it has struck also reveal the stubborn prevalence of some rather foolish and deluded fantasy vision of British boyhood? Of a past less noble and less real than it may seem in hindsight, a past which those books and comics that inspired this one would have us believe?

I suppose the answer is mostly yes. I’m old enough to have grown up in a time when the sorts of virtues championed here – wholesome curiosity, diligent teamwork, pluck and decency – still enjoyed some currency, especially in schools and in the cub scouts. However, while boys of my generation enjoyed a freedom to roam and to construct bows and arrows and to play football until dusk, those good-egg moral virtues were often scarce in reality. Boys who were not “hard” or sporty got picked on by boys who were, just as happens now. Bob Cherry, the brave and hearty hero from the Billy Bunter series, was very much a fictional character.

Is this book, then, purely romantic? That’s quite a tricky one to call. I’m wondering why it is called “dangerous”. Does the choice of adjective simply express that hankering after a time when parents were less fearful about their children? Or is it some sort of a comment being made to the effect that it is dangerous these days to insist that boys are totally different creatures from girls? A chapter called The British Empire (1497-1997) repays careful rereading. It’s all battles and rebellions and good intentions that didn’t always work out, but were still good intentions anyway. It is hard to see this as anything other than a conservative reading of the imperial centuries, which makes me inclined to see The Dangerous Book for Boys and its popularity as of a piece with a modern lament about the loss of an old gender order under which a chap knew what a chap was meant to do and the world was a happier place.

I don’t believe it ever was that simple, and pining for it will do none of us much good. Yet there remains much that is admirable here. Some more advice from Sir Frederick Treves: “Don’t swagger. The boy who swaggers – like a man who swaggers – has little else that he can do … It is the empty tin that rattles most. Be honest. Be loyal. Be kind. Remember that the hardest thing to acquire is the faculty of being unselfish. As a quality it is one of the finest attributes of manliness.” Not much to quarrel with there.

The June 13 Telegraph story on the book is equally interesting. Note the opening:

A book of old-fashioned, adventurous pastimes for lads and dads has become a surprise bestseller. Christopher Middleton watched his 11-year-old son transformed into a Middle Earth warrior

It’s amazing that The Dangerous Book For Boys ever got published, really, given the deeply unfashionable connotations surrounding two out of the five words in the title (the ones that aren’t “The”, “Book” and “For”).

The very thought of an educational volume that sets out both to exclude a specific gender and to promote activities with questionable health and safety implications is enough to bring the ultimate condemnation that the world of mealy-mouthdom has to offer – that of being “inappropriate”.

It’s not like Political Correctness is going unnoticed in England, as natural as breathing air. They’re apparently choking on it, too.

Is this a backlash against Political Correctness? Undoubtedly. Does it signal the beginning of a popular movement against it? I doubt, but I can hope. British doctor and writer Theodore Dalrymple, author of several books and numerous essays on the decline of British society, said this in an interview with FrontPage magazine after the publication of his book Our Culture, What’s Left of it: The Mandarins and the Masses:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

And I think he’s absolutely correct.

It’s past time for a backlash against it, both here and most especially in England. The Dangerous Book for Boys isn’t much, but it’s a start, and it’s aimed at exactly the right target.

Shill

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In his email to me, Professor Saul Cornell asked,

I wonder how you feel about Nelson Lund’s NRA chair at GMU law school. Would you say he is shilling for NRA?

To which I answered: “Yes.”

Dictionary.com defines “shill”:

(noun.)

One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.

(verb)

1. To act as a shill for (a deceitful enterprise).

2. To lure (a person) into a swindle.

I must apologize to Mr. Lund.

I truly think that both Mr. Lund and Professor Cornell believe that which they profess. They are not attempting deceit as they see it. Each is professing honestly held beliefs. (At least, I hope so.)

The difference, however, is in how closely those beliefs relate to reality, and how much each person is willing to ignore or even manipulate fact in order to promote their own particular world-view.

It was this willingness to avoid or manipulate that prompted Sanford Levinson to write The Embarrassing Second Amendment. He wanted to put a spotlight on the fact that the meaning of the Second Amendment was avoided in modern law simply because it made so many people uncomfortable. He wrote:

I cannot help but suspect that the best explanation for the absence of the Second Amendment from the legal consciousness of the elite bar, including that component found in the legal academy, is derived from a mixture of sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, perhaps even “winning,” interpretations of the Second Amendment would present real hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation.

Note that he included himself in that group supporting “prohibitory regulation.”

I’ve said before that I really started studying the topic of the right to arms – and, by extension, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – starting about 1995. I have stated that I had a certain understanding of that right, and in fact all of the rights protected by that document before I began that study. To some extent, my education has lead me to some conclusions I don’t particularly care for. For instance, I think state-permitted concealed-carry is historically justifiable (but prohibition of unlicensed open carry is not.) The one thing I have noted, however, is that when people actually take the time to study the topic, the conversion of opinion goes only one way: If they believe the right to arms is an individual one, their opinion is not changed. If they believe there is no individual right to arms, either they are converted to the opposite belief, however grudgingly, or their personal prejudices prevent them from doing so. But no one is converted from believing that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to an opposite conclusion. The evidence is too overwhelming.

The best example of this I know of is Professor Laurence Tribe. Professor Tribe is a professor of Law at Harvard, and is author of the textbook American Constitutional Law, which is used in (I believe) the majority of ConLaw classes in the U.S. Professor Tribe is a self-described member of the Left, and was a member of Al Gore’s legal team during the 2000 election debacle. I have absolutely no doubt about Professor Tribe’s position concerning gun control – he’s in favor of it. In the first two editions of his textbook, printed in 1978 and 1988 respectively, he relegated discussion of the Second Amendment to footnotes. But in his third edition, published in 2000, he dedicated nine pages to the topic, concluding:

Perhaps the most accurate conclusion one can reach with any confidence is that the core meaning of the Second Amendment is a populist / republican / federalism one: Its central object is to arm ‘We the People’ so that ordinary citizens can participate in the collective defense of their community and their state. But it does so not through directly protecting a right on the part of states or other collectivities, assertable by them against the federal government, to arm the populace as they see fit. Rather the amendment achieves its central purpose by assuring that the federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification consistent with the authority of the states to organize their own militias. That assurance in turn is provided through recognizing a right (admittedly of uncertain scope) on the part of individuals to possess and use firearms in the defense of themselves and their homes — not a right to hunt for game, quite clearly, and certainly not a right to employ firearms to commit aggressive acts against other persons — a right that directly limits action by Congress or by the Executive Branch and may well, in addition, be among the privileges or immunities of United States citizens protected by §1 of the Fourteenth Amendment against state or local government action.

A November 1999 Wall Street Journal piece, Liberals Have Second Thoughts On the Second Amendment discusses the topic as well. (The galley prints of Prof. Tribe’s book were out by then – and were already stirring controversy.)

Mr. Tribe believes the right to bear arms is limited, subject to “reasonable regulation in the interest of public safety,” as he and Yale Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar wrote in the New York Times last month. But Mr. Tribe has written that people on both sides of the policy divide face an “inescapable tension. . . between the reading of the Second Amendment that would advance the policies they favor and the reading of the Second Amendment to which intellectual honesty, and their own theories of Constitutional interpretation, would drive them.”

Journalist Daniel Lazare, a liberal gun-control advocate, acknowledges the tension, writing in Harper’s: “The truth about the Second Amendment is something that liberals cannot bear to admit: The right wing is right.” Mr. Lazare argues for amending the Constitution to repeal the Second Amendment.

And there is the point I want to make with this piece. Daniel Lazare wrote to the WSJ in response to the piece:

Ms. Levey is right that I agree with constitutional scholars like Sanford Levinson and Laurence Tribe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms. But she is wrong elsewhere.

First of all, she describes me as a liberal. In fact, I’m a socialist.
Second, she calls me a “gun-control advocate.” In fact, nowhere in my Harper’s article, “Your Constitution is Killing You,” did I specifically argue in favor of gun control; all I said, rather, is that if that is what the democratic majority wants, that is what the democratic majority should get, Second Amendment or no Second Amendment.
Third, she says that I argue in favor of “amending the Constitution to repeal the Second Amendment.” Not so: I devoted much of it to pointing out that the amending process is quite useless in this instance. Under the terms set forth in Article V, as few as 13 states representing less than 5% of the population can block any change desired by the emaining 95%. Given that no one would have any trouble drawing up a list of 13 rural states in the South or West, states for whom repealing the Second Amendment would be akin to repealing the four Gospels, the amendment is, under anything like present conditions, invulnerable. Even though polls indicate that a majority of Americans do not want an individual right to bear arms, a Constitution made in the name of the people says that is what the people must have whether they like it or not.
This is anything but democratic. Rather than amending the Constitution, my position is that we should toss this antiquated document and create a new plan of government from scratch, this time one based on strict majority rule.

Daniel Lazare
New York

There is an honest man. A fucking socialist, but an honest man.

Which, in my humble opinion, Professor Saul Cornell is not. (Honest, not socialist – though he might be that as well.) He is at best a self-deluded man. He twists logic, consciously or unconsciously, to justify a position that cannot be reasonably held by someone willing to look reality squarely in the face. As I said to him previously:

You, an historian, have taken it upon yourself to distort history – something that you yourself claim is unacceptable. You claim that the Justice department’s recognition of the “standard model” of the Second Amendment is somehow “well beyond” a “living document” re-interpretation. I’m sorry, Professor, but if you actually believe that you’re delusional, and if you know better you’re a bald-faced liar. I honestly cannot tell which.

And I can’t.

But it doesn’t really matter. He’s working willingly for the Joyce Foundation – a group dedicated to, among other things, disarming Americans. David Hardy has an interesting post from April of last year concerning the Professor, his association with the Joyce Foundation, and a symposium put on by Fordham University. Hardy notes:

You must, of course, apply to Joyce for a grant. And its standards make it clear that the project — or in this case law review — is expected to advance the enactment of gun legislation (buzzword = “policy”).

The Gun Violence Program supports efforts to bring the firearms industry under comprehensive consumer product health and safety oversight as the most promising long-term strategy for reducing deaths and injuries from handguns and other firearms.
Program priorities are:
• Supporting state-based policy initiatives in Illinois and Wisconsin that can achieve meaningful reforms and provide a model for gun policy nationwide ….
• Supporting focused research to inform state policy efforts.

From its grant FAQ,

Do you fund educational programs in violence prevention? We generally do not fund such programs.
….
Do you fund research? We fund research that is likely to have a strong impact on public policy.
…..
Please tell me more about your focus on public policy. We focus our grantmaking on initiatives that promise to have an influence on public policies. That includes advancing the public debate about important policy issues, most notably the need for federal consumer product health and safety standards for the firearm industry. We believe such policy initiatives can lead to broad, systemic changes that affect the most people over the long run.

In other words: don’t come to us with a law review that will explore the Second Amendment. Come to us with an idea for one that will help enact gun laws. That is what we fund.

Now, I’m sure the professor would point out that Nelson Lund is under similar restrictions regarding NRA funding – they don’t support anti-gun research, either.

But the NRA isn’t trying to swindle Americans out of their Constitutionally guaranteed rights.

And that IS a difference.

UPDATE, 5/15: I sent an email to Prof. Lund with a link to this piece. He responds:

Mr. Baker–

Thanks for your message and consideration. I took a quick look at the web page to which you provided a link, and feel that I should point out that it is incorrect to say that “Nelson Lund is under similar restrictions regarding NRA funding – they don’t support anti-gun research, either.” My academic work is under no such restrictions. The dean of my law school has designated me the Patrick Henry Professor of Constitutional Law and the Second Amendment. I do not answer to the donor, any more than hundreds or thousands of other holders of named professorships in this country answer to those who donated funds to establish the chairs. Nor has my dean ever so much as suggested that I am under any obligation to conform my views or the results of my research to the preferences, presumed or expressed, of the donor that provided funds for the professorship to which I was named. In short, I am perfectly free to publish “anti-gun research” if that is where the search for truth leads me, and I do not believe I would suffer any financial penalty of any sort if I did so.

If you could find a way to alert your readers to these facts, I would be grateful.

Nelson Lund

Consider it done.

The Big Lie

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On the way in to work this morning, the 7:30 NPR news played this quote from John “I Served in Vietnam” Kerry:

Confirming Judge Alito to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court would have irreversible consequences that are already defined if Senators will take the time to measure them.

In my judgment, it will take the country backwards on critical issues.

Really? Irreversible consequences?

But isn’t what Kerry (and the Left in general) is afraid of is the reversal of eighty years of leftward movement by the Court?

Hugh Hewitt interviews “The Smart Guys” – USC professor Erwin Chemerinsky from the Left, and Chapman University law professor John Eastman from the Right, weekly. On Wednesday, June 8, 2005 the topic was Janice Rogers Brown’s appointment to the DC Circuit, and this exchange was transcribed over at Radioblogger:

John Eastman: You know, I mean, it’s just so preposterous, I don’t even know where to begin. The reason Chuck Schumer is so upset about this, is Justice Brown is the kind of judge who will, you know, adhere to the Constitution. And when the members of the legislature, even the exalted Chuck Schumer hismelf, want to take actions that is not authorized by the Constitution, she’ll be willing to stand up and do her duty, and strike it down. That’s not an arrogance, that’s what the judges are there for, to adhere to the Constitution, and not to let the legislature roll over them and do whatever they want. You know, it really is preposterous. We’ve turned this upside down. The judges that do exactly what they’re supposed to do are demonized, and those that take a powder and let the legislature get away with every abuse, every extension of power imaginable, are touted at the cocktail circuit.

Erwin Chemerinsky: I think what Senator Schumer is saying, and is absolutely right, is that Janice Rogers Brown’s repeated statements that she believes that the New Deal programs like social security are unconstitutional, is truly a radical view. That’s not a judge who wants to uphold the Constitution. That’s a judge who wants to shred the last eighty years of American Constitutional law. Janice Rogers Brown saying she believes that the Bill of Rights should not apply to the states, would undo the last seventy years of Constitutional law. That’s not a judge who wants to follow the law. That’s a judge who wants to make the law in her own radical, conservative views.

John Eastman: Hang on, here, because Erwin…there’s a wonderfully subtle change in your phraseology that demonstrates what’s going on here. You said she won’t follow the Constitution, and then you said it’s because she won’t follow the last seventy or eighty years of Constitutional law. What happened seventy or eighty years ago that changed the Constitution? There was not a single amendment at issue in the 1930’s that changed the Constitution. Some radical, federal programs were pushed through. Some radical judges, under pressure, finally signed on them, and the notion that we can’t question that unconstitutional action that occurred in the 1930’s, and somehow that defending that unconstitutionality is adherent to the rule of law, is rather extraordinary. There are scholars on left and right that have understood that what went on in the 1930’s was…had no basis in Constitutional law, or in the letter of the Constitution itself.

They’re not afraid of “irreversible change.” They’re afraid of reversal of their changes. And, typically, they won’t come out and say that.

KevinLeave a comment

AAAAAAAGGGGHHHHH!.

I’m really tired of posting negative stories (as the ratio seems to run about 5:1 that way), but here’s another “Dept. of Collapsing Schools” story from Head’s Bunker that I. Just. Cannot. Fathom.

You can use the f-word in class (but only five times)

A secondary school is to allow pupils to swear at teachers – as long as they don’t do so more than five times in a lesson. A running tally of how many times the f-word has been used will be kept on the board. If a class goes over the limit, they will be ‘spoken’ to at the end of the lesson.

The astonishing policy, which the school says will improve the behaviour of pupils, was condemned by parents’ groups and MPs yesterday. They warned it would backfire.

Parents were advised of the plan, which comes into effect when term starts next week, in a letter from the Weavers School in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire.

Assistant headmaster Richard White said the policy was aimed at 15 and 16-year-olds in two classes which are considered troublesome.

‘Tolerate but not condone’

“Within each lesson the teacher will initially tolerate (although not condone) the use of the f-word (or derivatives) five times and these will be tallied on the board so all students can see the running score,” he wrote in the letter.

“Tolerate.” Sweet bleeding jeebus.

“Over this number the class will be spoken to by the teacher at the end of the lesson.”

And if they do it again, they’ll get another severe speaking to!

If the teacher can get a word in edgewise.

Parents called the rule ‘wholly irresponsible and ludicrous’.

Gee, you THINK??

“This appears to be a misguided attempt to speak to kids on their own level,” said the father of one pupil.

Should have do’s and don’ts

Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “In these sort of situations teachers should be setting clear principles of ‘do and don’t’.

As in “don’t spout off again, or you’ll be picking yourself up off the floor again.

“They should not be compromising in an apparent attempt to please the pupils. This will send out completely the wrong message.

“Youngsters will play up to this and ensure they use their five goes, demeaning the authority of the teacher.”

Someone’s actually raised a child there, I’d say.

Tory MP Ann Widdecombe said the policy was based on ‘Alice in Wonderland reasoning’.

“What next?” she asked. “Do we allow people to speed five times or burgle five times? You don’t improve something by allowing it, you improve something by discouraging it.”

Um, Ann? They’re pretty much doing that. It’s spreading into the classroom, not from it.

‘Praise postcards’

The 1,130-pupil school, which was criticised as ‘not effective’ by Ofsted inspectors last November, also plans to send ‘praise postcards’ to the parents of children who do not swear and who turn up on time for lessons.

Instead of warning postcards and expulsion notices to the parents of children who do swear and who don’t show up? Brilliant.

Headmaster Alan Large said he had received no complaints about the policy. “The reality is that the fword is part of these young adults’ everyday language,” he said.

Oh, I’m sure he’s received complaints, he’s just so disconnected from reality he doesn’t recognize them.

“As a temporary policy we are giving them a bit of leeway, but want them to think about the way they talk and how they might do better.”

Why, oh why did England do away with pillory?

(If this story’s a fake, a lot of news services are treating it as real.)

PreCISELY!

KevinLeave a comment

I was listening to Hugh Hewitt‘s radio show on the way home yesterday. On Wednesday afternoons he has “The Smart Guys” on, Erwin Chemerinsky (from the left), law professor at USC, and John Eastman (from the right), law professor at Chapman University. Well, yesterday Hugh was asking them both about their opinions of the appointment of Janice Rogers Brown. Hugh’s producer Duane Patterson runs the blog Radioblogger and has the transcript. Chemerinsky whined about how “out of the mainstream” Brown was:

I think it’s sad. I think Janice Rogers Brown is pretty much as far to the right on the political spectrum as you’re going to get for a federal Court of Appeals. She said that she believes the social security program is unconstitutional.

That’s just a set-up for what’s coming, though, because a few minutes later we got this exchange:

John Eastman: You know, I mean, it’s just so preposterous, I don’t even know where to begin. The reason Chuck Schumer is so upset about this, is Justice Brown is the kind of judge who will, you know, adhere to the Constitution. And when the members of the legislature, even the exalted Chuck Schumer hismelf, want to take actions that is not authorized by the Constitution, she’ll be willing to stand up and do her duty, and strike it down. That’s not an arrogance, that’s what the judges are there for, to adhere to the Constitution, and not to let the legislature roll over them and do whatever they want. You know, it really is preposterous. We’ve turned this upside down. The judges that do exactly what they’re supposed to do are demonized, and those that take a powder and let the legislature get away with every abuse, every extension of power imaginable, are touted at the cocktail circuit.

Erwin Chemerinsky: I think what Senator Schumer is saying, and is absolutely right, is that Janice Rogers Brown’s repeated statements that she believes that the New Deal programs like social security are unconstitutional, is truly a radical view. That’s not a judge who wants to uphold the Constitution. That’s a judge who wants to shred the last eighty years of American Constitutional law. Janice Rogers Brown saying she believes that the Bill of Rights should not apply to the states, would undo the last seventy years of Constitutional law. That’s not a judge who wants to follow the law. That’s a judge who wants to make the law in her own radical, conservative views.

John Eastman: Hang on, here, because Erwin…there’s a wonderfully subtle change in your phraseology that demonstrates what’s going on here. You said she won’t follow the Constitution, and then you said it’s because she won’t follow the last seventy or eighty years of Constitutional law. What happened seventy or eighty years ago that changed the Constitution? There was not a single amendment at issue in the 1930’s that changed the Constitution. Some radical, federal programs were pushed through. Some radical judges, under pressure, finally signed on them, and the notion that we can’t question that unconstitutional action that occurred in the 1930’s, and somehow that defending that unconstitutionality is adherent to the rule of law, is rather extraordinary. There are scholars on left and right that have understood that what went on in the 1930’s was…had no basis in Constitutional law, or in the letter of the Constitution itself.

THANK you, John Eastman for smacking down Chemerinsky when he so richly deserved it. Game, set, match.

And thanks to Duane Patterson for transcribing that spanking. (There’s quite a bit more, if you’re interested.) It made my day!

Dept. of Our Collapsing Schools

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Division of “AAAAAAAGGGGH!! AAAAAAAAGGGH!”

English doctors want to ban sharp, pointy kitchen knives. Legislators there want to replace the glass in beer bottles and bar glasses with plastic. Silly? Of course. Concepts like this make me shake my head vigorously to make sure I didn’t miss anything in the translation. It’s difficult to believe people can be that naïve.

But the Brits are hardly alone. The Nerfland Coalition™ isn’t restricted to that side of the pond.

Via El Capitan’s Baboon Pirates blog I found this USA Today op-ed on our “softer, gentler” advocates in the national education intelligentsia. The key quotation:

It seems that many adults today regard the children in their care as fragile hothouse flowers who require protection from even the remote possibility of frustration, disappointment or failure. The new solicitude goes far beyond blacklisting red pens. Many schools now discourage or prohibit competitive games such as tag or dodge ball. The rationale: too many hurt feelings. In May 2002, for example, the principal of Franklin Elementary School in Santa Monica, Calif., sent a newsletter to parents informing them that children could no longer play tag during the lunch recess. As she explained, “In this game, there is a ‘victim’ or ‘It,’ which creates a self-esteem issue.”

Is anything OK?

Which games are deemed safe and self-affirming? The National PTA recommends a cooperative alternative to the fiercely competitive “tug of war” called “tug of peace.” Some professionals in physical education advocate activities in which children compete only with themselves, such as juggling, unicycling, pogo sticking, and even “learning to … manipulate wheelchairs with ease.”

But juggling, too, poses risks.

A former member of The President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports suggests using silken scarves rather than, say, uncooperative tennis balls that lead to frustration and anxiety. “Scarves,” he points out, “are soft, non-threatening, and float down slowly.”

I would have more to say, but El Capitan points out that Red at Sheila Variations does it just fine.

In the mean time, I need to find a nice hard surface to bang my head against.

UPDATE, 6/3: Toren points to an associated piece at Silent Running with this excerpt:

Trying to raise children with the erroneous belief that there are no winners or losers, and that nothing bad will ever be allowed to happen to them will only result in an unworkable society full of litigious, therapy-obsessed malignant narcissists with a widly inflated sense of self-importance, a belief that nothing is ever their fault and an inability to recognise evil, let alone actually do anything about it.

Oh.

Never mind.

And one commenter, Lucyna, left this there:

There is a reason why this is being done – it’s called “dumbing down”. Cocooning creates adults that need to be looked after – that way they are far more manageable and less likely to be troublesome. This process is well under way and has been in progress for over a century now.

Oh and pc is the palatable explanation – not the actual reason.

Which once again reminds me of Connie du Toit’s explanation for the destruction of our public schools:

The other day our Carpenter’s helper heard me say something along the lines of, “it is difficult to conclude that incompetence is the reason why our public schools have deteriorated. There comes a point where you have to suspect sabotage, or a conspiracy.”

He asked me if I really meant that. I gave him the five minute explanation of John Dewey’s known affiliation with communists, his frequent essays and articles about the wonders of the Soviet education system, and his quote, “You can’t make Socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.”

I then went on to tell him about how public schools changed at the turn of the last century. That there were others involved in turning Americans from free-thinking individualists to factory drones. I also added that many people probably went along with it because it seemed like a good idea, but there were certainly enough people behind the scenes, who knew that the goal posts had been moved. THAT is a conspiracy.

Yes. There does come that time when you are forced to don the tinfoil hat.

The incompetence excuse only works once. Incompetence this great is impossible to attribute to accident.

This isn’t naïveté. This isn’t incompetence. Lucyna is correct. This is deliberate sabotage.