What scares schools most!
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Few things in life are a more god-given gift that that of a close friend, a person who has been there for a lifetime starting in schoolyard days or earlier, a person with whom one shares so many common bonds, great experiences, the good times, and the bad. As a child ventures out from the family unit, among a myriad of contacts in school and other activities, what a wonderful blessing it is to find a special friend and if life situations work out will be there for perhaps an entire life time. A best friend is someone with whom one can share his or her most intimate fears and weaknesses, dreams, schemes, and over time lots and lots of laughter.
Leave it to the ideologues who work in child sociology and psychology to want to interfere with one of life’s most precious gifts. What’s next, they’ll make official what the nanny state and Hollywood seem to suggest, marriage, life’s other big bond outside of the family of birth is not such a good thing?
The New York Times, June 17, 2009, “A Best Friend, You Must Be Kidding,” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/fashion/17BFF.html?scp=1&sq=camp%20couselors,%20teachers,%20friends&st=cse reports on efforts of schools and even camp counselors to start keeping tabs on children’s relationships and to separate kids who they deem as being too close. Before we go into any more details, what the hell makes it think that a child’s friends are their business unless the two kids are engaged in destructive behavior?
Among the assumptions these nanny state fascists articulate is a sense that real tight friendships encourage a kind of exclusivity which is contrary to their desire to create a climate of great inclusion. They weasel around what they are doing by arguing their efforts aren’t designed to discourage tight friendships but rather to encourage students to have respect for the dignity of others. This measure idiotic notion is supported by officials from The National Association of Secondary School Principals but also extends to summer camps where the Times reports that in recent years the Timber Lake Camp in Phoenicia, New York employs friendship “coaches” to help all kids become friends with all other campers.
The real essence of the matter is expressed in the following paragraph from the article:
Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.
Anyone who does not live in an ivory tower vacuum knows these concerns are absurd! Tight friendships do not lead to cliques and bullying. They promote loyalty and mutual respect. Cliques are more a result of kids not having positive relationships and developing a followers or a herd mentality exactly what the schools efforts would produce interfering in a child’s relationship.
What’s also implicit in the schools’ intrusive nanny nose poking into manipulating friendships is their continued pursuit to micromanage all aspects of a child’s life. For years, schools have been ostracizing parents and rejecting their input and interest into the affairs of schools with the attitude, “We’re the ones with degrees in education. What do these meddlesome parents know?” How often are schools fighting the exact values often concerning morality and religion that parents attempt to provide at home?
Tight friendships also create another problem for the nanny state fascists. While most kids tend to have at least one really close friend, what about the kids who don’t? In the brave new world of promoted by the intellectual elites, the notion that there could be “have’s” and “have not’s” is unacceptable so just like the same mindset that seems to increasingly hate and tax the rich, it is consistent with that kind of thinking to go after the “have’s.”
Close friends tend to reinforce each other’s values and outlooks thus this is yet another area where schools feel compelled to extend further their control so all kids who complete their public education will be a bunch of compliant politically correct left-wing leaning zombies.
One has to wonder if there’s still some paranoia how school officials missed what the infamous Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were up to leading up to the Columbine mass murder/suicide spree. Punish the healthy friendships for the sake of the possibility of a dangerous duo. If schools pursue such nonsense, they should be careful of possible unintended consequences.
While taken in isolation, many issues of what goes on in public schools today can be minimized and dismissed, taken in their totality and looking at the extent to which curriculum decisions have become grossly politicized as shown recently by the Texas statewide social studies text book madness where the battle focused on the desires of the extreme right versus the extreme left engaged in a death match for which side would prevail while true traditional academics and normal families’ concerns were ignored.
Student achievement continues to deteriorate where proficiency in reading, math and science fails to measure up. Test scores only tell part of the story since it has been common practice that when tests don’t tell the happy story state boards of education desire, they change the tests to something that temporarily boosts up the scores. The history of testing in Maryland shows the issue well. For decades, the Iowa test of basic schools was the statewide standard, in the late 70’s, test results plummeted, thus the California test was adopted. When the California test results wouldn’t work, Maryland attempted to adopt its own tests which have been subject to ridicule and scandal ever since.
It’s long past time that schools butt out of social engineering, from banning kids eating cookies at lunch, to destroying all reference to anything with religious connotations, to now messing around with how kids form friendships. Message to school boards, mind your own business and worry about TEACHING!
Of course the way schools have a long history of caving into the demands of teachers’ unions which have developed a union shop mentality in the school house where teachers are no longer allowed to be thinking professionals but rather job description droids, the structure which facilitates true learning is impossible.
Leave it to the ideologues who work in child sociology and psychology to want to interfere with one of life’s most precious gifts. What’s next, they’ll make official what the nanny state and Hollywood seem to suggest, marriage, life’s other big bond outside of the family of birth is not such a good thing?
The New York Times, June 17, 2009, “A Best Friend, You Must Be Kidding,” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/fashion/17BFF.html?scp=1&sq=camp%20couselors,%20teachers,%20friends&st=cse reports on efforts of schools and even camp counselors to start keeping tabs on children’s relationships and to separate kids who they deem as being too close. Before we go into any more details, what the hell makes it think that a child’s friends are their business unless the two kids are engaged in destructive behavior?
Among the assumptions these nanny state fascists articulate is a sense that real tight friendships encourage a kind of exclusivity which is contrary to their desire to create a climate of great inclusion. They weasel around what they are doing by arguing their efforts aren’t designed to discourage tight friendships but rather to encourage students to have respect for the dignity of others. This measure idiotic notion is supported by officials from The National Association of Secondary School Principals but also extends to summer camps where the Times reports that in recent years the Timber Lake Camp in Phoenicia, New York employs friendship “coaches” to help all kids become friends with all other campers.
The real essence of the matter is expressed in the following paragraph from the article:
Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.
Anyone who does not live in an ivory tower vacuum knows these concerns are absurd! Tight friendships do not lead to cliques and bullying. They promote loyalty and mutual respect. Cliques are more a result of kids not having positive relationships and developing a followers or a herd mentality exactly what the schools efforts would produce interfering in a child’s relationship.
What’s also implicit in the schools’ intrusive nanny nose poking into manipulating friendships is their continued pursuit to micromanage all aspects of a child’s life. For years, schools have been ostracizing parents and rejecting their input and interest into the affairs of schools with the attitude, “We’re the ones with degrees in education. What do these meddlesome parents know?” How often are schools fighting the exact values often concerning morality and religion that parents attempt to provide at home?
Tight friendships also create another problem for the nanny state fascists. While most kids tend to have at least one really close friend, what about the kids who don’t? In the brave new world of promoted by the intellectual elites, the notion that there could be “have’s” and “have not’s” is unacceptable so just like the same mindset that seems to increasingly hate and tax the rich, it is consistent with that kind of thinking to go after the “have’s.”
Close friends tend to reinforce each other’s values and outlooks thus this is yet another area where schools feel compelled to extend further their control so all kids who complete their public education will be a bunch of compliant politically correct left-wing leaning zombies.
One has to wonder if there’s still some paranoia how school officials missed what the infamous Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were up to leading up to the Columbine mass murder/suicide spree. Punish the healthy friendships for the sake of the possibility of a dangerous duo. If schools pursue such nonsense, they should be careful of possible unintended consequences.
While taken in isolation, many issues of what goes on in public schools today can be minimized and dismissed, taken in their totality and looking at the extent to which curriculum decisions have become grossly politicized as shown recently by the Texas statewide social studies text book madness where the battle focused on the desires of the extreme right versus the extreme left engaged in a death match for which side would prevail while true traditional academics and normal families’ concerns were ignored.
Student achievement continues to deteriorate where proficiency in reading, math and science fails to measure up. Test scores only tell part of the story since it has been common practice that when tests don’t tell the happy story state boards of education desire, they change the tests to something that temporarily boosts up the scores. The history of testing in Maryland shows the issue well. For decades, the Iowa test of basic schools was the statewide standard, in the late 70’s, test results plummeted, thus the California test was adopted. When the California test results wouldn’t work, Maryland attempted to adopt its own tests which have been subject to ridicule and scandal ever since.
It’s long past time that schools butt out of social engineering, from banning kids eating cookies at lunch, to destroying all reference to anything with religious connotations, to now messing around with how kids form friendships. Message to school boards, mind your own business and worry about TEACHING!
Of course the way schools have a long history of caving into the demands of teachers’ unions which have developed a union shop mentality in the school house where teachers are no longer allowed to be thinking professionals but rather job description droids, the structure which facilitates true learning is impossible.
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