Seems we’ve moved past the war on boys and gone straight to the war on merit. Which I have to admit is refreshingly fair.
Unfortunately for the social planners, you can’t simply wish away talent or drive. And sooner rather than later, these presumptuous cultural engineers who are robbing us each of our individuality in order to enforce an immoral egalitarianism — that is, a homogeneity that deconstructs the very notion of liberty, in which one is free to make choices that resist those of the herd — are going to learn that their ideological power is built on a very unstable foundation, one that will come crumbling down the moment the tide turns, and an awakened, formerly-free people simply refuse to follow their dictates, and refuse to grant them any kind of intellectual or bureaucratic authority.
The leftwing intelligentsia is a quavering mass of average to below-average cookie-cutter “thinkers” who have codified power and authority thanks both to incestuous self-selection within the ranks of the academy and the perpetual reinforcement among their acolytes of a manufactured consent that is in the end at odds with the reality that simply refuses to map on to their constructs.
They must be exposed and shamed — precisely in the way they’ve attempted to use things like political correctness, orientalism, “diversity,” multiculturalism, and racial and ethnic studies to shame and neuter us.
We murder to dissect.
And in cases like this, we can only begin killing off such pernicious social engineering schemes once the parents of those students “devastated” from missing the mark begin counseling their children to work harder — and demanding that the Massachusetts principal so intent on instilling in these kids a false sense of institutional equality stop doing them the kinds of “favors” that will later cause them harm. Because reality discriminates.
Sorry, but that’s life. Wear a fucking helmet.
(h/t Terry H)
it’s a failshit public school
this is how those ones roll
Everybody who has a job should be fired. It’s devastating to those who don’t have one.
Everybody who’s toilet trained should be forced to piss and crap themselves. It’s devastating to little kids who aren’t potty-trained yet, and as a side benefit chases off would-be rapists.
In fact, we should pass a law that makes hurt feelings illegal, because No Bad Feels Evar is a human fucking right. And if you don’t think so, you’re racist and you deserve ridicule and hurt feelings.
Hmmm . . .
. . . and this wouldn’t be a response to the counter-suggestions of that racist dog Dr. Benjamin Carson, now would it?
“The nail that stands up is hammered down.”
“When everyone is special, then no one is.” –Syndrome (The Incredibles)
Harrison Bergeron, we hardly knew ye.
The social planners may not wish to celebrate merit, nor even to recognize it. Unfortunately for them, merit exists with or without their recognition or approval.
Mostly, I suspect that the event was cancelled because the teachers and administrators simply cannot stand to spend an evening with students who are more knowledgeable and hard-working than they are. And don’t get them started on the overachieving parents…
In fairness (ahem) Dash Parr said it before Syndrome did — but Dash said it like it was a bad thing…
a nice FU would be to throw an honors dinner off campus
I’m reminded of the old joke about the student who says to his teacher, “I don’t mean to scare you, but my dad told me that if my grades don’t improve, someone’s gonna get a whipping.”
In the Newspeak version, TaiChiWawa, Dad gets a visit from CPS, Johnny gets put in foster care until Dad completes a mandatory 12-week anger management course.
My kid goes to the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics.
It’s a meritocracy in the real world, ye bloody bitches.
ot got the front and backs of my jeans sewed. time to put them together. my inner levi strauss exposed.
[…] […]
It would be nice if everyone just boycotted it and said “We have no time to waste on stupid, empty, purely symbolic farces dreamed up by self important drama llamas.”
[…] Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom comes the quote of the day on an article about an inept middle school principle who decided to do […]
I found this story yesterday and posted on it. In fact, I had to edit some of the anger out of it before a friend would retweet it for me.
Moronic ObaZma went to Israel to demonstrate his dumbassedness bona fides. That’s at least one way to stand out.
Obama quotes Alinsky in speech to young Israelis. Channels main theme of ‘Rules for Radicals’ book on community organizing
I wonder if it ever occured to Obama that Israel was FOUNDED as a result of REAL community organizing. He is a nameless microscopic piss ant in the field compared to those who founded Israel.
So they are still going to be recognized and honored, it just isn’t going to be quite as elaborate a presentation.
Not feeling this one.
You perhaps missed the point Beemoe. The principle decided to cancel the special night for the honors students because the other students who didn’t make the grade might have their feelings hurt. Well, cry me a freakin’ river. Perhaps they will try a little harder next year.
If Mr. Principal had said something along the lines of “can’t afford a special night for the Honors people, so we’ll just give them their certificates at the regularly-scheduled graduation thing,” that probably wouldn’t have provoked much of a reaction.
It’s the “but it’s terribly discriminatory and hurtful to all the not-so-smart students, who probably would be just as smart if not for their shitty home life, but who are we to judge” noises that are absurd, and need to be mocked and fought at every turn.
Soon all athletes will be required to wear devices to reduce their advantages over others, math whizzes will be required to wear noise producing head gear that makes it harder for them to think, artists will be forced to use distorting glasses to inhibit their abilities and singers will have to have electronic echoing devices to throw off their timing and tonal quality.
See. It’s just the government making every one EQUAL.
And when everyone’s EQUAL, no one does well.
(I read the above in some Science Fiction story a long time ago but can’t provide the credit.)
Fiction becomes reality. Brought to us by the Democrats/Liberals where fairness means you never have to know you suck.
Its pretty much a fact that an involved home life is tied to academic success, mocking statements like that don’t help your case.
There are a lot better examples of the point you are trying to make than this one, is all I am saying. Exagerating what is happening and then getting all bent out of shape about it is MSNBC type shenanigans, I wish Fox would cut it out.
jcw46, that would be Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s short story Harrison Bergeron, 1961.
Full text.
Better to hand out the achievement certificates when everyone’s collecting their participation trophy. That way nobody feels left out.
sdferr makes an excellent point about Dr. Ben Carson. I’m reading his book, America the Beautiful, right now. In it he says of classes which contain Carson Scholars, that the GPA of the whole class goes up one grade. Teachers LIKE having these exceptionally motivated students in class, because they bring the class along with them.
My son asked for a lab coat for Christmas when he was in second grade. We got it for him. He took it to school and put it in his cubby. When the class would do Science, he would take out the lab coat and wear it, and at the end of Science he would take it off and put it away. This delighted his teacher, and she told the other teachers about it. They would come and peek in the classroom window during Science to see him wearing his lab coat. She said the other teachers would pass the word when he was wearing the lab coat and they’d all come watch.
In third grade he took the lab coat and wore it, as he had in second grade, and with the same results.
In fourth grade at Meet the Teacher night, I told her that he had a lab coat which he brings and wears during Science class. She said he would not be allowed to bring it, because some other children might like a lab coat and if they didn’t have one, they might feel bad. (This school is in a neighborhood of two-lawyer or two-doctor families, with two Lexuses in the driveway, and for two years, these fragile orchids had somehow managed to survive being in the proximity of my lab-coat-wearing son.)
So, he didn’t get to wear the lab coat, and in my opinion, his class suffered for it.
But we won. He grew up and is now a rocket scientist. His fourth grade teacher is still a mediocrity.
The Ipswich Cuckoo.
There are a lot better examples of the point you are trying to make than this one, is all I am saying.
This example was linked. Your “better” examples are not. Why not share with the rest of the class?
Some parents disagree with his philosophy.
One indicator of the depth to which education has fallen in the U.S. is shown by this usage of the term philosophy. It’s of course meaningless, but then, that’s the point of such a usage, i.e., to make philosophy meaningless.
Blame Peter Mark Roget sdferr.
Heh, I’m sort of more inclined to blame Harvard, if not simply for Charles Eliot, then for beating New Mexico U. last night. But if Roget’s the man, so be it.
Actually, we need to blame John Dewey, but he’d dead. Never fear though- Bill Ayers has taken up the mantle of dumbing down our education system.
Well, sure, I guess. That is, if you care more about the state of education in this country than about its usage of the english language.
And Roget’s dead too, so he’s got that going for him.
Perhaps, though Eliot was introducing his ill-advised reforms at Harvard nearly two decades prior to Dewey’s own university education even beginning to take shape.
Just for the delight, such as it may be, to witness another view of the corruption of this term “philosophy”, herewith a brief passage from Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), Chapter IV, “Machiavelli’s Teaching”:
*** […] The reader thus comes to understand the truth that what ought not to be said cannot be said. It is fortunate for the historians of ideas, to say nothing of others, that there are not many books of this kind. Still, there are more of them than one would easily believe, for there were more great men who were stepsons of their time or out of step with the future than one would easily believe. As Faust put it to Wagner, “the few who understood something of the world and of men’s heart and mind, who were foolish enough not to restrain their full heart but to reveal their feeling and their vision to the vulgar, have ever been crucified and burned”; not everyone belonging to those few failed to restrain his full heart. Goethe was the last great man who rediscovered or remembered this, especially after he had returned from the storm and stress of sentiment to the tranquility of fullness of vision.[1] After him, social reason, sentiment and decision and whatever goes with those “dynamic forces” united in order to destroy the last vestiges of the recollection of what philosophy originally meant. ***
So I guess David Fabrizio is a sort of holy fool to the goddess Égalité then?
I shouldn’t know what Fabrizio worships. The article author, however, displays an ignorance I believe we are entitled to assume Fabrizio, and in large part even, the parents to whom the article writer refers, share with the dominant products of a system of education bereft of sense.
I’m still going with blame it on Roget and his thesaurus then.
I’m shifting with the winds, Ernst, since I’m fixin’ to pin it on the U. of Wisconsin Badgers.
Interestingly, Roget (1779-1869) is a near contemporary of Goethe (1749-1832).
College basketball is a matter of complete indifference to me.
Well yes, but this wouldn’t have anything to do with the situation on the ground in the American academy, would it (i.e., the sports enterprises being the last remaining vestige of competitive excellence therein)? heh.
I just don’t care for basketball.
And I’d enjoy college football more if they were honest about the fact that it’s the NFL’s farm league.
In fact, I wish football was more like soccer. The Vikings ought to be relegated to the NCAA!
So, Percy’s parting is apt to be much to Percy’s liking then, I’m guessing. For my own part, it’s still a bit of a puzzle what the Vikes have in mind.
Football should be more like Rugby.
And I agree with you about basketball being a big yawner. I didn’t ever particularly like playing it when I was younger. Too many hot doggers and no team work. Baseball suffers from this as well. It seems to have been forgotten that the job of the batter is to advance the runner, not to glory-hog it up trying to swing for the fences.
ach, that’s multifold calumny and misdirection leigh, concerning both the teamwork to be found in many a college basketball program and the aims of a batter at the plate, presuming winning the game repeatedly over the course of a long season is the object.
“Winning isn’t everything, it the only thing” as Vince Lombardi used to say.
I should have specified professional sports in my kibitzing. I’m starting to sound like my dad reminiscing about the good old days.
If it were, there’d be less concern about spinal cord injuries, concussions and long-term brain injuries.
Hard to use your head and shoulders like a weapon when they’re protected by leather.
Exactly. Manly men play Rugby and wear short pants while doing so. This could be a draw for the ladies. The knee britches in basketball is one of the reasons I quit watching it.
You knock some other guy’s block off with your shoulder, both of you are going to feel. Same deal if you crack heads together. Rugby shirts also look lots cooler that knock-off football jerseys on the fans. They almost double as a polo.
it’s still a bit of a puzzle what the Vikes have in mind.
When is that ever not the case?
I think I sort of understood Bud Grant once or twice. But then, it has been awhile.