How Not to Educate Children

In truth, it isn’t that difficult to ruin childhood education. Just do what the Obama administration prescribed: no more discipline, no more suspensions, no more expulsions.

If minority youth disrupt classes, to the point where no education can take place, we must not blame them. We must understand their needs. We must understand their natural rebellion against racism. If they continue to commit crimes, well, we must decriminalize crime. There, that will do it.

If you were wondering why only a third of American schoolchildren can read at grade level, here’s one explanation. I would remark that those who run these establishments are invariably from the political left, even from the radical left.

Hot Air has the story, via Maggie’s Farm:

Aptos Middle School is located in San Francisco and, from the outside, appears like an ordinary school. But today the San Francisco Chronicle reports a small group of disruptive students, somewhere between 5 and 20, have turned it into something reminiscent of the Lord of the Flies.

It quotes the San Francisco Chronicle:

One of the scariest incidents at Aptos this school year occurred in September, when two girls attacked a sixth-grade girl on the schoolyard. The girls pulled the sixth-grader to the ground by her hair, pulled a chunk of it out of her skull and kicked her in the face and the back of her head…

School administrators held a “restorative justice” meeting with the families of each girl. That’s the school district’s preferred way of resolving disputes, and it centers on mediation and acknowledging harm.

“There were no apologies,” [the victim’s mother] said. “When asked specifically what they would do differently, the girl said, ‘Well, I guess I wouldn’t have kicked her in the face.’… Those girls have approached her multiple times since then and said, ‘You better keep your mouth shut, you little bitch.’”…

“It’s kind of ‘Lord of the Flies’ around here,” [the mother] said.

That’s not all, folks. The Chronicle continues:

The language tolerated at school is horrific, students said. Kids use homophobic slurs, call girls “ho’s,” and a mother said she heard a student tell a teacher, “F— you, you motherf—ing n—” in front of other adults, and none of them did anything.

We note that these children have no respect for a teacher’s authority. Perhaps it’s because teachers have no power to discipline unruly and disruptive students. Perhaps it’s because we as a culture have become allergic to the exercise of authority.

We believe so fervently in democracy, we attack so regularly authoritarian governments, that the madness has come to infest the school system, producing a generation of illiterate, innumerate young people.