Today’s post was triggered by an email I got from Bernie Sanders. Yes, he personally sent me and several million other people an email touting how once fringe ideas are coming to center stage in the American consciousness. I’m not surprised because this is how things always happen. There was once a vegetable grower in California who was branded a lunatic for believing during the days of steam engine trains that he could feed most of the country and make more money if he could only keep his produce cool and fresh during the multi-day train ride east.
In this particular email was the results of a poll about free college tuition. Anyone who has been on this planet for a bit of time knows that survey, poll and study are synonyms for fiction. If you don’t believe that just look at all of the drugs which were approved in the past 10 years then recalled because the manufacturer hid certain evidence during the FDA regulated clinical trial. If you can either rig a clinical trial or clean up the data prior to FDA review, just how hard do you think it is to rig an unregulated poll?
Question 2 – Free College Tuition
Democrats: 79% Support
Republicans: 42% Support
All Americans: 60% Support
I’m absolutely certain you can find at least this much support if you call the right people. These would include a great many people who should have never procreated in the first place. These people don’t believe in corporal punishment and they believe all of society should forgive and forget every transgression of their child in perpetuity. The sad reality of today’s society is that most of the people producing offspring aren’t parents. Having a kid doesn’t make you a parent, it makes you a biological procreation unit and nothing more.
Our public education system has been overrun by people who have children and aren’t parents. I recently ran into someone who works at one of the better public schools around the Des Moines, IA area. Teachers aren’t allowed to tell kids no. They aren’t allowed to say “don’t run” or “stop running” when the wild animals are running in the hall. Can’t even raise their voice. They must calmly say
Walking steps. Walking steps please.
At this same school they have one or more kids who enjoy dropping trow and taking a shit in a room then smearing their own shit on the walls with their bare hands. It would cost more to send the child to a special school where they would most likely crack his ass to correct that behavior than it does to hire a couple of behavior moderation people for a few hours per day to sit with the child (children) in a classroom performing no consequences exercises to “correct” this behavior. At least one entire school year went by without the behavior being corrected. Each time there was a shift change or one of the people had to step out, drop, dump and smear.
A real parent would be mortified by such behavior. A real parent would have cracked the kid’s ass long ago and corrected that behavior at home. This child’s parent calls in and asks the school to do a better job of washing the kids hands because he comes home with shit under his fingernails.
Keep in mind this is one of the better schools and there still are no consequences so behavior gets worse. Why do you think there is a bullying epidemic? You get caught bullying and get your ass cracked a few times with the sound echoing down the hallways for all to hear and, eventually, you learn to curb that behavior or how to squat hovering over your chair for hours on end.
At this same school (though I’ve heard it from others too) a little girl in Kindergarten, mad that a teacher had taken her apple or something like that away screamed
Give me back my fucking apple you bitch!
Kindergarten.
They can’t crack their ass to curb such behavior. Years ago some socks in sandal wearing tree huggers “did a study” and got corporate punishment banned. They wanted to stop the one or two teachers in each state who had a tendency to choose a single student as the whipping child for all. They threw the baby out with the bathwater. Now we have an epidemic of school shootings because kids live in a world without consequences.
Do you really want your kid growing up like Jamie Dimon or any of the other Wall Street bankers who can deliberately engage in massive financial fraud sucking a trillion dollars or more out of the global economy ruining millions of lives then bribing politicians with share holder (not their own) money to stay out of prison able to sleep just fine at night? With today’s education system, that’s what you are headed for, a world full of Wall Street Bankers without morals, ethics or basic human dignity. Inmates just waiting for the cell doors to close.
When I was in junior high, on day one, all of the boys were taken back to the shop class room. There we watched as the shop class teacher carved out a paddle much like the one in the linked image. We all had to take turns hand sanding it and helping drill the air holes. Then we had to help stain and varnish the thing. Any time the Principal broke one we got to repeat this little exercise.
Once again, as Freshmen in High School, the same ordeal was repeated. In High School our teachers had extra options for correcting bad behavior:
Bullying: If you were caught bullying by a teacher or the guidance counselor got wind of it from the target and didn’t buy your b.s., a comment was made to whoever you had for P.E. In front of the entire class the P.E. teacher would casually ask you about this bullying thing they heard about. That was code for the class. If you didn’t need an ambulance, it wasn’t a foul, enjoy soccer today. Even your friends would join in on cheap shots because the alternative, an option you also had, was to run laps until you hurled.
Fighting: If you were caught fighting, and you both agreed, you could put on these massive gloves and go outside with several instructors to “finish the fight.” I don’t remember, but I think our parents signed some kind of waver to allow this as well. A few bloody noses growing up builds character and, you had to see these gloves. We called them “balloon gloves” but they weren’t inflatable like the ones you see now. They were somewhere between 50-80 ounces and all of the weight was back by the wrist. A good 8 inches of the fluffiest stuff mankind ever invented was between your knuckles and the outside of the glove. If you put your entire body into it and they stood flat footed with hands down you might bloody their nose and perhaps they would stumble.
We also had the 3-day out of school suspension. For rural kids with farming backgrounds, this was punishment. City kids sit around watching cartoons. On a farm you got worked into the ground. The hottest, nastiest most back breaking job which needed to get done got done during your 3-day suspension by you. Siblings didn’t get drafted to help. Whether it was forking all of the manure out of the barn or climbing to the top of the crib in August heat to grease and/or otherwise prep the cup elevator, the job was yours. Ordinarily people waited for a really cool day or morning and enlisted most of the kids for such jobs. If you got a suspension, that list of candidates was limited to one.
That education system turned out some decent human beings. Today’s education system turns out prison inmates.
What? You have to go to a college where they have trigger word warnings and safe zones? Your biological procreation units won’t tell you, but I will, you aren’t making it in this life.
I like you Bernie, but, until you bring back corporal punishment, I don’t want college tuition for all. I don’t want kids who grow up in a world without any physical consequences and behave like animals getting dumped into Junior and State run colleges and that’s exactly what will happen. If it is free it is not appreciated. Even if a college could crack a kid’s ass, after the age of 16 can they even be saved?
People like to blame the War on Drugs and every other thing in society for why our prison population is exploding. There are exactly 2 reasons:
- Biological procreation units aren’t parents.
- Corporal punishment was removed from public schools. In the past schools could correct worthless parenting, now they can’t.
