U.S. ‘too ashamed and timid to assert authority in the classroom’
You can almost see the spittle dripping down Michelle Malkin’s chin as she riles against a report with ‘sob stories of students humiliated after being disciplined by school officials for unruliness’. This from the New York Post in 2008.
Classroom Chaos
Corporal punishment is not the problem
THE citizens of the world
who hate America are going to love the latest agitprop released this week by
Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. In a document titled
“A Violent Education: Corporal Punishment of Children in US Public Schools,”
the leftwing groups seek to paint a horrifying portrait of the nation’s
classrooms as Abu Ghraib torture chambers.
The report compiles sob
stories of students humiliated after being disciplined by school officials for
unruliness, and claims that minority students are “disproportionately targeted”
for punishment. Citing international law and threatening lawsuits, Human Rights
Watch and the ACLU are demanding that the White House and Congress ban physical
discipline in all public schools.
The report says that “more
than 200,000 US public school students were punished by beatings during the
2006-2007 school year,” but makes no distinction between “beatings” that take
the form of mere knuckle-rapping versus swats on the backside versus over the violent
confrontations. In several of the anecdotes cited, it wasn’t bruised bottoms
that upset the supposedly brutalized students. It was bruised egos.
Peter S., a middle-school
student from the Mississippi Delta, whined to the researchers: “The other kids
were watching and laughing. It made me want to fight them. When you get a
paddling and you see everyone laugh at you, it make you mad and you want to do
something about it.” How about ending your bad behavior and flying right?
Of course educators must
use common sense when punishing bad apples. Of course they should be held
accountable if they cause undue harm. But the agenda of these outfits is not to
ensure the safety of everyone in the classroom. Their agenda is to demonize
unapologetic enforcers of order and to impose international dictates on
American public institutions.
The main author of the
report is a special fellow with the Open Society Institute, funded by George
(America must be “de-Nazified”) Soros. Replete with references to the
Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, the report declares in sweeping terms: “All corporal
punishment, whether or not it causes significant physical injury, represents a
violation of each student’s rights to physical integrity and human dignity. It
is degrading and humiliating, damaging the student’s self-esteem and making him
or her feel helpless.” It’s Gitmo all over again.
As usual, the Human Rights
Watch/ACLU activists inject claims of racial discrimination into the mix — repeatedly
underscoring that many of the remaining states that allow corporal punishment
are in the South. They infer deliberate targeting of black students based on
statistics that reportedly show that “in the 13 southern states where corporal
punishment is most prevalent, African-American students are punished at 1.4
times the rate that would be expected given their numbers in the student
population, and African-American girls are 2.1 times more likely to be paddled
than might be expected.”
But that disproportion does
not automatically equal discrimination. What they don’t tell you are the races
or ethnicities of the victims of the thugs being disciplined. What they don’t
bother to mention — because it doesn’t fit the “America as torturer of
minorities” narrative — is the unmitigated violence perpetrated in American
classrooms against minority teachers.
The recent videotaped
beating of black Baltimore teacher Jolita Berry by a black female student — as
other black students cheered and screamed, “Hit her!” — exposed the continuing
chaos in inner-city districts. In that school system alone, 112 students were
expelled for assaults on staff members this school year.
Federal education
statistics show that between 1996 and 2000, 599,000 violent crimes against teachers
at school were reported. On average, the feds say, in each year from 1996 to
2000, about 28 out of every 1,000 teachers were the victims of violent crime at
school, and three out of every 1,000 were victims of serious violent crime
(i.e., rape, sexual assault, robbery or aggravated assault). Violence against
teachers is higher at urban schools.
America’s problem isn’t
that we’re too tough and cruel in the classroom. It’s that we’ve become too
soft and placative, too ashamed and timid to assert authority and take
unilateral action to guarantee a secure environment. Exactly where the human
rights groups want us.
As published in New
York Post, 23 August 2008.
Picture credit: Unknown
Comments
Post a Comment