John Derbyshire with his usual panache and an outsider’s knack for observation diagnosis the pervasiveness and perversity of our current culture of poltical correctness in his latest article in The American Conservative, viz.:
Educational practice has long been a playground for PC’s “experiments against reality,” with the ludicrous No Child Left Behind Act, legislating that all students must be above average, as the culmination of those experiments.
Much energy has gone into a sissifaction of the schools—an effort to get boys behaving like girls. Fighting—a normal activity among small boys—is now considered an offense so horrible as to justify suspension and psychiatric intervention. “Use your words,” our sons are told, when they would rather, and would be better and healthier, using their fists. Schoolyard confrontations that would once have been taken to the gym to be decided with boxing gloves on now end with clenched-teeth apologies and grudging handshakes under the anxious eye of some senior staff member, usually female. Repeat offenses are dealt with via tranquillizing medications.
The converse thing—getting girls to be more boyish—has, where it has been attempted, mainly worked to the further disadvantage of boys, as with the ruthless application of Title IX of the 1972 education law to destroy athletic opportunities for male students.
The language of education is even more punctiliously PC than that of society at large. I have just returned from the annual field day at my son’s school, the events terminating in a, yes, “tug-o’-peace.” Talking to my son, I contemptuously called it a “tug-o’-mayhem, massacre, and blood-spattered death.” He laughed. He liked that. He’s a boy.
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