Snowflake students

The NEA is raising a generation of snowflake students. They can only survive in a climate-controlled environment, with a politically correct thermostat. Microaggressions cause them to die of pneumonia. 

Now bullying can be a genuine problem. I don't deny that. Some students are mercilessly bullied by other students. Some boys are physically abused by other boys. Some girls are verbally abused by other girls. 

Every so often a bullied boy finally strikes back by returning to school with a rifle to even the score. And there are mitigating factors. 

Mind you, those aren't the cases that the education establishment cares about. Rather, it only cares about "protected classes." The social mascot du jour. 

It's striking to compare the current educational regime with the past. I have a relative, now retired, to began her teaching career in a small-town farming community. Students had a hazing ritual. When a new student, a boy, came to school, a local boy would pick a fight with him. The new student didn't have to win. He just had to show that he could take a punch and fight back. That earned the respect of his peers. 

It was a one-time rite of initiation. He wasn't bullied everyday or every week. To the contrary, the other male students accepted him so long as he passed the rite of initiation.

I knew a coworker, an immigrant, who attended a big inner city school. It had the same hazing ritual.

I expect that's fairly widespread. My point is not to evaluate that practice. I'm not commending that. Yet it's useful to contrast what today's generation takes for granted with what former generations took for granted.

I had an older relative who began his teaching career in the 50s. At that time you still had corporal punishment in the public schools. This was in junior high. I don't know if it extended to high school. And it wasn't the principal who meted out the punishment. Teachers were expected to do so.

Another relative of the same generation told me that in her day, if you got paddled at school, you got paddled at home. The two systems reinforced each other. 

She told me one more anecdote about a teacher she knew. I'm guessing this was during the first quarter of the 20C.

A new teacher began his first day of class. The male students were rowdy. The teacher was athletic. So he grabbed one student by the collar, lifted him out of the chair, with his feet dangling in the air, shook him like a rag doll, then dropped him back into the chair, where the chastened student slumped in his seat. Not surprisingly, things quieted down after that display.

However, that evening, when he glanced out the window, he saw a motorcade approaching his house. He assumed the worst. The boy's father had come, with his buddies, to rough up the teacher.

They exited their vehicles, climbed the porch, and knocked in the door.

When, with trepidation, he answered the door, they shook hands and invited him down to the bar. He was their kind of teacher. 

Now someone might say that was in the bad old days when society was more violent. But was it? As I've mentioned on more than one occasion, when I was a public school student, back in the 60-70s, we had an open campus–K-12. No security guards. No police on the premises. No student ID badges. No metal detectors. No random searches. No gunfights. No knifefights. Even fistfights were rare. No driveway shootings. And that's not just my anecdotal experience. For instance:

It’s no coincidence that, much like the number of fatherless children, the number of mass shootings has exploded since the 1960s. Throughout the entire 1960s, six mass shootings took place. That number doubled in 1970. Heck, 2012 alone saw more mass shootings than the sixties did. 

http://thefederalist.com/2015/07/14/guess-which-mass-murderers-came-from-a-fatherless-home/

When I was a kid, school was simultaneously far freer and far safer. What changed?