SelwynDuke.com

The Schools' Sinister War on Guns

By Selwyn Duke

Call it living in Upside-down Land or the realization of the Bible’s prediction of a time when bad will be called good and good, bad, but once again innocent schoolchildren have been persecuted for, well, just being children. This time the offender was Chase Lake Elementary School (CLES) in Edmonds, WA, where some kids were suspended for using Nerf guns on school grounds. And it’s an all-too-common story. A child will be punished for drawing a gun, shaping his fingers as one and saying “bang!” merely talking about guns or some other innocuous action. And recently there was a case of a five-year-old boy who brought a cap gun to school to show a friend and then was interrogated for two hours until he wet his pants. It’s all very bizarre and very twisted.

In the Edmonds case, the children were told that they could bring the toys to school, but I’m not interested in individual details but deeper matters. And make no mistake, something deeper is afoot here.

If I Were a Governor….

By Selwyn Duke

If I were a governor, the first thing I’d do is scrutinize the school curriculum in my state. For the teachings in the schools today will be the ideology of tomorrow, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln.

I’d review as much of the material as I could myself, and if the volume was too great, I’d appoint like-minded traditionalists to help with the task. But gone would be the revisionist history, radical environmentalism, feminism, multiculturalism, politically correct teaching models, and most other pseudo-intellectual “innovations” of the last century. Tradition would be resurrected and exalted, the classics would be taught, and the moral supremacy of the old Western civilization emphasized. I would be mindful of G.K. Chesterton’s words: “It ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest children, the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself.”

White and Wrong in Philly

By Selwyn Duke

When your article inspires a big-city mayor to refer your case to a "human-relations commission," you know you've hit a nerve. And when that article is the recent "Being White in Philly" piece by liberal Robert Huber, you know it doesn't take much truth to hit that nerve.

That's the scary part. Huber's article contains mostly tepid examples of whites' negative experiences with blacks and primarily black neighborhoods, such as a Philadelphia resident whose grill was stolen from her backyard but "blames herself" for not fencing it in. Its tone is basically apologetic, absolving a drug dealer of responsibility because he was just "trying to get by" and describing the US' racial history as "horrible and daunting." Yet this wasn't good enough for Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter and his comrades. They still want Huber silenced.

Raping the Language

By Selwyn Duke

Although the creation of the film Idiocracy evidences how we’re already halfway to an idiocracy — the work reflects decadent modern culture — it’s a good comedic warning about where we’re headed. For those too unsophisticated to imbibe such Hollywood fare, know that the movie presents a dystopian future America dumbed-down to a preposterous degree. One thing portrayed in the film is the degradation of language, with, for instance, a doctor character starting an interrogative with “why come” instead of “how come.” And it is a perfect example of art imitating life.

Many today will rape the English language, taking pleasure in mangling and tangling it, confusing corruption with creativity. What follows are examples of such, starting with the relatively innocuous and concluding with the more dangerous.

While journalists are supposed to be word men (those were the days, huh?), they often lead the charge toward idiocracy. It’s not just the news piece I read a few years back penned in pidgin English — obviously by someone to whom English isn’t his first language — but those who try to be “cute.” For example, Golf Channel’s Tim Rosaforte recently mentioned something that had been revealed and began his sentence with, “The big reveal is....” But unless he was about to apprise the audience of a large window jamb’s existence, “reveal” is a verb, not a noun. The word you’re looking for, Tim, old boy, is “revelation.” Likewise, let’s dispense with the new and budding practice of writing things such as “The tells are there,” which seems to have originated in the poker world. For unless we're talking about a raised mound at a Middle Eastern archeological site, “tell” is a verb, not a noun. If one wants to “tell” someone about a thing serving as a clue, the relevant term is “indication.”

Read the rest here.

School Shootings Solution: Not Gun Control or Guard Patrol — Door Control

By Selwyn Duke

In the wake of tragic Sandy Hook, many Americans are desperate to prevent further school shootings. Thus do we find ourselves debating two very divisive ideas: gun control and armed guards in schools. But there is another idea, one both simple and acceptable to virtually all: lockable, bulletproof doors for classrooms and school entrances.

This is a common-sense suggestion that has precedent. After 9/11, we had similar debates to those raging now. Today we’re divided over the idea of arming some teachers; back then there was rancor over the idea of arming pilots. Of course, we did finally appoint air marshals, the equivalent of armed guards in schools. Yet no one had to debate what was universally self-evident: the need to reinforce cockpit doors.

When Teachers aren’t Smarter than a Fifth-grader

By Selwyn Duke

When I’ve written about our listing mis-education system, my focus has mainly been on rampant political correctness, on how students learn few of the right things partially because of emphasis on teaching the wrong things. Yet there’s another problem: in some cases the teachers couldn’t teach the right things even if they wanted to — they don’t know them.

Professor Walter Williams treated this in his latest syndicated column, “Dishonest Educators.” He introduces the topic by talking about the fairly recent cheating scandals in places such as Atlanta, Philadelphia, Houston, New York, Detroit, and other large cities (in areas that, not coincidentally, also have high rates of vote fraud and other criminality). These are shocking instances in which teachers would commit transgressions such as reading answers aloud in class during the National Assessment of Educational Progress test. How did they justify this? Well, Williams quotes one teacher who told a fellow “educator,” “I had to give your kids, or your students, the answers because they’re dumb as hell."

Six-year-old Suspended for Firing Assault Finger

By Selwyn Duke

If you want to know why we’re breeding some crazy youngsters nowadays, you only have to look at the adults surrounding them. A case in point is a Maryland elementary school that recently suspended a little child for using an assault finger. Writes The Examiner of Washington:

The 6-year-old, who attends Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School in Silver Spring, made a gun with his hands, pointed it at another student and said "pow," according to Robin Ficker, the boy's attorney. He was given a one-day suspension, with a conference on the matter planned for Jan. 2….

Wow.

He said “pow.”

And I bet it really was “POW!”

Time for Schools to be Gun-free Free

By Selwyn Duke

If there’s anything the Newtown massacre has proven, it’s that school zones billed as “gun-free” cannot be guaranteed to thus be.

They’re only virtually certain to be good-guy-gun-free.

And it’s time for this symbolism-over-substance policy to end.

Students Forced to Stand for “Black National Anthem”

By Selwyn Duke

Students at Capital High School (CHS) in Charleston, West Virginia have been regularly forced to stand during the playing of a song known as “The Black National Anthem.”

The song, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” was played in the morning right after the American national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance, and students were forced to stand for all three. While the law currently states that no child can be compelled to stand for any kind of pledge, controversy only arose at CHS after two students and a parent complained about having to stand for the “Black National Anthem” (BNA).

Shameless Judges Strike Down Michigan Affirmative-action Ban

By Selwyn Duke

Hundreds of years ago, satirist Jonathan Swift described lawyers as “a society of men … bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white….” And evidencing that some things never change is the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In an 8-to-7 decision, the court just declared Michigan’s constitutional amendment banning affirmative action (AA) unconstitutional, with multiplied words that molest reasonable minds. Fox10Tv.com writes:

The court said the 2006 amendment to the Michigan Constitution is illegal because it presents an extraordinary burden to opponents who would have to mount their own long, expensive campaign through the ballot box to protect affirmative action.

That burden "undermines the Equal Protection Clause's guarantee that all citizens ought to have equal access to the tools of political change," said Judge R. Guy Cole Jr., writing for the majority….

However bad AA may be, the “reasoning” of these judges is more troubling still. For their argument could be used to strike down any law. ObamaCare? Overturn it “because it presents an extraordinary burden to opponents who would have to mount their own long, expensive campaign through the ballot box to protect” healthcare choice.

Read the rest here.