Posted on

A Pet Peeve

College student doesn’t recognize Ronald Reagan.

This has happened more than a few times in my 30-year teaching career.  As part of a broader discussion, a kid will define a “conservative” as one who opposes change.  That’s not the end of it.  What follows is a train wreck of logic.  Diving deeper, we find that the kid is hung up on the root “conserve”, which to the student means to stand athwart “change”.  And “change” is synonymous with “reform”.  And “reform” is “good”.  That’s etymology, or a loose rendering of it.  When did etymology become a substitute for philosophical reasoning?  Somehow it has for the masses of the young passing through our schools into adulthood.

To set the record straight, “conservative” is one of many philosophies – in common usage, call them ideologies – that have bounced around our world for the past few centuries.  Other modern examples would be “liberal”, “progressive”, and “Salafist Islam”.  A philosophy/ideology is a simple set of judgments on how the world works.

The terms are also labels.  What fits under the label can change over time.  A “conservative” of 16th century England would support the aristocracy and a Catholic-style Church of England (High Churchmen in the parlance of the day).  However, by the 19th into the 20th centuries, “conservative” came to be defined by the liberty agenda of Locke, Burke, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, the now-defunct British Whig Party, and our founding fathers.  Amazing as to what a few centuries can do.

If “conservative” can be defined by a liberty agenda, what of “liberal” and “progressive”?  It’s easy to knock these two things out since they have morphed into the same thing.  A “progressive” (or modern liberal) begins with an unexamined, unacknowledged, and unstated assumption about history.  For them, the past is deficient, the present is an improvement, and the future is an advance on an inferior present.  An appropriate progressive metaphor for the human experience would be a chairlift up a ski slope.  It’s the unstated view of History curriculums in our schools, and part and parcel of the Obama rhetoric of being “on the right side of history”.

Some serious implications soon follow.  For instance, who is the most capable of ferreting out the trajectory?  Academics, of course.  They, the knowledgeable, have the wherewithal to peer into the past and present and guide us onto the true path of human betterment.  It’s the dawn of the administrative state and diminishment of the rough-and-tumble politics of popular sovereignty.  Now, the way is laid open for an academically-trained civil service to guide and direct us.  Say goodbye to the citizen republic, guns, and the spontaneous order of free markets.  Life is reduced to the prescriptions of empowered social technicians.

The administrative state.

The Soviets tried to do the same thing on meth.  It was called central planning.

“Science” is the buzzword. Science is, indeed, a great thing … but not when a little bit of it is extrapolated into airy historical predictions and social abstractions.  Take for instance Marx’s “scientific socialism” and “dialectical materialism”.  Take for instance the Green New Deal. At this point, “science” is no different from religious mysticism.  The conclusions are no longer tethered to Earth’s gravity but have zoomed past the asteroid belt.

So, what do we have?  We have one line of thought rooted in a firm grasp of human nature with all its flaws.  Does the Old Testament sound familiar?  Out of the idea comes the rule of law and constitutional republics as checks on the evil men and women can do.  By contrast, the other reasoning means reform, reform, and more reform.  Everything is turned topsy-turvy forever, and all under the direction of a set of planners with the latest zeitgeisty truths-of-the-moment.  Be prepared to constantly queue up for shortages will be the afterbirth.

The Soviet Union in its latter days suffered from a birth dearth (and still does) and plague of alcoholism.  I don’t think that the rule of dogmatic, degreed social managers comports well with our nature.  The planners, as it turns out, have the same flaws as the rest of us.  A social miasma will descend on life.

Please, take me somewhere else.

RogerG

Posted on

Harming Our Kids

Steve Forbes in “Forbes” (April 30, 2019) reviewed Rich Karlgaard’s book, “Late Bloomers”.  In the book, Karlgaard makes the point that there is no hard timetable for human flourishing.  When we act as if there is one, we disfigure our kids and their future.  We go further in creating a cult of youth and shuffling the old out to pasture.  In the end, I can’t help but think that we are fashioning our young into future clients of the therapy and counseling industry, and increasingly dragging in the government as financier.  Taxpayers, watch out, for the taxman cometh.

Evidence of the mauling is all around. Parents will stretch themselves into bankruptcy court to move into a “nicer” neighborhood for the so-called “good” schools.  The schools aren’t better; the student body is just better dressed with better cars in the parking lot.

And the kids are more likely to do the homework.  But what’s in the homework?  It’s the same deficient curriculum for the most part.

Guess what?  This is all about cosmetic resume-building.  Make sure to get the AP on your high school transcripts; go to the right summer camp; crowd your kid into as many organized sports as possible; do a charity for the way it’ll look to the college admissions officer.  When does the kid have the breathing space to simply be a kid?

The college entrance cheating scandals are a sign of the trend.  Do all of the above, and if that doesn’t work, or if the kid hasn’t done it, cheat.  We’re creating a world of facile and sterile expectations.

But where does wisdom fit into the grand plan?  It doesn’t.  In a world of only looking good, wisdom has no place.  Wisdom doesn’t arise from a mad race to fill a resume.  Life, family, and faith have a much greater bearing on personal resilience and true happiness.  And for some, maybe most, that takes awhile.

A Stanford prof is quoted as saying that the incoming freshman are increasingly “brittle”.  Indeed.

Students in Los Angeles protest the November 2016 election result.

RogerG

Posted on

A Tale of Two Articles

Lesson: Fashionable ideas frequently fall into the category of “too good to be true”.

Compare Amy Harder’s Axios piece from yesterday, “The key to unlocking wind and solar: Making it last”, and Michael Shellenberger’s Forbes article from 2018, “We Don’t Need Solar And Wind To Save The Climate — And It’s A Good Thing, Too”.  The former is a puff piece about another alleged “breakthrough” for solar and wind energy.  The latter is a healthy splash of cold water on the whole ploy.  In today’s media, almost anything chic among the beautiful people, popular with the rulers in deep blue states, championed in thousands of public service ads, and exalted in high school science fairs, should be taken with a ton of salt.

Here’s a few takeaways from the analysis:

* Solar and wind, especially solar, have always been on the cusp of the next will-o’-the-wisp big breakthrough since the 19th century.  Shellenberger recounts the history; Harder unwittingly provides another example.

* Solar and wind are expensive.  They sound like a great idea since the sun shines and the wind blows without our help.  Check out the electricity rates of countries who have bought into solar and wind.

* The environmental damage of wind and solar is immense.  They use up and mar vast tracts of the landscape, disrupt and threaten the natural flora and fauna, and the production of their devices begets toxic wastes and land scarring.

* Nuclear is an obvious alternative but gets no mention in the rush to the solar-and-wind utopia. It’s better, more efficient, more cost effective, produces no CO2, and recycles much of its waste.  What’s there not to like … if we can look away from the scowls of the beautiful people?

The China Syndrome (1979), directed by James Bridges. Shown from left: James Hampton, Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas.

The real world can’t be boiled down to Sierra Club talking points.  I wish that our media would stop repeating them and our kids weren’t taught the baloney.

RogerG

Posted on

A 16-Year-Old Vote?

Here’s a thought, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (waitress/batender/sophmore class president) makes it easy to imagine: AOC is proof of the mistake of extending the vote to 16-year-olds.  With the exception of age, what’s the difference between her and Molly Ringwald’s character in “Sixteen Candles”?  Answer: not much.

RogerG

Posted on

Government as Parent

Case in point: Parenting Montana.

I begin with “crowding out”.  Crowding out occurs when so much money flows to one thing that other things die on the vine.  It happens in venues other than those based on mammon.  Big, really big question: Has the state become so huge that it’s sucking the blood out of civil society?  A vampire could work as a metaphor.

Nosferatu is phlebotomizing civil society.  What is the victim, civil society?  Our definitions are muddled.  The UN’s World Health Organization tries to pigeonhole civil society away from business and government.  To them, civil society is “collective action around shared interests, purposes and values”, and the third rail of life.  Sorry, that’s way too cute.  Sounds too much like something out of a snooze-inducing textbook.  Actually, much business is born of the interactions of those “shared interests, purposes and values”.  The same could be said of government, but civil society – and business, at least pre-Sanders – is voluntary.  Government isn’t about voluntary.  People in power have a quiver full of carrots and sticks to make you do something they want, and behind every carrot is a big fat hand holding that big fat stick.  Isolate government to itself while civil society since business share too much DNA.  Thus, in actuality, 2 rails exist.

Of side note, Ocasio-Cortez and her minions would like to gene-splice business and government together.  That’s the socialist thing at work.  They want 2 rails with this new hybrid Leviathan attacking the neck of a remaining and wilting civil society (in keeping with same metaphor).

This came to mind while streaming Pandora.  An ad for “Parenting Montana” appeared between the music, another one of those dot-org’s.  What the heck is that?  Smelling a rat, yep, it’s government. Go to the website and you’ll find in the fine print a scat trail to a federal block grant program to the State of Montana, CFDA 93.959.  Mind you, I find not much wrong with government helping to address the deeply troubled in our neighborhoods.  The fly in the ointment is that it is today’s government doing it.

Our present government isn’t a better one than great grandpa’s; it’s just bigger, way bigger, and beset by the ACLU, dominated by a narrow demographic, and addicted to fashionable causes.  The result is a mess.

I’m not sure what John Dewey and the rest of the Progressive leading lights of a century back, as pushers of big government, would think of today’s Leviathan.  They envisioned a government of technocratic know-it-alls guiding us to the promised land.  He probably couldn’t grasp the fact that the techs could lack wisdom and are infected with their own prejudices.  What they, the Prog’s,  produced is a government shaped around their experience of 16-plus years sitting in a classroom receiving curriculum.  Yes, curriculum.  For them, curriculum is the answer.  There’s nothing that couldn’t be cured by more curriculum.

Follow the steps, procedures, and factoids and you’re supposed to be a better person.  It is the chosen path for the representatives who made the law and the people who passed the civil service exam to get the thing up and running.  Do you get the picture?  The whole outlook is based on form (curriculum), not the substance (what’s in the curriculum).

Decamp to the website, ParentingMontana.org, and you’ll find curriculum and some referrals to nonprofits in government’s gravitational pull.  Watch videos, read the how-to links, and pay a visit to a counselor steeped in the curriculum – more people with degrees and certificates as Dewey preached.

Issues develop not with curriculum per se.  Curriculum is only a guide for what and how to teach.  The person doing the teaching most assuredly is important, but even more important is the “what”, what are they teaching?  The substance mentioned before.  Sadly, the spiritual is absent from the syllabus.  No room here for the faith.  A Bible study is replaced by your state-sponsored counseling group led by your state-approved counselor.  A referral to a church would be met by the hounds of the ACLU and years in court.  The experience produces a vanilla curriculum without God.

It competes with the kind offered by your priest or pastor, but with a distinct advantage.  Milton Friedman had it right when he said, “Nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program”.  Government draws strength from its access to everybody’s paycheck (the taxing power) and the Bureau of the Mint.  And politics is the measure of success, not bottom-line metrics, so a program has life long after it became rancid (ag subsidies anyone?).  Not exactly a level playing field here.

And government programs can be hip.  Your local priest or pastor, in contrast, will be bound to God’s word, the Bible.  Government is bound by politics, and politics is bound by money under the spell of any tight organization of commonly-oriented loud mouths.  If something gets popular traction, you bet that the authorities-that-be will take it in.  Consider gay marriage and transgender rights.  Look at the pot craze sweeping red and blue states alike (see Forbes).  The fashion-of-the-moment will find a place in government decrees on everything imaginable, including its “wisdom” on being a good mommy.

I saw the phenomena at work in a California high school.  California being so chic in thought and feeling, and personally as a teacher and department chair (Social Studies), the staff and I were frequently told of a new mandate from the state to honor one of the many “marginalized” in our lessons.  So, we went from unions to blacks to women to multiple ethnics to LGBTQ in its many variations, and back again.  Remember, the more time devoted to balkanized America, the less time for the Constitution, the Civil War, Supply/Demand, the Great Depression, etc.  “Crowding out” at work before your munchkins.  Welcome to politics flummoxing your kid’s school.

It’s no less true for “Parenting Montana”.  Scroll through the links.  Since many problems in the home can be traced to the desire for a high, a good part of the guidance will be consumed with booze and drug abuse.  Going to the links, I couldn’t find any mention of marijuana.  I found heroin, meth, alcohol, but no “mary jane”.  The words “abuse” and “reefer”, and its many equivalents, weren’t connected.  Could it be that marijuana has a constituency?  It’s fashionable whereas shooting up in a public bathroom isn’t.

But think about it: today’s THC-rich cannabis isn’t the stuff wafting through a 60’s Grateful Dead concert.  It’s jam-packed with maybe 3x’s more (though potheads hotly dispute the figure).  Hey, more bang for the buck, and with the “bang” comes all kinds of things attaching to your lungs as if you were lighting up a Marlborough (according to the American Lung Association).  Even more disturbing are the neurological and cognitive effects (see here).  It helps in germinating mental illness in the form of multiple psychoses like schizophrenia (see here).  The junk should not be given a free pass as “Parenting Montana” does.

But what are you going to do when getting high becomes “medical” … and fashionable?

I can only imagine the kinds of mischief that a hotbed of a lefty dreamscape like California can put the money to.  “Parenting” could be combined with “Heather Has Two Mommies” and how to teach your child to share a bathroom with someone of divergent genitalia.  The possibilities are endless.  If government is your mommy, you just found another way to inject politics into the family and the rest of civil society.  And then is civil society all that civil?  It certainly is more political.  Soon, we may be down to only one rail: government.  Sanders, AOC, and Marx would be smiling.

RogerG

Posted on

What’s Happening to Our News and Information?

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.  The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Who said this? Bernie Sanders?  AOC in one of her Twitter fits?  Any of our “woke” college activists rampaging at a Charles Murray presentation?  Good guesses, but wrong.  The author is Karl Marx in his “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”.

In one sense, though, it sounds like the kind of thing they would say (maybe not AOC because that would ask too much of her facile understanding).  And it sounds like the kind of thing rattling the synapses of the vast majority of those manning our broadcast studios, newsrooms, and much of the publishing industry.  It’s a view of the world smothering the mental faculties of many in the chattering classes, whether chattering with the mouth or a word processor.

The notion has infected much of what we read, watch, and learn in our classrooms. It’s the idea that a hidden structure of oppression exists to ensnare us no matter what we do.  For Marx, the idea justified a complete revolution in the individual’s mind to the family to social relations to government.  Everything was to be managed, and that means big, really big government.  Sounds like the Green New Deal?

I’m reminded of Marx’s influence, now, almost every time I pick up my National Geographic Magazine (NGM).  The magazine reads like a series of op-eds in The Daily Worker.  A common tactic in its articles is to quote opinionated academics to buttress an opinion.  Add some stats and a few graphs, and, voilà, an opinion becomes “science”.  Marx also liked to say that his opinions were “science”.

Race is a field rich with possibilities for exploitation by those inclined to see the world as Marx did.  For instance, NGM’s April 2018 issue, “Black and White”, blathered about race as some “social construct” while veering off into Confederate statues and racial profiling.  The opinions of opinionated profs were replete in the issue’s articles.  The confusion of opinions with science has become a hallmark for the magazine, just like Marx.

Let’s examine the magazine’s treatment of racial profiling.  There’s more to the story than “racist” cops, but you wouldn’t know it from the piece.  Absent from the author’s angle on the issue is any recognition of something called “context” – context as in any other considerations.  What about the uneven distribution of chaos in the home, the uneven distribution of violent crime on the streets, the war on drugs, the debilitating effects of made-in-America welfare, other issues like the epidemic of illegal immigration to the tune of an accumulated 11 million to 21 million “undocumented” (Who knows?), and the attendant presence of the Sureños/Norteños/MS-13 and Crips/Bloods?  Circumstances exist beyond the hidden, unconscious prejudices of a police officer and the Man.

2 Sureños and 2 Norteños.

An interesting aside that’s never been adequately explained by the race hustlers: There was a time when NYC black cabbies would avoid fares from young black males. In advertising, it’s called branding.  Past experience can brand an entire demographic, even among black cabbies tired of being crime victims by the very same demographic.  I would think that something else is at work other than racism (hidden or otherwise) against blacks by black cab drivers.

Police are searching for answers after a Flash Cab driver was found shot to death inside his taxi in the Lincoln Square neighborhood. Feb. 23, 2016. (CBS Chicago)

Instead, NGM and its stable of writers traipse off into the fantasy of Marx’s world.  Evil has always resided in the souls of our species. Racism and general mayhem have always been there.  Marx’s non-stop revolution won’t change that fact.  An ever-bigger government to police human thought and conscience won’t either.  A healthy civil society – the very thing that the Left is systematically dismantling – with appropriate public sanctions is the answer.

Adopting Marx is a descent into the snake pit of totalitarian control.  Bad, very bad.

RogerG

Posted on

Totalitarian Mind Control in Academic Jargon

Implicit bias is all the rage in social policy circles.  The rationale for the crusade is based on the assertion that we do something more than overtly act like racists (homophobes, Islamophobes, etc.).  We harbor hateful prejudices deep in our subconscious.  It’s not enough, it is said, to control the racist behavior.  We must expunge the lurking bad thoughts swimming around in those vast unconscious reservoirs in our brains.  The field is more than a rich source of consulting income for the high priests of the endeavor.  The dogma branches off into innumerable calls for the checking of privilege and other forms of sloganeering.  But is it true?  There’s good reason to say wowwww!

David Berreby

This came to mind while reading in my April 2018 issue of National Geographic Magazine the article, “The Things That Divide Us” by David Berreby.  A natural logic could lead one to rightly assume that evil behavior has tentacles in evil thoughts.  Fair enough.  The problem lies in ferreting out the purported bad biases.  Further, there appears to be a tenuous connection between the lurking prejudice and behavior.

And there’s good reason to question the attempts to measure the hidden bias.  Please read the following article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Can We Really Measure Implicit Bias? Maybe Not”, by Tom Bartlett, Jan. 5, 2017, https://www.chronicle.com/…/Can-We-Really-Measure-Im…/238807.

What we have in the National Geographic article is another non-scientist author claiming the certitude of a scientist with, in reality, an ideological ax to grind. Berreby has nothing but a BA in English from Yale to his credit.  He uses the tendentious claims of some psychologists to support what is in essence his political crusade.

Since the 19th century, we have experienced the attempt to marry science to politics.  The regions of the world laid waste by Marxism, eugenics, and National Socialism are a testament to its abject failure.  Informed decisions are one thing; totalitarianism is another.  It’s amazing that we have discovered a new way to construct Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Love.

RogerG

Posted on

Mussolini, Progressivism, and a Missing Link

PBS’s “Dictator’s Playbook: Mussolini”, my assessment: very misleading.  If you haven’t seen it but plan to, don’t!  There are better biographies out there.  The thing exudes with the ideological partisanship that grips today’s academic and media hothouses.  The program says more about them than Il Duce.

One of the contributors to “The Dictator’s Playbook: Mussolini”.

Politically corrupted academics littered their commentary with derogatory parallels to anyone who has serious doubts about multiculturalism, the many tentacles of political correctness, and the fantasyland socialism of the green movement.  In the intro, the creators set the stage by connecting Mussolini to the modern rise of populist and nationalist parties in Europe.  They couldn’t help but boil their beliefs down to “xenophobia”, as if there’s nothing to worry about in the sudden influx of millions of unassimilated immigrants.  Check the crime stats and terror cells coming out of Scandinavia’s “especially vulnerable areas”.

Watch the clip of violent Muslim youth confronting Swedish police in Stockholm.

Trump illusions pervaded, like two profs’ summary of Il Duce’s program as one of “making Italy great gain”.  It’s repeated often enough to make sure you get the idea.  But think about it: what leader would be opposed to making their country great, from George Washington to Obama?  If they weren’t about that, they would have to keep it secret or nobody would entrust them with the keys to the White House.

Mussolini’s political platform is reduced to violence, love of war, violence, nationalism … and did I say violence?  One glaring plank missing from the script is summed up in the Fascist Party motto, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”.  The Fascists’ love of the state was conspicuously absent from beginning to end.  I suspect that modern Progressives are a bit uneasy knowing they share the same love.  When you’re too busy lambasting Trump, sometimes you muff the more obvious connections.

Elizabeth Warren and Ocasio-Cortez might very well have a Mussolini problem.  All you have to do to see the line of descent is substitute “free” (for all the stuff that they want to give people: healthcare, college, reparations, high wages, you name it) for “the state”.  And, indeed, nothing is to be outside “the state”, as Hobby Lobby, Jack Philips, and any traditional Christian who takes 2,000 years of church history and the Bible seriously should now know.  Today’s Dem-Left would be uncomfortable with the marching, uniforms, and martial vigor, but not much else.

FDR didn’t have much of a problem with Mussolini’s corporatism.  He tried it in the National Industrial Recovery Act and its commissariat, the National Recovery Administration.  Likewise, the Dems of today are marching toward a greater fulfillment of the motto with state-aggrandizement in the Green New Deal.  Could that be the reason for the slipshod treatment of Il Duce?

RogerG

Posted on

#REDFORED = #RESIST

Teachers rally outside the state Capitol for the second day of a teacher walkout to demand higher pay and more funding for education in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, April 3, 2018. Reuters

The recent teacher strikes – mostly in “red” (i.e., Conservative) states – are intriguing. What started out as a cause to boost the pay of truly underpaid teachers in West Virginia has metastasized into Occupy Wall Street, something under the rubric #redfored. In truth, I think that the lefty hive is being ginned up as the Supreme Court deliberates its decision in Janus vs. AFSCME. If Janus wins, the cushy power relationships of public employee unions will be deflated. But here’s the big scoop from the ruckus: government unions are lefty enterprises.

PHOENIX, AZ – APRIL 26: Arizona teachers chant in support of the #REDforED movement as they walk through downtown Phoenix on their way to the State Capitol on April 26, 2018 in Phoenix, Arizona.  (Photo by Ralph Freso/Getty Images)

It’s a familiar script. Trump gets elected and hyperventilation replaces deliberation – mostly on the left but also in some extreme precincts on the right. The swarming extends everywhere the left has a stranglehold. The only surprise to me is the length of time it took for the education blob to catch on.

What has the adoption of California-style taxes to do with teacher pocketbook issues? Clearly, for the firebrands, simply raising pay is too vanilla. The slogan is bloated to include lefty planks like the adoption of the progressive tax nightmare and dolloping layers of bureaucracy on the schools. Poor pay was simply the vehicle to swarm the hive and cloak the wolf in a pleasant disguise.

Well, it took some time but the genus Ovis aries (sheep) costume was outed. Now the “#redfored” is no different from “#resist”, “Bernie Sanders for president”, or Occupy … [fill in the blank].

RogerG

* Check out “Teacher strikes morph from pocketbook clash to partisan street theater”, Frederick M. Hess, Education Next, AEI, 5/8/2018,  http://www.aei.org/publication/teacher-strikes-morph-from-pocketbook-clash-to-partisan-street-theater/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT0RjM1pERXhabUZsWVRBNSIsInQiOiJzeFpQdkVWblBGaExlMGhtQnFwTFB4dEd4VmlDbFBxYWdZSVF5QXJoQVVzNDdYK3J3bDNEb0xycDBHT2dJOWUzVGI5Rjh1QTdIOU9mMWhDYllmWWFodVpneWxPNXhWSUo5T0VtWGZsK3BGSGtIV2ordDBHM0ZqcVhiVUxvSnhyYiJ9

Posted on

Make-Believe and Its Costs

Student fights at West High School, Bakersfield, Ca., 3/15/2017.

Today, there seems to be a concerted effort to make-believe everyone is the same, not just equal: among the sexes, genders (?), racial and ethnic groups, social classes, everyone. Of course, this is a flagrant contradiction to multiculturalism’s worship of differences. But, pushing the incoherence aside is the pogrom against any real or imagined bigotries. It takes the form of a jihad to eradicate “disparate impact” – or the presence of unequal outcomes. If we are more than equal, but the same, too many of one group in an unsavory category is said to be proof of amorphous and shadowy forces of bigotry. The only problem: It’s all nonsense and, when implemented, a hot mess.

Recently, the Kern High School District in California was sued by the Dolores Huerte Foundation for a negative “disparate impact” in its discipline policies. Too many minorities were said to be kicked out of school. Now, in caving in to a judicial shakedown, the District implemented PBIS. Don’t fret over its meaning. It can be translated to mean more mothering for hellions. Too bad if you’re a good student or well-meaning teacher.

Bakersfield High School teachers expressing their fear and dismay:

Here’s a clip of fights at neighboring West High School from last year:

You see, hellions aren’t evenly distributed in a population any more than the social conditions that give to their rise.

Read the article: “‘Out of Control’: Teachers describe KHSD schools after anti-discrimination settlement”, Jeff Platt, Eyewitness News staff, BakersfieldNow.com, http://bakersfieldnow.com/…/out-of-control-teachers-describ….

RogerG