[Nextrush]

Peter Hitchens touches on several things but a lot on the mass murder insanity in Florida and why guns get blamed when one can see that drugs like antidepressants are the "new kids on the block" at schools.

[Fiji Hill]

We may have the certificates. But it is the people from the old-fashioned countries that tend to have the education......

I knew a guy from India, a very old-fashioned country, who said he didn't need to use a calculator for multiplication because when he was in grade school, students had to memorize the multiplication tables up to the number 25. Like most Americans, I had to memorize them to the number 12, and that knowledge has stayed with me my whole life.

[morphing libertarian]

In catholic school we did up to 12 times. I can add large columns in my head 3digits. People asked me how I did it. I said catholic school

[LibertarianLiz]

I just heard on the news this a.m. that this school shooter had just "come off" his meds.

I think this is a connection to other school shooters who were also taking, or, had just come off, these medications.

[miss marmelstein]

Steroids are not the same as antidepressants. As usual, Peter Hitchens doesn't know what he's talking about when he talks about the USA.

[Rurudyne]

Education gets in the way of providing emotional support.

[JusPasenThru]

Post hoc ergo proper hoc.

[Mach9]

Hitchins is on the right path, but he abandoned it too early. It isn’t just the multiplication tables. It’s everything and the main thing they represent: the learning of and adhering to right-reasoned rules. One of my lit professors many years ago mentioned that he had noticed that only Catholic school graduates seemed to grasp the physics of grammar. Why, he asked the class. The answer was simple: we were responsible for knowing and adhering to rules, all sorts of rules—everything from behavior in the church to sentence-diagramming in the classroom and sportsmanship on the field. Right and wrong, or good and bad, mattered in every facet of life. Honor was good; cheating was bad. Sixty-plus years ago this ethic was universal, honored by public AND private schools. No longer, anywhere.

[dennisw]

Times tables recited in unison in class......Ah the good old days before the education establishment crackpots took over, trying to re-invent the wheel for fame and fortune.

I’ll bet if you go to Mexico the kids in schools are shouting out times tables in Spanish.

[Chicory]

From the article: As the horrible abusive crimes of some Oxfam workers are revealed, Left-wing types crowd the media saying these outrages are individual misdeeds and should not unleash a fury against foreign aid in general.

But with a school shooting, *all* gun owners are vilified.

Basically, when someone on “their” side does it, it’s an individual anomaly. When someone on what they define as “our side” does something, it’s just a sign of how evil we truly are.