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Fifth grader charged after bus fight over snack cake [9 yr old beaten to unconsciousness]
AP ^ | April 2, 2004 | Staff writer

Posted on 04/02/2004 5:34:30 AM PST by TaxRelief

For discussion and education purposes only.

Greensboro, North Carolina-AP -- A North Carolina fifth-grader has been charged with assault for knocking out a boy in a school bus fight over a snack cake.

(snip) ...According to the principal, when the boy sitting next to him asked for a bite, Kevin said no and was smacked in the face with a stuffed Tweety Bird. Kevin hit back, but was slammed against a window and hit in the back.

Then he fell in the aisle and was stomped.

School officials say when the bus driver pulled the aggressor off him, Kevin was unconscious.

(Excerpt) Read more at whnt19.com ...


TOPICS: Front Page News; US: North Carolina
KEYWORDS: bullies; bullying; cakecrime; educationplan; littledebbie; movieviolence; nccrime; schoolbus; schoolviolence; schoolyard; socialdecay; tvviolence; videogames; zebracakes
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To: Gerasimov
My hubby loves those things. He always puts them in the cart if he goes grocery shopping with me or if I send him out for a few things--LOL.
141 posted on 04/03/2004 6:49:13 AM PST by cupcakes
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To: TaxRelief
Re: the school bus fight between the boys over a snack.. I fear this is not what most mothers and sadly too many fathers want to hear, but this is what has happened to our boys and the blatant feminizing of our boys in our culture.

It is true that fighting is not the first, or even the second response that boys should revert to when settling a dispute, but that is where we men learned our early lessons, that sometimes it isn't wise to mess with losers, or associate with bullies, or pay the consequences. Yes life has consequences, and early lessons that are essential, and today for a young boy it may be a punch in
the nose, because tomorrow it will be screwing around with drugs and sex.. YES, it can be that basic, early lessons are warning systems.. Fathers that are worth their salt are no longer around to set examples and teach their sons how to avoid bad decisions, or how to fight back, which is the best deterrence.

Judgment, or what we called commonsense is unfortunately lacking in this society, also, what happened to fighting back, this boy folded like an old deck of cards, and as such, he was victimized, I dare say something that he will regret or even more sad, learn to submit to throughout life. And finally, the aggressor will not be severely dealt with by any authorities, or even better for his own good, this boys friends, if he has any, as would have been the case in the recent past, which is another long gone life
experience, standing up for right and wrong, even if it means taking a licking for a friend..

Unlike girls, and it should stay this way, boys must get used to fighting for themselves, early in life with their fists, wits or feet, and later with their superior intellect or you'll get your asses kicked around until you quit, win or cheat.. sorry .. flame away
142 posted on 04/03/2004 7:27:45 AM PST by carlo3b (http://www.CookingWithCarlo.com)
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To: carlo3b
But stomped into unconsciousness?
143 posted on 04/03/2004 10:57:20 AM PST by TaxRelief (Become a dollar-a-day donor and help end the quarterly fundraisers!)
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bump
144 posted on 04/03/2004 11:11:05 AM PST by spunkets
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To: Aquinasfan
Read Gatto's book. Public schools have never been about education.

Hmmmm. Well, I've read enough reviews and excerpts of Gatto's book to get a feel for her point. However, it does not match up with the reality I have actually observed, rather than had recited to me through the writings of an author whose bias cannot be ignored.

I can point to three different principals and at least 15 of my kids' teachers over the years (which is nearly all of them, BTW) for whom your comment would be completely false. And, just to be clear, I do not say that without actually having met and known the teachers, and their motivations.

I do not deny the presence of some of the agendas you're talking about, nor do I deny the pervasiveness of them. But I do reject your characterization of what "public schools have never been about." That's just plain crap.

I suggest you take off your ideological blinders and actually visit a few schools before you take Gatto's book at face value. And until you come up with a rational alternative to "schooling," I'm going to have to dismiss your posts as uninformed rants. Sorry.

145 posted on 04/03/2004 1:54:10 PM PST by r9etb
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To: r9etb
The history is invaluable. And you can read it for free on-line. (He isn't waging his crusade to line his pockets.) He has written the only history of American education that examines all of the forces and people who shaped it, from Horace Mann and his disingenuous report on Prussian compulsory schooling, to the Know Nothings, to the Blaine amendments, to the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, to the behavioral psychologists operating through the teacher colleges and School-to-Work. Sam Blumenfeld is also worth reading, but he hasn't written as comprehensive a history. Another book regarding modern education that is well worth reading is C.S. Lewis' "Abolition of Man."
146 posted on 04/03/2004 2:18:55 PM PST by Aquinasfan (Isaiah 22:22, Rev 3:7, Mat 16:19)
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To: r9etb
But I do reject your characterization of what "public schools have never been about." That's just plain crap.

If it was true, would you want to know?

The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.

The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte—one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.

In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1 lay the power to cloud men’s minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.

Prior to Fichte’s challenge any number of compulsion-school proclamations had rolled off printing presses here and there, including Martin Luther’s plan to tie church and state together this way and, of course, the "Old Deluder Satan" law of 1642 in Massachusetts and its 1645 extension.

The problem was these earlier ventures were virtually unenforceable, roundly ignored by those who smelled mischief lurking behind fancy promises of free education. People who wanted their kids schooled had them schooled even then; people who didn’t didn’t. That was more or less true for most of us right into the twentieth century: as late as1920, only 32 percent of American kids went past elementary school. If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school, though Switzerland has the world’s highest per capita income in the world.

Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it’s not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far-off Germany, was published in England. Schule came after more than a decade of deliberations, commissions, testimony, and debate. For a brief, hopeful moment, Humboldt’s brilliant arguments for a high-level no-holds-barred, free-swinging, universal, intellectual course of study for all, full of variety, free debate, rich experience, and personalized curricula almost won the day. What a different world we would have today if Humboldt had won the Prussian debate, but the forces backing Baron vom Stein won instead. And that has made all the difference.

The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army;2 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed.

The area of individual volition for commoners was severely foreclosed by Prussian psychological training procedures drawn from the experience of animal husbandry and equestrian training, and also taken from past military experience. Much later, in our own time, the techniques of these assorted crafts and sullen arts became "discoveries" in the pedagogical pseudoscience of psychological behaviorism. Prussian schools delivered everything they promised. Every important matter could now be confidently worked out in advance by leading families and institutional heads because well-schooled masses would concur with a minimum of opposition. This tightly schooled consensus in Prussia eventually combined the kaleidoscopic German principalities into a united Germany, after a thousand years as a nation in fragments. What a surprise the world would soon get from this successful experiment in national centralization! Under Prussian state socialism private industry surged, vaulting resource-poor Prussia up among world leaders. Military success remained Prussia’s touchstone. Even before the school law went into full effect as an enhancer of state priorities, the army corps under Blücher was the principal reason for Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, its superb discipline allowing for a surprisingly successful return to combat after what seemed to be a crushing defeat at the Little Corporal’s hands just days before.3 Unschooled, the Prussians were awesome; conditioned in the classroom promised to make them even more formidable.

The immense prestige earned from this triumph reverberated through an America not so lucky in its own recent fortunes of war, a country humiliated by a shabby showing against the British in the War of 1812. Even thirty years after Waterloo, so highly was Prussia regarded in America and Britain, the English-speaking adversaries selected the Prussian king to arbitrate our northwest border with Canada. Hence the Pennsylvania town "King of Prussia." Thirty-three years after Prussia made state schooling work, we borrowed the structure, style, and intention of those Germans for our own first compulsion schools.

Traditional American school purpose—piety, good manners, basic intellectual tools, self-reliance, etc.—was scrapped to make way for something different. Our historical destination of personal independence gave way slowly to Prussian-purpose schooling, not because the American way lost in any competition of ideas, but because for the new commercial and manufacturing hierarchs, such a course made better economic sense.

This private advance toward nationalized schooling in America was partially organized, although little has ever been written about it; Orestes Brownson’s journal identifies a covert national apparatus (to which Brownson briefly belonged) already in place in the decade after the War of 1812, one whose stated purpose was to "Germanize" America, beginning in those troubled neighborhoods where the urban poor huddled, and where disorganized new immigrants made easy targets, according to Brownson. Enmity on the part of old-stock middle-class and working-class populations toward newer immigrants gave these unfortunates no appeal against the school sentence to which Massachusetts assigned them. They were in for a complete makeover, like it or not.

Much of the story, as it was being written by 1844, lies just under the surface of Mann’s florid prose in his Seventh Annual Report to the Boston School Committee. On a visit to Prussia the year before, he had been much impressed (so he said) with the ease by which Prussian calculations could determine precisely how many thinkers, problem-solvers, and working stiffs the State would require over the coming decade, then how it offered the precise categories of training required to develop the percentages of human resource needed. All this was much fairer to Mann than England’s repulsive episcopal system—schooling based on social class; Prussia, he thought, was republican in the desirable, manly, Roman sense. Massachusetts must take the same direction.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1Machiavelli had clearly identified this as a necessary strategy of state in 1532, and even explored its choreography.

2For an ironic reflection on the success of Prussian educational ideals, take a look at Martin Van Creveld’s Fighting Power (Greenwood Press, 1982). Creveld, the world’s finest military historian, undertakes to explain why German armies in 1914–1918 and 1939–1945, although heavily outnumbered in the major battles of both wars, consistently inflicted 30 percent more casualties than they suffered, whether they were winning or losing, on defense or on offense, no matter who they fought. They were better led, we might suspect, but the actual training of those field commanders comes as a shock. While American officer selection was right out of Frederick Taylor, complete with psychological dossiers and standardized tests, German officer training emphasized individual apprenticeships, week-long field evaluations, extended discursive written evaluations by senior officers who personally knew the candidates. The surprise is, while German state management was rigid and regulated with its common citizens, it was liberal and adventuresome with its elites. After WWII, and particularly after Vietnam, American elite military practice began to follow this German model. Ironically enough, America’s elite private boarding schools like Groton had followed the Prussian lead from their inception as well as the British models of Eton and Harrow.

German elite war doctrine cut straight to the heart of the difference between the truly educated and the merely schooled. For the German High Command war was seen as an art, a creative activity, grounded in science. War made the highest demands on an officer’s entire personality and the role of the individual in Germany was decisive. American emphasis, on the other hand, was doctrinal, fixated on cookbook rules. The U.S. officer’s manual said: "Doctrines of combat operation are neither numerous nor complex. Knowledge of these doctrines provides a firm basis for action in a particular situation." This reliance on automatic procedure rather than on creative individual decisions got a lot of Americans killed by the book. The irony, of course, was that American, British, and French officers got the same lockstep conditioning in dependence that German foot soldiers did. There are some obvious lessons here which can be applied directly to public schooling.

3Napoleon assumed the Prussians were retreating in the direction of the Rhine after a defeat, but in truth they were only executing a feint. The French were about to overrun Wellington when Blücher’s "Death’s Head Hussars," driven beyond human endurance by their officers, reached the battlefield at a decisive moment. Not pausing to rest, the Prussians immediately went into battle, taking the French in the rear and right wing. Napoleon toppled, and Prussian discipline became the focus of world attention.

You might want to check out this sorry period in American history as well.
147 posted on 04/03/2004 2:42:25 PM PST by Aquinasfan (Isaiah 22:22, Rev 3:7, Mat 16:19)
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To: Aquinasfan
What you've provided (and what I knew you were talking about, having already read it some years ago) is a description of one type of agenda. It is not the only agenda to have taken aim at education over the years.

For example, there is also the agenda for which you are an advocate -- it features lots of dark complaints and conspiracies, and says that public schools are Bad, but offers no damned solutions. Give me a suggested alternative, and I might just listen to it.

148 posted on 04/04/2004 8:37:23 PM PDT by r9etb
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To: r9etb
Give me a suggested alternative, and I might just listen to it.

Vouchers. Homeschool. Unschooling.

149 posted on 04/05/2004 12:29:52 PM PDT by Aquinasfan (Isaiah 22:22, Rev 3:7, Mat 16:19)
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To: Aquinasfan
Vouchers.

You're apparently talking vouchers to a private school. You're assuming that private schools do not have agendas, not to mention you're basically pre-supposing the continued existence of public schools (tax money from which would go to fund the vouchers). And, given the presence of tax money in the equation, you're also presupposing that there will be no strings attached to those funds.

Homeschool.

Fine, for those who can afford it, and who can actually do it. Which, these days, is not a terribly high proportion of the population.

Unschooling

Meaning...?

150 posted on 04/05/2004 12:45:25 PM PDT by r9etb
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To: r9etb
Unschooling

Meaning...?

Take at hazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred uneducated children of the people and compare them in anything you please; in strength, in agility, in mind, in the ability to acquire knowledge, even in morality—and in all respects you are startled by the vast superiority on the side of the children of the uneducated.

— Count Leo Tolstoy, "Education and Children" (1862)

151 posted on 04/05/2004 6:16:33 PM PDT by Aquinasfan (Isaiah 22:22, Rev 3:7, Mat 16:19)
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To: Aquinasfan
Mr. Tolstoy's comment may or may not have been true for a feudal and agrarian Russia, but it is certainly not true here. You can look at incomes, illegitimacy rates, drug or alcohol abuse rates, number of teeth, or average Sunday church attendance. Pretty much any way you slice it, the folks who've gone to, and stayed in, school tend to come out ahead.
152 posted on 04/06/2004 6:31:08 AM PDT by r9etb
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To: r9etb
Pretty much any way you slice it, the folks who've gone to, and stayed in, school tend to come out ahead.

That's true, partly because credentials are a passport to employment, even though most business people recognize that schooling has little relationship to performance.

School-to-Work is intended to close the loop. No job without a diploma. Tracking from an early age. Universal chooling from birth through college. If you don't believe it, read this formerly private letter from Marc Tucker, President of the National Center on Education and the Economy, to Hilary Clinton, outlining the plan.

153 posted on 04/06/2004 7:20:49 AM PDT by Aquinasfan (Isaiah 22:22, Rev 3:7, Mat 16:19)
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To: Aquinasfan
You're dancing now, A-man. You know as well as I do that "un-schooling" is not an option, except for those who aspire to the lowest reaches of the lifting professions.
154 posted on 04/06/2004 8:06:23 AM PDT by r9etb
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To: r9etb
You might want to read the letter.
155 posted on 04/06/2004 8:19:01 AM PDT by Aquinasfan (Isaiah 22:22, Rev 3:7, Mat 16:19)
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To: r9etb
People who like school could send their kids to school. Others who don't wouldn't have to. Unschooling worked for Ben Franklin, and everyone else before 1850.
156 posted on 04/06/2004 8:21:09 AM PDT by Aquinasfan (Isaiah 22:22, Rev 3:7, Mat 16:19)
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To: Aquinasfan
The letter doesn't matter. If you're proposing to follow Mr. Tolstoy's model, the child will be too ignorant to do much of anything that doesn't involve lifting.
157 posted on 04/06/2004 8:22:29 AM PDT by r9etb
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To: Aquinasfan
Unschooling worked for Ben Franklin, and everyone else before 1850.

I'm sure it did. It might work equally well for us, were we still part of an unmechanized agrarian economy.

158 posted on 04/06/2004 8:37:24 AM PDT by r9etb
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To: TaxRelief
public schools have become cesspools of politcial correctness. Save your children. Get them out now.
159 posted on 04/06/2004 8:51:06 AM PDT by Eternal_Bear
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