US educators may or may not be content that the US has slipped to “average” among the OECD nations for high school age reading and science (below average for math), but there is one thing that the Spotsylvania school district at least will not tolerate – spit balls:
Andrew Mikel II admits it was a stupid thing to do. In December, bored and craving attention, the 14-year-old used a plastic tube to blow small plastic pellets at fellow students in Spotsylvania High School. In one lunch period, he scored three hits.
“They flinched. They looked annoyed,” Mikel said.
The school district saw it as more than a childish prank. School officials expelled him for possession and use of a weapon, and they called a deputy sheriff to the scene, said Mikel and his father, Andrew Mikel Sr.
The younger Mikel, a freshman, said he was charged with three counts of misdemeanor assault…
Mikel will be cleared of the misdemeanor criminal charges if he participates in a year-long diversion program, he said. The county sheriff’s office did not return messages seeking comment.
Ah, well: Boys will be boys.
At least until we beat it out of them.
For the love of all that is holy, we are such a nation of pansies. Our local news today: a 13-year old boy was arrested for trying to steal another kid’s food and a 12-year old girl was arrested for throwing a bracelet (a BRACELET!) and hitting a teacher. Are you KIDDING me? No wonder the cops here can’t seem to get a grip on the ice/meth issue – they are too busy arresting ‘tweens for being knuckleheads.
Arrested for throwing a bracelet? Expelled for a spit wad? Give me a stinking break. And people wonder why I homeschool…
HF6:
And I fear for our future, when anyone’s feelings being hurt equates to a Hate crime, or such things like this get 13-14 year old’s screwed for life with a felony on their record….
I would favor more than a stern talking to for striking a teacher in any fashion, but an arrest does seem extreme.
A rap sheet for a peashooter.
Well, at least it was a misdemenor.
The school authorities, and the police exhibited stupidity at the felony level.
COA Recommended: Stay after school and write “I realize it is childish and foolish to misbehave in school, I am sorry for the shame I brought to my family” 500 times on the blackboard. Worked on me.
He’s a little slow developing…they nailed me when I was 10. 11 at the latest.
You got it, Grandpa.
When my son was in public elementary school many moons ago (he’s now in his late 20′s) there was a great hue and cry over the attempt to bring back detention as a way to curb behavior problems. While my wife and I said “Great idea!” most of the parents were against it and the teachers didn’t think they “deserved detention” to supervise it on a rotating basis. Consequently there was no suitable punishment for acting out.
I think this is probably pervasive in the public school and accounts for nonsense such as this and other stories we hear. There is no punishment suitable for typical kid behavior offenses. I guess it’s sort of like trying to run the Navy without Captain’s Mast and NJP, only Court Martial.
We eventually exercised school choice – starting with Catholic elementary school followed by single sex junior high and high school run by the Jesuits, complete with detention and such. Worked wonders. A significant chunk of the high school students were non-Catholic.
George V.
Correction to George V. The Jesuits don’t have detention, they have JUG. I was recently visiting my old school in CT and the Alumni Director told me that at a Freshman Parent’s Night, a mom asked what JUG was and if she should be worried that her son had received it. Without prompting, half the dads said in unison “Judgement Under God!”
Of course the real masters of discipline were the Christian Brothers. According to my father, he was told that in the late 1800′s everyone thought that the way the NYC police kept us Irish in line was by recruiting the biggest, toughest guys off the boat to be cops. According to what his Uncle George told him, that wasn’t completely true. The Christian Brothers had first pick!
Christian Brothers Academy alumnus here. The brothers were highly educated and motivated but what also contributed to the learning environment was you had to pass an entrance exam to even get in. Also, the parents who paid the tuition tended to take greater interest in how well their son (no girls) was doing. Another aspect was the dress code which required a jacket and tie at all times, and don’t let your haircut get out of hand either. Lacking air conditioning, you knew it was really warm when they allowed us to take off the jackets.
Tough college prep program and the Christian Brothers were the best. Numerous non-Catholic kids attended, and the Student Council VP was Jewish. The Jewish guys got excused for both Catholic and Jewish holidays, although they still had to take the Catholic religion classes.
Jerry Pournelle went to a Christian Brothers high school. He said it did him good, and that if he were a kid these days, they’d prolly drug him for being an obnoxious rowdy boy-type person.
He was able to write “Christian Brothers” in nitrogen tri-iodide on the front lawn of Memphis Central High without getting caught, though. He said the letters remained faintly visible for years in slightly different-colored grass.
“Your comment is awaiting moderation.” Was it because I mentioned nitrogen tri-iodide?
Well, make the most of it!
Picric acid. Hexogen. Penta-erythritol tetra-nitrate. Nitroguanidine. Chlorine trifluoride. Mercury fulminate. Triacetone triperoxide. Thermite, and aluminum powder in general. Gelignite. LOX and sawdust. Flour dust in the air.
Octogen. Torpex. Exploding-wire detonators. Neutron generators.Lithium Deuteride. Phosgene. VX. GB. BZ (not the signal). Pbbbbphbtt!
Kids are much slower these days, Gramps! Like you I was getting nailed in the 3rd grade. Sunset Elementary was glad to hear my father had orders to Germany.
Personally, this is another good reason to homeschool.
Most school districts get money based upon a per/student formula. Take the students out of the schools and starve the beast. Then rebuild it.
What a waste of time and resources but that doesn’t bother the Adminstrators as money comes from the Taxpayers and they regard that as a bottomless well solely for their needs.
Who cares about the outcome of a bad decision to register this as a felony?? They’ll get their life-time entitlement of medical care & pension….The Administrators are an insulated bunch of elite idjits who could care less about the child or what effect something like this has on the rest of his life….
Was it an autoloader?
I hesitate to mention the exceedingly dangerous combination of rubber bands and paper clips for fear of jail time for the perp.
If idiots like these were in charge of my junior high school back in the 60s, I’d still be doing time.
(And then there was chemstry class!)
Probably would easily qualify as an auto loader with plastic balls; with the old dried peas if you kept them in your mouth too long they split and then didn’t shoot worth a darn, so it was better to be either full auto back then, or single shot. I preferred full auto with the side benefit of spit making the process that much more disgusting.
I wonder at what today gets a kid in trouble versus the stuff that I did when young. Truly, I would today be in a juvenile detention setting for some of the “minor” stuff that my friends and I thought up and then put into play.
…easily qualify as an auto loader with plastic balls; with the old dried peas…
Dang. I AM a fossil, a relic, a dinosaur. In my day we chewed up lil bits of paper to make spitballs. Teknologee sure has improved things… aside from felonies, misdemeanors, and criminal records, of course.
Paper’s a damn sight cheaper, Buck, and the teachers always kept a sizable supply handy. We didn’t have enough allowance in my day to waste on one time shots, so we mooched paper from class!
Lentils… or Peas for our Pea Shooters. I was probably 10 or 11 when the local dime store stopped selling them: Beefed up straws and dried lentils and you could buy little bags of Peas as refills. The great thing about the peas was the ability to cram your mouth full of them. The automatic weapon of spit-balling. We thought paper to be more like paint-ball as it stuck where it hit, allowing for crude spit ball art on ceilings and walls, and occasionally some unlucky person.
Rubber bands with half paperclips were called “bushwackers”.
Oh, yeah, we used to do that. Those can really sting. The most artistic way is to call his name just before you let fly… (Only do this with the paper wads; we don’ want to cause eyeball damage)
I just want to know if he had a hi-cap magazine he could have used….
“We shall have to BEAT the devil out of him!”
– Little Big Man
The nanny-staters won’t be happy until all men have “fortitude” like Ken.
Had these standards existed back in my day, I’d still be in jail.
You and most of the rest of us…
Too bad. I used those long decorative toothpicks that hold sandwiches together. Stuck a bunch of them in the ceiling in the cafateria. When I got older I made a blowgun. It was 42 inches long, and a quarter inch in caliber. I glued cotten wadding abound the back end of sharpened wooden applicators. (The kind people used to clean infants ears) I later changed out the wood for piano wire. I could pin a squirrel to a tree at 25 feet. I used to practice on pigeons a lot as there were so many. No one seemed to mind.
WTF. My country is indeed gone.
Respect FOR the law is taught at an early age by the law respecting you. DISRESPECT for the law is taught likewise. And this sort of law exhibit is supposed to teach which?
This is a case that I would want to take to a jury instead of pleading to a diversion program. I don’t know how the Virginia assault statute is written, but I would bet there aren’t twelve jurors anywhere in the state that would convict him.
Alas, he lives in the region that is affected by the creeping insanity of the district of corruption.
Misdemeanor assault? A year of diversion? For somethin’ less than a good spitball? Not even close to a good peashooter?
Cripes! How about felony stupid for the school officials? You can’t threaten, intimidate, or harm anyone (those are the words in the law used in this case) with the puny stuff this kid had. Check the picture of what the kid’s “weapon” was. A pencil is more of a threat. All he had to do was hit someone like a Moonbeam Jones once and game over anyway.
This kid was nothing more than a kid, the faculty made a huge mistake. I pray that this kid has people around him that will help him see that this is a tiny act on his part and a huge mistake on the part of the school. What a bunch of maroons.
I love how many on this forum were obviously juvenile delinquents. What shock… you were to smart for school!
Umm… too. (stupid fingers got ahead of the brain)
Yes, those damn dyslexic keyboards can be a problem.
JD is not a 4th grade spitball beef. JD is never getting busted and suffering after school writers cramp, and therefore losing all respect for the teachers and administrators by the eighth grade.
ROFLMAO. We used to have spitball fights when ever we had a substitute teacher! heck even the girls got involved….
I wonder if a kid did this…..http://kipkay.com/featured/ez-airsoft-machine-gun/ would they give him life??
Wadda you mean “were” JDs. I’m approaching 70 and still am.
Me, I’m losing all my socialization, becoming a GD (geriatric delinquent). Don’t take my word for it, ask Galrahn.
Yup, ain’t it awful! When one is very young, he is a selfish little hellion of a heathen who doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.
When one is very old, he becomes an unselfish old grumpy hellion of a non-heathen who doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.
I think the latter category comprises some right dangerous folks. Not least, because we are so old that we were properly educated before the Dewey damage completely ruined the schools. My first-grade teacher was very likely born in the 19th Century. She had white hair in 1956. She started me out right.
I stand corrected, gentlemen.
The world is being run by crazy people. The cockroaches have well and truly gained control of the light-switches–from Obama on down. Zero-tolerance? ZERO JUDGMENT!! “What we have here,” are people afraid (out of fear of law-suits as much as anything, imo) to make “command-decisions” in light of the circumstances. Instead they make a “non-decision decision” and reflexively–automatically–toss everything into the same ham-fisted procrustean bed that is our legal system, thereby simultaneously avoiding any personal responsibility while precluding any nuanced flexibility in the administrative handling of the situation. Such school officials have, by their actions, abdicated their professional responsibilities via the “criminalization of daily life.”
We moved to NY from SoCal in 97′. My son was bullied on a regular basis. I did everything I could to appease the situation. Kinda reminded me of the “Officer Grundy” song from West Side Story. Nothing worked until my son smashed a lunch room chair over this huge galluk of a kid. That worked…
Good thing he didn’t go to Spotsylvania High, babs–he’d STILL be in ball & chains..
I was bullied by a girl all through 5th grade and into 6th. She was a foot taller than me and loved to pick on me. It continued on – despite intervention by teachers, parents, administrators – until the day she cornered me on the playground, up against the auditorium and out of the sight of the playground monitors. She and 2 of her friends were going to beat the snot out of me. She turned her head to say something funny to one of the girls standing behind her so I sucker-punched her in the stomach and then grabbed her ears/hair and brought her face down as I brought my knee up.
I knocked 2 of our front teeth out.
Cost me 3 days of suspension but it was the LAST time anybody %^@%*& with me.
Take away all the tools from corporal punishment to detention and what are you left with?
I’ll never forget 6th grade stepping into the hallway with a restroom pass and seeing the principle, Mr. Wastradowski, holding Mark S. up against the wall. Ol’ Waterdog as we called him was a thick, tall old jock with an old school flattop. Anyway, Waterdog had Mark by the shirt front and shoved up into the ceiling. Mark’s head was bent over sideways against the acoustic ceiling tiles. There was a pretty stern tongue lashing going on. Looked like Mark was about to wet himself. Only time I saw any fear in his eyes in all the years I knew him. I just kept eyes front and got down the hall to the head.
I knew Mark. He needed it like some guys really need a drill instructor to get on track.
He turned out pretty good. Waterdog did him a favor by making it clear he needed to stay inside some of life’s boundaries. We’re in touch on facebook. He produces cooking shows for TLC or something now. Yeah, Waterdog knew just what Mark needed — a bit of fear and that didn’t come easy for Mark. That family was Xtreme sports before there was any X-games.
In any case, I reckon Mark was happy to take what he got at school as long as his folks didn’t find out. /heh
+100.
You don’t tolerate some punk harassing students trying to learn. It has to be dealt with. Harshly, quickly, and painfully.
But we’ve taken away everything but legal charges…when a dozen lashes with belt or cane would be far more effective.
Heh. I now officially feel old. I went to elementary school in a one-room school with a teacher who paddled the miscreants. Wow–today that seems like the dark ages, though it was really just over a generation ago.
Sometimes, I am thankfull that I am approaching 70 and will not have to endure the demise of this great country any further. On the other hand, I wish to survive to 125 so I can fight it all the way. OT, just found out that I lost my first fleet CO. Wes “Red”, Ralston, my CO in VAH-10 in my first sea tour, passed away on 25 Jan. He and his relief, J.Q. Quinn were the primary influences in my staying in the Navy for 26+ years. God rest his soul.
Yes, bos, I know EXACTLY how you feel. Little did we know growing up in the simpler time of the 50s how it was all going to turn out, did we? I’m reminded of a sci-fi story I once read in which a guy out “hunting” UFOs with cameras & recording devices was “taken” by time travelers into the future. When he was returned, his friends to whom he told the story asked why he had no film, recordings–or any exact memory–of life in the future. “They showed me everything,” he said, “all of it, and gave me the choice of filming, recording and remembering it all or having everything wiped clean–including my memory.” He went on: “I chose the latter–funny isn’t it? I wonder why..”
Boss, if time-travelers had abducted us as 11-year olds and taken us to the present and shown us today, would WE have wanted to go back to remember what was awaiting ahead of us and what we were in for in this Brave New World–even despite all the shiny technology? Would we have wanted to live with the fore-knowledge of all of that/”this”? Could we have borne the knowledge of what awaited us? Or would we have made the same decision as the guy in the story?
Just a thought…
Actually, I think we made out pretty well, other than the frustration of watching this once great country go downhill. It’s my kids and grandkids that I worry about.
You said a mouthful and all of it gospel, AirBoss.
How many of us going back wouldn’t have tried starting a guerilla movement to kill all the leftists?
Still not too late.
Oh wait. Did I say that? Ummm, never mind. Belay my last.
Too late. You’re on The List.
Greetings:
I think that I was still in (Catholic) grammar school when I first came across a BIC ballpoint pen. Now, in Catholic school, a ballpoint pen was absolutely considered contraband. We were fountain pen people and had the ink stained shirts and fingers to prove. But, besides the insurrective joy of ballpoint possession, there was a technological breakthrough. A BIC bell could be easily disassembled; a bit of dental pressure and arm pull and the pen’s point and ink reservoir slid right out, leaving a five or six inch plastic tube which could be easily secreted about a student’s person. A couple of bits of loose leaf paper (two-holed, never three), adequately sized and chewed, and spitball war was all but declared. One more thing, don’t ever even think that a good Sister of Mercy can’t tell the difference between fountain pen writing and that of the infamous ballpoint pen.
Gee. Fountain pens. I had to learn to write with a steel dipping pen. Our desks came with holes with inkwells. I learned to form my letters only on the down stroke as the ink splattered on the up stroke.
I showed one of those to the guys in the motorcycle club last year and they had never seen one.
The next week I came to a meeting with an actual feather quill pen.
Well, after I’m gone they can say they actually saw some.
As for ball points, the first one I ever saw my aunt Sarah had. It leaked. I didn’t see another for years. As I remember, they were more expensive than fountain pens.
For just that reason Bic pens were banned from my Junior High school about two weeks after the local stores started selling them.
Thank God he didn’t have an extended magazine sling slot.
Ya know why kids get arrested nowadays for stuff you and I got away with? Don’t blame the cops. It’s the school administrators and teachers running scared after *insert latest active shooter here* and all the media nancies who post-mortem everything to death. “But where there signs that were missed by officials” they always ask. THAT is why every school has an SRO now who makes arrests for discipline issues.
This sort of thing does not make my life any easier.
Scott, in a free society a policeman’s job is supposed to be difficult.
Sorry, Chunk, but it IS the cop’s fault. I worked an extra job in an urban high school in the 90s. If a teacher or principal had asked me to arrest a student for this I would have laughed in his/her face. Bad prosecutions begin with bad policing. The prosecutor gives credence (too much, IMO) to the cop’s judgment. Morons have always cried to the police about situations needing no legal intervention, and it’s up the the officer to filter those out.
I’m going to go against the trend here. Not that the administrators aren’t asses, but that’s exactly what they are paid to be. Government schools don’t exist to actually teach anything, they exist to warehouse children, separate them from their children, churches and communities, and train them through behavioralist methods to conform to the rules and follow them unthinkingly.
Bell rings? Get up and move. “But I was working on something that requires thought and persistent effort?” Tough luck, get up and move. “Why?” Because the bell rang. What are you, some kind of troublemaker? This will go into your permanent record and you’ll never go to college and get a good job with a corner office.
Noting the boy was bored, I would add that boredom is a feature, not a bug. Bored children are easier to condition. Interested, engaged children deeply involved in learning something that matters to them? Not so much. But government schools don’t exist to create children that can think for themselves, they present “management” problems.
So if the boy and his family have any brains left that can think autonomously, they will realize that being expelled might be the best possible thing that can happen. The boy has learned that the state (for that’s all the schools are, the primary conditioning arm of the state) has no interest in him whatsoever except so far as he quietly succumbs and takes his assigned role in the machine. That will serve him for a lifetime. And in the meantime, he actually has the quiet hours without endless conditioning distractions to read, think, build something, write a program–all the stuff that school exists to keep you from doing on your own.
I have been concerned for some time about the incredible number of young men in our country that are ambling through life, unengaged, unmotivated, and in danger of being permanent members of the underachieving class. Plenty of stats to back it up, starting with the disproportionate levels of female vs. male college grads today. I would offer Knucklehead Two as a prime example until an encounter with a certain set of yellow footprints has him tracking.
I never understood what the causes were. Had some thoughts, but no one encapsulated it as well as this book: http://tinyurl.com/6zx898n. I cannot recommend Dr. Sax’s work too highly. I think this young man is yet another example of how our schools are the direct cause of what I observed, and what Dr. Sax has explained.
Oh please. Spit ball tube as weapon. Give me a break; I weep for the future of this country.
[...] Neptunus Lex. Posted in Kids, Law Enforcement, Schools, WTF | Tags: [...]
Man. I used to blow @#$% up when I was in school. Chemistry was fun!
We still do! Yay for homeschool science! And salt peter…
When I was a junior in high school one of my fellow students in Chemistry class asked me – the best science student in the school – how one made nitroglycerin. Thinking this to be a hypothetical question, I told him. Turns out it was not a hypothetical question.
I underwent about 1/2 hour of questioning by various faculty, including the Principal. They didn’t have anything else to do, given that half the school was evacuated. I was thisclose to being expelled, but they believed my story. In the present regime I bet I *would* have been arrested.
A year ahead of me, two boys built a bomb or two. Black powder IIRC. Blew a toilet all to Hell. School administration knew who it was, knew what it was–but they still called in the FBI. This was in 1978, probably scared the Weatherman were moving in. I later found a private letter from him in which he discussed that and some other “incidents.” He never forgave the school for calling in the FBI, and I don’t blame him.
Incidentally, he went to Renssalaer. This was another guy bored out of his mind by public schools.
Had a nephew that was given a pipe bomb – really a giant firecracker (early 80′s) by a friend to take out in the woods and watch explode… fortunately it was discovered by some school administrator before he could find out what kind of havoc black powder in a steel pipe could do. (It was investigated of course by the local police and FBI, but as an honor role student and never been in trouble with the law, they just said stupid kid tricks.) He finished his senior year in alternative school but that was the end of that. Oh, he went on, got a degree, married, family, and now teaches (depending on the year 1-4th grade elementary).
Now? He’d have been in jail, marked as an extremely dangerous felon, prosecuted under terrorist laws, unemployable, and a continuous debt and burden to society. All in the name of progress. If there is one single thing I hold against the Bush years in the white house it would be the DHS and the mindless pursuit of terrorists to the extreme detriment of liberty and the shredding of the constitution.
So, I see lots of commentary about this sad state of affairs but not a lot of suggestions on what to do about it. And here I thought that you were all ladies and gentlemen of action.
May I suggest you all join me? The Boy Scouts of America have been teaching young men how to live outdoors, sharpen and use – and keep and bear – knives, axes and saws, build fires, run around in the woods for all hours, sleep in tents in heat, rain, storms and cold, catch, clean and cook fish, cook just about anything in fact, paddle a canoe, swim, save their own life, save someone else’s life;
And while they’re at it, say every week while facing the American flag that “On my honor I’ll do my best to do my duty to God and my Country” and occasionally answer questions like “What does honor mean? What does duty mean? What is your duty to God? What is your duty to Country?”. The which you can sure as Hell bet they’re not going to be asked at school.
I’ll wager there’s a Troop – or Pack, if you want to start with 1st graders, or a Crew if you want to work with High School and college kids and do even more fun stuff – quite near you. Call your local Council office and I’m sure they can give you some numbers to call. I’ve been doing this for 18 years now and the dirty little secret is that I have as much fun as the kids.
That’s the truth. Before my body started telling me it’s life story almost every day, I used to be involved with BSA. No better boys program out there and it is fun.
My son asked what I wouold do he quit Scouting. I told him I’d like him to stay and at least make Life, but that I was in it because I liked it, not because he was in it.
I didn’t get much out of Woodbadge, but most people will and it was certainly worth my time regardless.
If you ain’t in Scouting you are missing a fine opportunity to mold a generation of boys that really need to see real men up in front of them.
Yup, amen, concur, usw. Eagle Scout here. Troop 388, Coral Gables, FL.
Many +1′s
I wholeheartedly agree. We definitely need institutions like the BSA to influence our boys to become upstanding citizens that have a duty to others. The BSA can’t be the sole pillar to do this though, parents and school being probably more important in that vein. However, when a school uses the legal system to punish a kid when a stern talking to would do more to teach a lesson, to use the incident as a learning experience, we’ve told that kid he’s not a citizen, he’s a criminal. Now he will possibly disrespect the school and the law, now that they’ve given him what I would believe is a fully adequate reason to.
Ditto.
Here we have a choice between the original UK version and the US version at the base. Son says he wants to wait until we return to the states, but now I will take action. The UK version is kinda wussy, so I’m going to take him down to the base and throw him in with some American boys again.
Good idea, RonF.
The Boy was signed up for Cub Scouts the first day he was eligible. The Girl tags along anytime and every time she can (Girl Scouts is NOT where she wants to be) and is learning a lot of the same skills. Once we get off this god-forsaken turd in the middle of the Pacific, we will be putting a lot of those skills and more to good use – hiking, camping, hunting…you name it. Can’t wait.
If I may ask, can you take a weekend at Bellows on the beach? Camping is wonderful and both of them would probably enjoy the heck out of it. When I was that age we used to drive from Annandale to VA beach and camp out on the beach…on the beach just there at VA Beach. It was a mil camp ground on or about Fort Storey. It was like Bellows at the age. Once you got there you felt like you were a thousand miles away from the land. Saw 2 back to back movies at the drive in while staying there once. Swiss Family Robinson and Love Bug. There. Dated myself.
Wishing you all the best.
Laie Falls and the Kahuku’s for minor league warmup hikes. There are some nice trail circuits up on the Koolau’s.
To anyone still following this thread- a former HS teacher of mine, and my nephew’s current Principal shared that this type of overreaction is all due to Columbine. They think this will prevent a kid from either turning into a Dylan Klebold, or ensure that they react appropriately to what someone might consider is bullying. Huge difference in a spitball and a machine gun, but not to them apparently.
Oh, on the nitrogen tri-iodide. I found out the hard way that plutonium is not the only stuff that is more likely to blow up, the more you have of it in one chunk. I confirmed this later when I learned some more chemistry. Be careful out there, boys!
Oh, great, you add this some forty posts and three fingers later.
When I was still in grade school several of us boys used to take our shotguns to school. This would have been around 1972. We’d hand them over to the teacher, who stored them in a wardrobe in the coat closet. After school we’d get our guns back and we’d walk home along the railroad tracks or the ditches looking for pheasant, quail, or other small game. It wasn’t that we needed the food, like during the Great Depression (and farm families didn’t really need the food then, for that matter), it was a a rite of passage for a boy at that time. When you were old enough, you got a rifle, then a fowling piece, and at some point displayed enough responsibility to be allowed out with it sans an adult.
When I entered junior high, I’d saved my allowance and purchased “The Poor Man’s James Bond.”
The wonders of chemistry were opened to me, and I’ll stand on my record of no fatalities.
In high school, and this is approaching the 80′s, the farm kids wore their pocket knives on their belts. Many had pliers too, in a holster, especially those who drove to school and thus went straight from classroom to field or farm. If we drove, our guns were in our cars.
Nobody ever gave a darn. Our lockers didn’t have locks, and if we were to mis-behave we’d get the lash from the principle and knew our parents would be waiting to administer their own punishment once we returned home. Nobody picked on the weaker kids either. There were plenty of bullies, but even weak kids have older brothers, and bullies aren’t known for picking fights with even opponents. As the older brother I was obligated to prove my credentials only once, and the lesson was learned.
Oddly enough, the only time I was in the principles office officially was because of an english class. We had to write a flippin’ poem, and Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” had been playing quite a bit, so I decided to parody it with The Wreck of the Toyota Corolla. Yeah, turns out the principle had one of those, which his wife mainly drove. After a couple minutes of conversation whereupon I had to point out that the Corolla was, in fact, smaller than a Kenworth and the poem was true to fact from a physics point of view, I was let out with a, “Try to rhyme Cadillac next time — that’s what the superintendent drives!”
That changed in college. I was informed I could not have any weapons in my possession, even if I lived off-campus. Since I lived off-campus, I ignored that particular statute — let the bastards enforce their rule. I discovered that not everybody has a penchant for self-reliance or wishes to take upon themselves the mantle of responsibility. I saw plenty of friends drop out due to grades because they wouldn’t study, and the Friday or Saturday drinking started moving into Monday through Friday. I saw many more ignore their principles and beliefs and turn in papers that they thought reflected what the professor wanted to hear instead of what they thought.
I learned one thing through those 20 years of schooling: Nobody cares about your GPA, all they care about is that you graduated and have the chit to show you’re qualified. That includes the teachers and the employers. Nobody cares if you learned anything, nobody cares if you were challenged, nobody cares if you were bored, nobody cares if you were performing below your ability. The school exists to churn out product, and industry selects upon the interview rather than the school transcript.
It would seem the consumer, industry, doesn’t quite trust the schools to tell the truth with respects to their product.
Gee, wonder why that might be.
– Max
Gee, Max, you are sounding like us jaded grumpy old farts who hang out at Steve Sailer’s blog!
Really, though, I think the “higher education” bubble is about to burst.
Credentials were cool when they were hard to get, but now that everyone has them, with minimum effort, well, I don’t think they’ll have the reputation they used to have, to put it mildly.
MD, I just want to say that this may be the best comment anyone ever wrote on Lex’s board.
yep, MD. Similar experience to mine with school discipline & homes that supported it.
Logging and coal town. Of course we had guns in our trucks at school — why wouldn’t you? Hunting before/after school in season. Plinking after school. Couldn’t have imagined otherwise at the time. Of course you had a Buck lockblade on your belt (if you weren’t a “townie”). You’d be undressed without it.
Indeed, “An armed society is a polite society.”
I always have carried a pocketknife, growing up on a ranch it always came in handy. Then one day at school, the teacher decreed that only the “Big Boys” would be allowed to carry a pocketknife. Evidently, being a girl, I couldn’t figure out how to run one. I just ignored her and kept my knife. I still carry a pocketknife, except now I carry three of them, um, just in case, you know…..