After seeing this request in the Honey Badger Facebook group I couldn’t help but jump all over it! Now before I begin I wish to state cleanly – I’m not a trained professional in any sense of the word when it comes to the children’s psychiatric/psychological field of study. What I am is a loving father of a young boy who is fairly energetic and was at one time such an energetic young boy myself. What I had different than many others that have gone through our educational system the last 30 years was three wonderful male role models and at least two decent female role models. In short, I was a lucky son of a bitch, and yes I mean that about my mother.
So lets give this my typical bit by bit break down of the article in question, and interject not only some of my own experiences and some of what worked for me but insert why some of this is just plain ridiculous. To preface, the piece is from July/August 2015. Therefore even among some of the feminist academics this is likely out of date. Of particular note are the attempts in some schools to induce gender dysmorphia via the Safe Schools concept by misattributing thoughts from a child’s imagination and wanting to play make believe and considering it reality. Add to that this newer law in Canada that would claim that the state knows better than a parent whether or not they can risk ruining their developing bodies with sometimes highly volatile artificial hormones. With that in mind, Let’s Hammer This In!
We start out with a typical anecdotal stroll out of a cheap short story compilation that you’d likely find at Books-A-Million that describes Will. A likely misdiagnosed child who is pegged with a learning disorder but is quite possibly just a case of a 9 year old boy being what he is naturally. I can attest that this vision of young boys particularly in that age range has been around for a while. One of the few things I’ll give my mother credit for is she never overstepped bounds on medication. I realize I’m answering an anecdote with an anecdote but this will make a modicum of sense.
When I was this exact same age range I had a teacher whose name was entertainingly enough Mrs. Wolfe. Now obviously this is not the feminist that Karen had so vastly owned a few years back but the attitude was similar. This grade school teacher had called my mother on countless occasions requesting that she overdose me on ritalin. I was already on the maximum 10mg dose and even that seemed like a bit much. Now why did Mrs. Wolf here request this? Because I was always the first to not only answer the questions asked during class but got them correct every single time. In short I was a top tier student and she had a problem with that. This same year she called my mother DURING CLASS and told her she thought I was playing with myself. My mother then had to explain to her that for my age I was…gifted. In other words I was trying to not sit on myself. Sounds a lot like the ‘manspreading’ argument doesn’t it?
So now that I’ve probably frightened the lot of you with the idea that this crap was happening in the early nineties and that a woman who was in her 50s at the time was imagining a 9 year old boy masturbating. Lets see where this Mrs. Robinson takes her story shall we?
First off just because the boy acts like a playful boy and not a meek demure girl they immediately write him off as prison material. They also claim that the basic ideas of reward and punishment are ‘outdated’. The systems they are pushing for are ones that lack consequence and have resulted in situations such as what is currently happening in Evergreen. They then cite with the picture their article on Common Core, a system proven to be an abject failure in teaching male students anything about the world.
Now I’ve had a hand full from my graduating class become teachers themselves, out of the 6 that I know about 5 of them are women, one is a guy and that guy is a failed quarterback who took after his father to become the school football coach. None of these people are generally impressive nor anywhere near valedictorian level thinkers. In fact our one Valedictorian from my graduating class is a medical compliance manager today. In other words nothing special. So first and foremost we now have basically mediocre minds becoming teachers to students who aren’t given a system in which they can learn any objective facts and don’t understand how to enact any form of reward-consequence system competently. If a student gets uppity they don’t humiliate them or use it as a launching point for teaching by example. They go for In-School suspension, basically shoving them onto an even lesser educator and putting them out of sight, out of mind.
Now from here it goes on to a lot of data. I mean a LOT of data. From what you typically see from me I usually put forth a couple decent paragraphs from the article and comment, but in trying to separate this I got to about the seventh image before realizing that most of it is saying a lot of the same artifacts and feelings over and over in different ways and if I were to translate that over and over again this would be three times the size of my typical article. No one wants to read that, so I’ll save us all some hassle and summarize. You have the link to the article. If you want to read it for yourself you are more than able to.
It goes into the work of these two psychologists and another named Ross Greene, a man who thinks that over-correction is whats been going on, whose solution is talking things out to get reasoning out of a male child for a problem and using that talk alone to try to figure out how to discipline the child. The problem with that is when I was a young boy there were times where I didn’t feel like talking. That would have made me act out more. Now this isn’t to say a lot of older approaches are right. Far from it. What helped me was before I was punished my stepfather explained to me WHY I was being punished. Now how was I punished growing up? Simple, my toys were taken away and I was given increased chores, like polishing his desk, helping wax the car, helping dig a ditch.
Now when I was in 4th grade I did get a particularly rough punishment because I did something wrong with my brother that risked our lives. As such, we were given the strictest punishment I had ever gotten in my life. It was about summer time during the Olympics. I remember him watching it in the background as he took off for a vacation to help enforce the punishment. I was a lucky son of a bitch to have such a caring stepfather huh? Well I had all my toys taken away, TV fully removed from our rooms, our only form of entertainment being allowed was to read in our rooms, while during the day we had to write full legal pad essays on why what we did was wrong and dissertations on specific virtues and how one should act in the world to not only be a contributing member of society but a balanced individual. Then we also helped dig out not only a fish pond but a fresh drainage ditch to aid in our house’s plumbing.
I guess that explains why I write the way I do and why I’m so in depth of studying the things I am debunking. I was basically taught how to do this from an early age. So if you like how I write things you can thank my late stepfather for cultivating the skill in me. So why did I mention this? Well its simple – this ties back to when I talked about mentoring last year and how one should work on discipline today. Sometimes a more corporal punishment could be seen as necessary to some – whether these people are more abusive or not is up to your interpretation. However, that is not the method I’m going to suggest for teaching children discipline. I’m going to suggest a balanced method of how my stepfather did things.
First you should sit the child down after they’ve done something wrong – don’t lash out and lose control yourself. If you grab them only do so if they are in harm’s way – otherwise request they go with you. If they try to tell you ‘no’ then take them firmly but not violently. Second, calmly but sternly explain to them what they did that was such a problem. You can show disappointment and disapproval just keep your anger controlled and metered. This will show them that you are in control and they will respect you for it. Then you ask them for the next thirty minutes to write down why what they did was wrong and why they shouldn’t do it again. This will help them realize more fully and reason it out in their own minds. Finally you assign an appropriate chore for the level of the transgression. For a small one you could ask them to clean their dinner plates themselves after eating. For a medium sized one? They have to clean the kitchen or bathrooms themselves. For A huge one? Then have them wax the family car or wash the sides of the house. Did they do something extreme? Then its time to get in that home improvement project you always wanted to do. I believe this, in tandem with grounding, worked fairly well with me and even my brother to a point.
The way our Mrs. Robinson did things as you would see in the article had her play hostage negotiator when he would act out. She treated the boy as a terrorist. On the psychiatric side of things, she assumed he had a learning disorder when more likely he was just a more masculine little boy from the way he seemed to act. She also tried to cite racism, when often those African American children who act out are suffering from a lack of a strong father figure as well. That’s another area in which this Mother Jones article fails miserably – taking the parents of the children (mother and father both) out of the equation of teaching discipline, hinting quite obviously that the schools should be teaching discipline – that the state should be teaching children not facts about the world but how to live life.
This is a very very dangerous path for multiple reasons, and should be called out. With many social justice warrior types we have seen lately typically grow dependent on the support of the collective in one way or another, such as financially through via welfare, through employment through their left wing political leaders, or ideologically through media platforms. As such, they are overall psychologically stunted and can not live under normal conditions. They then start to lash out and try to take control of workplaces for the ‘revolution’ – I’m sorry ‘change’ to come about. Recently our own Max Derrat did a pair of videos based around the comparison of the development of the soviets to the development of the Social Justice ideology we are dealing with today. I highly suggest you watch it as it will as a parent give you warning signs that these things are happening in your kids schools.
It is my hope that with these tools that we can start to roll back these ideologies big time. Next week we are going to have some fun with The Independent and their obsession with the wood of mahogany. Until next time Please Remember to Game Freely!
- Breaking the Narrative Episode 124: Nice Try Kotaku! This Won’t Work Though! - July 8, 2019
- Breaking the Narrative Episode 123: We Shouldn’t Go Straight to Mars! How Anime Got Space Right! - July 1, 2019
- Breaking the Narrative Episode 122: You’re Reviewing What Now? The Dissenter Web Browser! - June 10, 2019
by 
Great article.