Thursday, February 11, 2016
Because too many teachers and administrators are incapable of reliably rational thought, that’s why.
Take this ridiculous episode, for example:
Ethan Chase Middle School in Menifee, California urged its students to costume themselves as Disney characters for Spirit Day last week. Austin Lacey, 13, being a broad-minded and creative lad who, like an astounding number of his fellow Americans, apparently admires “Frozen,” the Disney animated cult smash soon to be a Broadway musical. He chose to dress as Elsa, the movie’s troubled Snow Queen.
The school principal made him take off the costume, because, as Romoland School District Superintendent Dr. Julie Vitale said in a statement, it was necessary to “stop a general disruption to the school environment.”
See what I mean? Morons.
The school asks students to dress up as Disney characters, with no further guidance or limitations. This open-ended assignment leaves options open for students of any color or gender to costume themselves as mice, dogs, wolves, lions, wart hogs, dragons, witches, wizards, pirates, mermaids, crabs, one-eyed monsters, insects, toads, weasels, crocodiles, Hercules, Tarzan, Mr. Potato Head, the Headless Horseman, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Davy Crockett, Uncle Remus, Neverland Indians, any of seven dwarfs, robots, dozens of princesses and princes, or Annette Funicello. A young man, for whatever whimsical motive, chooses to dress as one of the princesses, the frigid blonde one from “Frozen,” which is hardly out-of-bounds in this gender-jumbled day and age. It is a tasteful costume, as you can see. It is not salacious or in bad taste in any way. Look: here is his model:
Not bad, right? Never mind. For bizarre reasons that only dwell in the rarefied environment of the principal’s mossy skull, and the similarly tangled morass of the superintendent’s cranium, poor, innocent Austin is singled out, ostracized and embarrassed. Anyone who has been awake longer than Sleeping Beauty would know that this would instantly become a controversy on the web, bringing deserved sympathy to the student and embarrassment to the school. Why would any educators do something so pointless and gratuitously hostile to a student?
The answer is “because they are incompetent” —not all public school educators, but a critical mass of them, enough that there is no way one can be sure whether one’s child will be inspired by Mr. Holland or brutalized by Hogwarts’ horrible Dolores Umbridge. Public school education, a realm with no code of ethics and few standards, is stuffed with too many poorly trained, unprofessional boobs with delusions of significance. This was a small incident, but typical of the level of judgment that is too often applied to our children’s education and socialization. It illustrates, dear readers, why I recently wrote, in connection with another school fiasco, that such people have no business trying to guide our children through the complex thickets of race, culture, and politics.
They can’t even get “Spirit Day” right.
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Pointer: Fred