I can’t tolerate people who take advantage of liberal policies.
I can’t tolerate criminals and chronically misbehaving schoolkids. Those kids who believe they have ‘rights’ where discipline is concerned.
I am only recently coming to the realization that there is such a thing as ‘too liberal’.
In case I was misunderstood - of course kids have rights. What I meant was - I don’t like a system that allows kids to get away with using ‘I have rights’ as an excuse to be abusive and uncontrollable in class.
They have human rights. But they shouldn’t have the right to behave in a way which makes the teacher lose control of the class. A teacher should have just enough legal rights to ensure control of a class of pupils. And the teacher should be able to know this and so put the pupil straight where ‘rights’ are concerned. Not lose confidence because they are utterly unsure what they can and can’t do in today’s ambulance chasing society.
In case I was misunderstood - of course kids have rights. What I meant was - I don’t like a system that allows kids to get away with using ‘I have rights’ as an excuse to be abusive and uncontrollable in class.
They have human rights. But they shouldn’t have the right to behave in a way which makes the teacher lose control of the class. A teacher should have just enough legal rights to ensure control of a class of pupils. And the teacher should be able to know this and so put the pupil straight where ‘rights’ are concerned. Not lose confidence because they are utterly unsure what they can and can’t do in today’s ambulance chasing society.
And furthermore,
As with all people, kids have rights, BUT they also have the other “r” word- responsibilities, namely to not be an ass anymore than they can absolutely help it (and to take their lumps when they can’t help being one).
I’m constantly amazed by how liberal I’m not as I age. I’m still a complete libertarian when it comes to women’s rights to choose, people’s sex lives, etc., but I’m about 3 degrees from Cartman when it comes to hippies.
When I was a kid I hated those fellow schoolkids who gave the teacher a hard time. Teaching is a noble under-appreciated profession (afterall… those kids are the future workforce). Even as a student I wanted to be a teacher. I still do.
Normally I am distrustfull of authority. But teachers are totally different. They are the exception to the rule that authority and power corrupts. They are in it for the gratification that they are doing something good for the world. They are contributing to the quality of life of hundreds of future adults per year.
Letting your children run around like maniacs has nothing to do with being a liberal. There are plenty of conservatives with misbehaving children. This kind of behavior is symptomatic of a society that treats children as if they were all precious and fragile angels who can do no wrong. There are people on both sides that subscribe to this–the liberals/seculars because they believe children are closer to the Earth or maybe the original state of Man, the conservatives/religious because they believe children are closer to God.
And of course, there’s the pathologizing of brattiness which has been so rewarding to our multinational corporations. Nobody dares criticize little Johnny when his mom hands the teacher a slip of paper saying he’s got ADHD*. And pharmaceutical companies are more than willing to dope up the children of both liberals and conservatives, and both varieties of parent are equally likely to fall back on the “Johnny has ADHD” excuse than “Johnny is a little bastard who needs to learn to shut up” reality.
I just don’t believe political philosophy and strength of child rearing correlate. There are rotten children and parents all over. The real solution is to wake up and realize that children are not perfect little angels who only misbehave when they have a “disorder,” they are human beings, with the same responsibilities toward other human beings that everyone else has. Nobody should be immune from punishment, when they’ve done something to deserve that punishment. And that’s not a conservative position, it’s a common sense one.
(Note: I am not saying ADHD is a fake diagnosis created by the drug companies in every case. Just 99.87% of them*.)
**not a real statistic
That’s true of most teachers, including my brother, my sister-in-law, and my aunt. But let’s not get carried away here.
There are some who just want a job where they get their summers off. There are some who love being petty tyrants in their pathetic little kingdoms. And one wonderful individual, an art teacher in my high school, apparantly became a teacher so he could sodomize his students.
I really doubt all the teachers in your childhood were great teachers, or even good people. Life just doesn’t work that way.
So you might want to dial down the rhetoric a bit. Teachers for the most part are good people doing a very necessary job. Saying they’re some sort of weird super-humanitarian - that’s not quite necessary.
(Underlining mine)
Mod note: Moved from the Pit because it seemed more MPSIMSy.
Lynn
For the Straight Dope
I agree with what has been said in this thread and don’t disagree that ADHD is over used. However, we had a daughter that had ADHD although back then she was “hyper-active” which I feel better describes the condition. The drugs really helped in her case.
I’m with you on hating spoiled brat children. But, I think it’s a meme that liberals let their kids run wild. My liberal friends all have really well behaved kids, but some of the conservatives have kids from hell.
Look at the difference between Chelsea Clinton and the Bush twins. And didn’t Jeb Bush’s son get caught screwing in a car at the mall?
As for hippies, and pan-handlers, and “street kids” with dogs wearing bandanas: feh!!
Al Gore’s son has had some noteworthy problems, which is probably an indication that generalizing in this way is dangerous.
Speaking of the Bush twins, Jenna seems to have gotten some, oh, “exposure” as of late.
(Think Paris Hilton getting out of the car).
I haven’t seen any evidence that there’s any correlation between classroom misbehavior and parental political leanings. But IIRC, a number of other moral misbehavings (such as divorce rates) have a higher incidence in red states.
Why, what’s with hippies?
Honest, I’m curious. It’s been eons since I’ve seen one. Are the ones that are left - wherever they’re hiding - imposing on anyone?
Maybe that’s because they’re getting married in the first place.
This article suggests that cohabitation is more prevalent in blue areas and among, well, blue people.
If you classify divorce as a moral misbehavior, what is shacking up?
Again, this illustrates the limits of generalizing in this way.
I don’t understand the sort of cognitive dissonance that lets people see how useful ADD drugs are and still lets them subscribe to this notion that ADD was invented by drug companies. (Ritalin, the most popular ADD drug, was invented fifty years or so ago and is available quite cheap as a generic. So it’s not people are necessarily earning huge amounts of money off it.)
So what is it? Your daughter really has it, but other people’s kids don’t? Is your own perception really less important to you than this message that has been pounded into our heads? Just because you hear something repeated over and over doesn’t mean it’s true.
You know what? You’ve got a point..
The marriage and divorce data for 2001-03 provided by the NCHS is in PDF format, but I entered the marriage and divorce numbers for 2003 into a spreadsheet, ID’d the states by red and blue, and ranked by (#divorces)/(#marriages), from lowest (best) to highest (worst). It works out about even: blue states had an average rank of 22.11, and red states had an average rank of 23.59.
This was excluding Puerto Rico (neither red nor blue), Nevada (people used to go to Nevada for quickie divorces; now they go there to get married, and boy howdy, does it show up in the numbers), and five states that didn’t provide divorce stats: CA, HI, IN, LA, and OK.
Weighting the rankings by number of marriages (in lieu of weighting by population, which would have entailed entering another column of figures) left things essentially unchanged.