Preach It, Fred Reed

My favorite curmudgeon, Fred Reed, shares my disdain for all things modern but has a greater reservoir of memory from which to draw comparisons between the sane world of yesteryear and the raging insanity of today. In this article he tackles the feminist war against education and boys. Great stuff (here's a small sample):

All of my teachers in grade school, and perhaps half in high school, were women. They were fine. The reason was that they accepted the masculine view that schools existed to teach content. They did: first arithmetic and then math, and history, English grammar and composition, literature, Latin, and so on. Bless them.

What I dislike is the feminized, therapeutic view of schools as places not to teach anything but to engage in Pavlovian conditioning of kids to female norms of syrupy goodness, non-violence (tag, dodge ball, and wrestling) docility, conformity, and warm interpersonal glop. Learning anything gets short shrift.

An examination of the intellectual qualifications of teachers, such as rankings against those in other fields on the Graduate Record Exams, will show them to be at the bottom. These are averages, of course, and there are exceptions. Still, people of low voltage do not naturally have much interest in academics. They easily become prey to a pedagogy focusing on “interpersonal relations.”

EDIT: And here is an inspiring story of resistance against the very tyranny Fred was describing -- a young boy steadfastly refuses to pledge allegiance despite his teacher's efforts to geld him in front of the class. Even though the teacher was aware that the boy is a Jehovah's Witness, she apparently didn't know that they do not pledge allegiance (there's even Supreme Court precedent on this), driving home Fred's point concerning the dim nature of modern pedagogues.