Dakota Beacon

I hope you saw my post last Saturday.  I featured the life and work of a truly great American, Marva Collins, recognized by two presidents and celebrated by a rock star.  Her accomplishment was to take inner-city Chicago children from a life of crime and social dysfunction and wasted life in the ghetto to the pathway of great success and their own great accomplishment.  If you watched any of the videos or the movie about her life (all there), you will have noted that she did this through high expectations, firmness and a great love of the children and of life. She encouraged the kids through finding their interests and strengths and using them to help the kids achieve.  And it worked. Every time. If you missed it on Saturday, read here about this amazing and gifted woman.

Now for something completely different.  Today’s news brings us the story of six-year-old Margot Gaines, a student at Valley Forge Elementary School in Pennsylvania.  Margot has Downs Syndrome. Little Margot has an arrest record now, thanks to her schoolteacher and the school’s administrator and the police.  As a minor it might only impact her school records, but who knows? People’s personal information has a way of getting into the massive databases.  The child pointed her tiny little finger and said “I shoot you.’ No reason seems to have been given which might have “triggered” her to say this, but kids often act out just to get some kind of attention, and in Margot’s case, she is perhaps less motivated by logic than some of her classmates.  The school district labeled this event a threat to the teacher’s life. It is obvious as you read the story that this little kid has no idea what it even means to shoot someone. So now her name is part of an “official report” but don’t worry, she has “no record”. Sure.  

It was in 2016 when another child, this a seven-year-old boy named Josh Welch, who was diagnosed with ADHD, nibbled his pop tart into the shape of a gun.  He was promptly suspended. When his family challenged this decision a Maryland court upheld the suspension (or from the kid’s point of view, let’s call it “early release”).  One wonders what a Marva Collins-trained teacher would have done with this little boy, already a victim of the system or he would not have been labeled “ADHD” in the first place.  One might guess that she would have seen his creativity in a positive light and maybe encouraged him in the direction of art, maybe sculpture, harnessing his creative energy and imagination in that way, while giving a lesson in table manners  I would be willing to bet that at age 11 now, he probably reads well below his proper level.   Just a guess, of course.

These school administrators, reinforcing the incompetence and dysfunctionality of their classroom teachers, are really providing nothing more than a very poor quality babysitting service.  They are the end result of the so-called “snowflake” environment (“snowflake” is too pretty a term - I would call this “feculent, oozing garbage”) in which these college graduates have been marinated.  Instead of using the opportunity to teach or maybe to connect with the student, they run to the principal. No wonder the old one-room schools were so successful - they didn’t have a principal to resort to every few minutes when a teacher was frightened by a six-year-old child with Downs Syndrome.  

If someone is not prepared to deal with life itself, to work with people who are not their clones or some kind of robots, they really should not be admitted into a college-level program in the first place.  A college which even provides “safe spaces” should simply close its doors - or just boot out those students who say they need a safe space.  (After all, what would a principal do with someone like Nancy Pelosi for ripping up a copy of a speech as a stunt?  Obviously there are people at every level, in all walks of life who are out of control.)  There really is no room in the classroom - or the courtroom or the boardroom or even the stockroom - for someone who needs a safe space. 

Two words sort of screamed at me as I read these two tales - “HOME SCHOOL”.  If your community has a genuine one-room school perhaps that might also work.  But seriously, we need to do better than this by our children. We can see by looking at these teachers and principals what Margot’s and Josh’s classmates will be as adults - they will have been conditioned the same way as these incompetent so-called educators to feel threatened by pre-school children rather than inspired to channel their energies into constructive effort.  Nothing can be achieved while quivering under a desk. Let’s hope that this tide can be turned and we can once again raise children to become adults.

Comments:  (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)