NEWS FLASH: Muskogee, Oklahoma schools run by morons
From CNN: An 11-year-old Oklahoma girl has been suspended from a public school because officials said her Muslim head scarf violates dress code policies...
The stated reason is "to stem gang-related activity." I guess Muskogee must be having a lot of trouble with menacing gangs of 11-year-old Muslim schoolgirls. I wonder what kinds of problems they've been causing. Koran smuggling? Drive-by gossipping? Conspiracy to acquire an education?
Of course, this is the same benighted state where school officials in Broken Arrow recently filed suit against a student for allegedly "casting magic spells" at a teacher. And Duncanville, Texas, persists in thinking that "ejjikashun" consists of suspending straight-A students because their shirts aren't tucked in tightly enough to please some pinhead administrator who couldn't spell cat if you spotted him the "C" and the "A".
Anyone who judged Oklahoma and Texas by the quality of these public school administrators would conclude that H. L. Mencken was right to dismiss everything south and west of his beloved Baltimore as a "Sahara of the Bozart" populated solely by drooling, illiterate yokels. But it's worse than that. These so-called "schools" are using their inescapable, taxpayer-funded monopoly power over children, not to teach them how to be functioning, responsible, educated citizens, but to indoctrinate them into habitual, abject submissiveness to pompous administrative drones. Let's be honest. These aren't schools. They're madrassahs of mindless bureaucratic conformity.
(For further reading, in case anyone's interested: John Taylor Gatto's The Six Lesson Schoolteacher and Dumbing Us Down.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Fiend @ 12:35PM | 2003-10-12| permalink
Unfortunately, moronic school administrators aren’t restricted to the South.
In a case analogous to your first example, a 16-year old was expelled from her Québec school for failing to remove her hijab because it violated the school’s dress code (surprising because Québec is generally considered a very liberal province).
Ironically, the private school’s motto is “Open to the World”...
email | website
Carlos Zamora @ 2:15PM | 2003-10-12| permalink
Oklahoma ain't in the South! (I'm not sure if Southerners or Okies would be more offended...)
email | website
Fiend @ 2:57PM | 2003-10-12| permalink
My reply to that would have been “Well, I was referring generally to states located in the lower half of the U.S.” if not for the fact that I'd actually been unsure whether OK was part of the American South and looked it up. According to the authoritative definition located at Wikipedia, OK is a state that is “sometimes included” as part of the South.
I suggest you take the issue up with the contributors to Wikipedia.
email | website
Felix @ 5:12PM | 2003-10-14| permalink
As to whether Oklahoma is in the South: for purposes of comparison with HLM's "Sahara of the Bozart", I used his implied definition. He compares the "Sahara" unfavorably with the swath of land "between Ohio and the Pacific", making it roughly, as I said, everything south and west of Baltimore. I'll grant that this definition probably peters out somewhere around western Oklahoma. I have vague memories of living in Ponca City, and it's much more Western than Southern. Muskogee, however, is in the eastern part of the state, in the foothills of the Arkansas Ozarks, which puts it on the edge of my mental definition of The South. And after all, Stand Watie did fight for the Confederacy.
In any case, the point is moot, since as Fiend points out, control-fetishistic behavior is not geographically limited. The example she cites is legally redeemed by the school's private status, I suppose, but it's still painfully stupid and mean-spirited, especially given the school's motto. At least they aren't using mandatory tax dollars to pay for their fetish.
To make things equal-opportunity-offensive, here's a story about problems encountered by a conservative school teacher and counsellor in British Columbia:
http://www.familyaction.org/Articles/issues/education/few-defended-teacher.htm
It's not about left vs. right or religious vs. atheist. It's about control fetishists versus freedom.
email | website
Post a Comment