Are kids fit to live? Not if parents, schools, and lawyers have their way. Geez, the kids aren’t even fit to have fun – they’re fit to be tied.
Overbearing parents and schools are killing kids with protectiveness, leaving them without the physical and mental coping skills they’ll need as adults. Windham school in New Hampshire damned and banned Dodgeball. Apparently, kids that can’t throw well are “objectified.”
It’s sad when adults won’t let kids run a bit wild in the playground - but it’s sadder that - when they do let kids run wild - it’s with their mouths, when it’s time to eat. Here’s some food for thought.
From 12.8% to 30.1% from 2010 to 2013. In Jakarta, Indonesia, that meteoric rise stands for the percentage of kids between 5 and 12 years old deemed overweight. Why the big ballooning? Because, amongst other factors, parents let kids eat too much junk food and “greasy” street food. (In one case a mother’s lament was that her child would have a tantrum if she tried to feed him vegetables.)
But where’s the middle ground of reasonableness and perspective? Will kids in Ohio USA specifically, at Burlington Elementary School, have tantrums now that birthdays celebrated in class will be held without birthday cakes? Gifts such as pencils and erasers are OK, notwithstanding that they taste terribly tough.
(The kids’ fits, however, will have to take a back seat to the snits of mom and dad – for their bits on the article page were vitriolic.)
It’s ironic that schools in America, whose educational standards in OECD international rankings are slipping – Huff Post Education reports that they’re now deemed “average” - focus on food and fat, not figures and facts, and deem parents too dumb to know what’s good for youngsters. (Maybe educators read the Indonesia obesity horror story.)
But, hooray, some help for youngsters, parents, and schools - thanks to scientists - may be on the way. Pointy-heads from Baltimore’s John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that warning on a 500ml bottle of coke that drinking same would take a 4.2 mile run or a 42-minute walk to burn off the calories made many switch to healthier drinks, or smaller sizes of coke. They state that many of us don’t understand calories too well at best, and basically ignore caloric admonitions too much at worst.
And here’s more help, from New Zealand of all places, to turn back the “Nanny Parent” hermetically-sealed safety state. A tip of the hat goes to Principal Bruce McLachlan and his Swanson School. He abolished playground rules, knowing some kids might get hurt, a downside, but consider the upside: besides the kids having WAY more fun, they learned to think, cope, and problem solve. “There was also less bullying, less tattling. Incidents of vandalism had dropped off.”
But for the vast majority of kids they still, even after finishing elementary and high-school, will be largely untested and un-toughened. In fact, they will have been primped for adulthood, thanks, in large part, to nutty educational modes of “child-centered learning” as ruined, spoiled, generally rotten twenty-year-old tall toddlers, short on the facts of life, particularly about the hard knocks in the real world that will inevitably follow them around as night follows day.
Child-centered learning is great for boosting a kid’s self-esteem, but as a method to boost the A B C’s, it’s found wanting. And, get this, in the heartland of the USA, a school district in Nebraska, in a sop to transgendered kids, of which there are, what, one percent of the student body, if that, wanted to ban the words “boys” and “girls” in favor of “purple penguins.” That’s kooky-centered learning.
Sometimes overbearing and under caring universities intentionally create a situation where the kids are fit to play, but are made fit not to think. The University of North Carolina, in a bid to ensure its student-athletes got some good marks, steered them into sham “paper-classes” in African and Afro-American Studies where, as whistleblower Mary Willingham points out, attendance was not required. The one paper required was written, she emphasized, at an abysmally low level with students unable to write a sentence or paragraph. She said their reading skills were at a grade two or three. Nevertheless, magically, the marks averaged around A to B minus! Obviously these kids were pushed through with passes in elementary and secondary schools just because they were fast, or strong, or shifty.
And when kids do have intelligent thoughts? Well, often, American universities, in a not so nifty move, have deemed it darn near impossible for kids to voice original, not always popular – so far as their educational masters are concerned – thoughts on campus by restricting the public space in which they can orate, to “free speech zones.” Someone, please photocopy the Constitution and pass it around to those awful administrators and safe student groups whose abridgment of the First Amendment rights for all but they - with their correct opinions - is flagrant and malevolent.
While universities may be evil in banning free speech, Livermore, a New Hampshire town has gone all sinister. Halloween is now verboten. Legislatively, via a misdemeanor, free treats are no more. According to the mayor, Bob Appel, Halloween causes ‘mental harm.’
Here are some other Halloween no-no’s for places where it’s still allowed. Skeletons should be shunned; face paint should be forbidden and nurse nylons should be nixed.
So, are kids fit to live, or have fun? Not really.
Overall it is to howl:
Boo-Hoo...
Overbearing parents and schools are killing kids with protectiveness, leaving them without the physical and mental coping skills they’ll need as adults. Windham school in New Hampshire damned and banned Dodgeball. Apparently, kids that can’t throw well are “objectified.”
It’s sad when adults won’t let kids run a bit wild in the playground - but it’s sadder that - when they do let kids run wild - it’s with their mouths, when it’s time to eat. Here’s some food for thought.
From 12.8% to 30.1% from 2010 to 2013. In Jakarta, Indonesia, that meteoric rise stands for the percentage of kids between 5 and 12 years old deemed overweight. Why the big ballooning? Because, amongst other factors, parents let kids eat too much junk food and “greasy” street food. (In one case a mother’s lament was that her child would have a tantrum if she tried to feed him vegetables.)
But where’s the middle ground of reasonableness and perspective? Will kids in Ohio USA specifically, at Burlington Elementary School, have tantrums now that birthdays celebrated in class will be held without birthday cakes? Gifts such as pencils and erasers are OK, notwithstanding that they taste terribly tough.
(The kids’ fits, however, will have to take a back seat to the snits of mom and dad – for their bits on the article page were vitriolic.)
It’s ironic that schools in America, whose educational standards in OECD international rankings are slipping – Huff Post Education reports that they’re now deemed “average” - focus on food and fat, not figures and facts, and deem parents too dumb to know what’s good for youngsters. (Maybe educators read the Indonesia obesity horror story.)
But, hooray, some help for youngsters, parents, and schools - thanks to scientists - may be on the way. Pointy-heads from Baltimore’s John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that warning on a 500ml bottle of coke that drinking same would take a 4.2 mile run or a 42-minute walk to burn off the calories made many switch to healthier drinks, or smaller sizes of coke. They state that many of us don’t understand calories too well at best, and basically ignore caloric admonitions too much at worst.
And here’s more help, from New Zealand of all places, to turn back the “Nanny Parent” hermetically-sealed safety state. A tip of the hat goes to Principal Bruce McLachlan and his Swanson School. He abolished playground rules, knowing some kids might get hurt, a downside, but consider the upside: besides the kids having WAY more fun, they learned to think, cope, and problem solve. “There was also less bullying, less tattling. Incidents of vandalism had dropped off.”
But for the vast majority of kids they still, even after finishing elementary and high-school, will be largely untested and un-toughened. In fact, they will have been primped for adulthood, thanks, in large part, to nutty educational modes of “child-centered learning” as ruined, spoiled, generally rotten twenty-year-old tall toddlers, short on the facts of life, particularly about the hard knocks in the real world that will inevitably follow them around as night follows day.
Child-centered learning is great for boosting a kid’s self-esteem, but as a method to boost the A B C’s, it’s found wanting. And, get this, in the heartland of the USA, a school district in Nebraska, in a sop to transgendered kids, of which there are, what, one percent of the student body, if that, wanted to ban the words “boys” and “girls” in favor of “purple penguins.” That’s kooky-centered learning.
Sometimes overbearing and under caring universities intentionally create a situation where the kids are fit to play, but are made fit not to think. The University of North Carolina, in a bid to ensure its student-athletes got some good marks, steered them into sham “paper-classes” in African and Afro-American Studies where, as whistleblower Mary Willingham points out, attendance was not required. The one paper required was written, she emphasized, at an abysmally low level with students unable to write a sentence or paragraph. She said their reading skills were at a grade two or three. Nevertheless, magically, the marks averaged around A to B minus! Obviously these kids were pushed through with passes in elementary and secondary schools just because they were fast, or strong, or shifty.
And when kids do have intelligent thoughts? Well, often, American universities, in a not so nifty move, have deemed it darn near impossible for kids to voice original, not always popular – so far as their educational masters are concerned – thoughts on campus by restricting the public space in which they can orate, to “free speech zones.” Someone, please photocopy the Constitution and pass it around to those awful administrators and safe student groups whose abridgment of the First Amendment rights for all but they - with their correct opinions - is flagrant and malevolent.
While universities may be evil in banning free speech, Livermore, a New Hampshire town has gone all sinister. Halloween is now verboten. Legislatively, via a misdemeanor, free treats are no more. According to the mayor, Bob Appel, Halloween causes ‘mental harm.’
Here are some other Halloween no-no’s for places where it’s still allowed. Skeletons should be shunned; face paint should be forbidden and nurse nylons should be nixed.
So, are kids fit to live, or have fun? Not really.
Overall it is to howl:
Boo-Hoo...