I remember when our primary school (ages ~4-12) banned students from playing British Bulldog on the steep grassy slope behind the school. Facists 
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Has School Become Too Hostile to Boys?
- Thread starter tastybasslines
- Start date
My point is that if schools have become bastions of PCness in order to keep the kids from getting their feelings hurt and to make sure that they play nice, then why is bullying purported to still be a huge problem?
are you saying that schools have NOT become bastions of PC-ness (if that's a word...political correctness-ness........)....because if that's what you are saying, i respectfully disagree
While schools have arguable adopted stricter zero tolerance policies, I remain skeptical of the extremity of PCness because the only thing being cited are anecdotal examples culled from articles such as that in the OP or examples of someone's sister's neighbor's cousin's son experiencing extreme PCness. This is ultimately a statistical question and I am not seeing any statistics; I don't deal in anecdotes when it comes to empirical and falsifiable questions, particularly when there are better epistemological tools available. The question of whether or not schools on a whole have become bastions of PCness becomes more dicey when we take into consideration other factors:
-Are we talking about urban schools versus rural schools?
-What about the dominant political ideology of school administrators, board members, and faculties? Who's shaping policy?
-Are students coming from homes with one parent or two?
-Public vs. private schools?
-Is there a high amount of crime surrounding the district (may be collinear with my first question)?
-Is there a dominant sports culture associated with a district? What about an academic culture?
-Socio-economic status of students? Of tax-payers?
These are all things that need to be taken into consideration if we were to answer the question of whether or not schools have become bastions of PCness. There are countless districts in the United States; while federal policy is going to have some influence in making them homogenous, they all still have different cultures, different faculty, different boards, and different geographic and demographic factors, which makes generalizing about macro-level, extreme PCness infecting our schools pretty much impossible.
Indeed. But the null hypothesis is the default until it's been falsified. Hence why I'm not convinced until I see (good) data.
Is this is a big national federation or is this a smaller one? The children look rather young. I admit that I don't know much about sports, but from my understanding, the emphasis in things like Little League has always been more about teaching the children the rules of the game and having fun.
My wife is a teacher in Denver Public Schools. She can't suggest that there's something wrong with a kid (ADD, Autism, etc) and cannot tell a parent that they need to do something about their child's behavior. To do so would end in her being fired, and all she can do is tell the parent what their kid does in her class without hinting at why.
She's not allowed to hold a kid back without the parent's permission and she's not allowed to talk to the parents about holding a kid back without first talking with the principal and filling out a ton of paperwork.
Her performance and bonus (if she gets one) is based solely on results from standardized testing and there is very little wiggle room for teaching anything but the test. The school's and district's funding and status are also based on standardized test results and as such she is reviewed both by the principal and district review board on a fairly regular basis to ensure that she following the curriculum to achieve the best results on those tests.
Trying to stay non-political is tough so I'll shut up for now.
My little brother (10 years younger than me, born in '81) played soccer in this organization when he was in his teens. They never officially kept score.
I was born in '84. I played soccer for my school in 4th grade and it ended up in a multi-school tournament in which our school won 1st place. I had a blue ribbon and everything!
BTW, my tangent was that the teachers, schools, and districts have little say over the kids' education anymore. The government has sucked that up and homogenized it and now we're left with what we have.
Is your wife's situation indicative of the majority of school districts throughout the U.S.? If so, what knowledge do you have to support your conclusion?
I was referring to that particular organization.
My brother had previously played in a competitive league, and when my parents moved to Houston, this "Fun Fair Positive Soccer" was pretty much all they had.
It's a public school in a fairly big city so I would suppose it does.
The standardized tests I speak of are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Student_Assessment_Program
Which came about as a result of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act
Which hasn't affected this:
Invalid Link Removed
I am someone who kind of falls into both sides of this.....I was bullied to the point of trying suicide at the age of 14, kids used me for a punching bag, soccer ball, and target practice........and yet, I was armed the whole time.....never went anywhere without a fairly large pocketknife.....and once I could drive, always had a firearm in my car. It wasn't until I got to college, started lifting weights and bulking up a little bit, that I took a little revenge on my former tormentors by tracking the worst offenders down and giving them a taste of their own medicine.
Yeah, I remember carrying a buck knife to school for a few weeks when one bully got especially aggressive. I got the knife from a classmate when I explained what I wanted it for. I had every intention of using it at the time too. I was an angst ridden adolescent being pushed around by a kid twice my size. Funny thing was he stopped bullying me once I got the knife. I don't know if word got back to him through the grapevine or it was just coincidence. Whatever it was it did the trick.
I don't know what the big deal is about not keeping score at soccer games. The kids keep score anyway. When they're like 4 years old, they can't remember the score by the end of the game, so the score is kinda meaningless. Later, they keep score themselves and talk in terms of who won and lost. There's no "official" score that I know of. That would require the adults paying attention instead of standing at the sidelines chatting about politics.
So, whether or not it's a good idea to keep score, the kids keep score. As for every kid getting a ribbon, the kids see through that. I noticed that my daughter had gotten a ribbon. She said: "So what, everybody got one of these ribbons." They're smarter than we think. Kids are competitive. They keep score themselves.
But somebody has grabbed onto these ideas to support their preconception that the sky is falling.
So, whether or not it's a good idea to keep score, the kids keep score. As for every kid getting a ribbon, the kids see through that. I noticed that my daughter had gotten a ribbon. She said: "So what, everybody got one of these ribbons." They're smarter than we think. Kids are competitive. They keep score themselves.
But somebody has grabbed onto these ideas to support their preconception that the sky is falling.
"Safety" at what cost. Still not worth it in my view. And did you hear of mass shootings at school every couple of months back then? I didn't.
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