Return to Accountability

Something similar to “kill all the lawyers” needs to be enacted politically because the culture of unaccountability is just ruining the public school system. When students can (these are true incidents) announce in class that they are horny, grope the girls publically in hallways, jack off in the bathrooms or talk aloud about how they have been “shucking their corn”, call teachers bitches to their faces or produce marijuana spliffs in class there is something very, very wrong with the system (and this isn’t even half of it). It is my belief that the teachers’ unions are at the root of this evil—they have little or no interest in education and seem primarily interested in vague, social style policy enactment or experiments with political correctness as opposed to real education. Real education is hard and requires moral and personal effort. Any jackass can make vague pronouncements about education and push paper instead of actually doing something that requires brain power and effort.

The terrible failure of public education to distinguish between the moral and the intellectual virtues is, sadly, a direct reflection of the watered-down atheism of our legal system. The law is positive, meaning it only reflects upon itself and not an objective moral code. This is one of the greatest intellectual heists of the 20th century and is at the root of many of our social difficulties. How can it be possible to discuss intellectual excellence without also discussing and understanding the meaning of moral excellence? Morality is not religion but the confused folks at the teachers’ unions routinely confuse the two because the religiously neutral overlap of a common morality and religion would nip many politically correct ideas in the bud.

I’ll never forget an incident that has stuck in my mind for over forty years. I was 15 or 16 years old and had taken a walk in Keezar Stadium on a day when nothing was going on and climbed up to the very upper stand in the stadium. I was looking down on a street behind the stadium and watched helplessly from above as a mob of black kids chased an Italian student down, stomped him viciously and then this image: one of the hoodlums picked up what might have been a tooth and brandished it above his head like a trophy. Now the first reaction of most red blooded folks might be: “fucking bastards” or more colloquial and colorful terms involving racial epithets but the sad truth is that the behavior of those “students’ was the direct result—even then—of an accursed and devolved system of non-accountability, the roots of which can be traced back to the moral and spiritual devolution that was the Protestant Reformation. Under a different system of education and religion these black children might have been model citizens. Left adrift on their impulses by a society without a moral compass, they did what comes naturally, which is to say that they engaged the age-old impulse to slay and maim in all its natural and vice-ridden permutations.