At a 1990s public school meeting on the new outcome-based education model that was sweeping American schools, we parents were told that what children needed for success was to feel good about themselves. Achievement and especially competition would take a back seat to compassion and fairness. I’ll never forget hearing at this meeting that it was “wrong and unfair to pin a child down to only one right answer on a math problem.” Huh?
So American children were told they were unique, special and smart, no matter what. Now, these products of social experimentation find themselves graduated into the world confused, clueless and unable to compete with graduates of other countries’ performance-based education systems. Imagine the betrayal they must feel.
Everyone agrees the Connecticut mass murderer must have had a mental disorder. But isn’t it curious he first killed his mother, and then chose a school, a gun-free zone, in which to perpetrate his crimes? Perhaps to some extent he acquired his mental disorder from the practitioners of the greatest of mental disorders: liberalism.
God save us from our folly.
–Bruce E. Smith, Battle Ground
