Somebody just sent me a story from the UK-based Daily Telegraph about two little boys who got in trouble for playing army at school. You may think I’m joking, but here’s a blurb from the report.
Staff at Nathaniel Newton Infant School in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, reprimanded the two boys after they were seen making pistol shapes with their fingers. Teachers broke up the imaginary classroom shoot-out and contacted the youngsters’ parents, warning them that such behaviour would not be tolerated. …Parenting groups condemned the school’s reaction to the children’s game of soldiers… Margaret Morrissey, founder of the family lobby group Parents Outloud, said: “It is madness to try to indoctrinate children aged seven with political correctness in this way. “Children have played cowboys and Indians like this for generations and it does them absolutely no harm whatsoever.” …The case follows a string of similar incidents in which children’s playtime activities have been curbed by overzealous staff over health and safety concerns. Earlier this year, a Liverpool school banned youngsters from playing football with anything other than sponge balls amid fears youngsters might get hurt. Research last month also found that one in six British schools had banned conkers over concerns of pupils being hit in the face. Other traditional playground games such as British bulldog and even leapfrog are prohibited at 30 per cent 10 per cent of schools respectively, a study by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers union found.
This is mind-boggling stupidity and jaw-dropping political correctness, and my first instinct was to wonder how a nation that once ruled much of the world has descended to such a pathetic level.
Then I wondered whether, as an American, I was guilty of throwing stones in a glass house. There certainly have been lots of dumb examples of political correctness in the UK.
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o A job-placement center that got in trouble for discriminating against incompetent people by seeking “reliable” and “hard-working” candidates.
o A women who was being threatened by thugs got in trouble with the police for brandishing a knife in her own home.
o A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
o The government wanted to require “competency tests” for pet owners.
These surely are laughable examples of bureaucracy run amok. But is the United States any better, given these examples?
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o A Rhode Island boy getting in trouble for bringing toy soldiers to school.
o A student in San Diego who got in trouble for making a motion detector for a science project, simply because someone decided it resembled a bomb.
o The military was criticized for giving Osama bin Laden an Indian code name (Geronimo) as part of the operation to exterminate the al Qaeda leader.
o A Florida student was expelled for having a toy gun on school property.
o And how can we omit the politicians in San Francisco, who decided that banning happy meal toys was an appropriate use of government coercion.
I’m not sure which country produces more stupidity, but we can safely conclude that governments do stupid things in all countries.
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A pity you omitted the land down under.
One of the features of their current gun laws is the prohibition of citizens owning military weapons. The case is point was a gun owner who switched his bolt action rifle from the original wood stock to a plastic and metal adjustable target stock. The new stock allowed a shooter to adjust the gun to fit their physiology but added no features banned under Australian gun laws.
Police justified seizing the gun because it now looked like a banned semi-automatic rifle even though it was not. The kicker was that the Australian military used this very same model of bolt action rifle during Viet-Nam. The gun with the wood stock was, in fact, a military rifle. The same gun in a target stock was not.
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To Ben; You are joking, right. Forget the PC gone wild UK. Children in the USA are suspended all the time for drawing guns or bringing water pistols to school. (things I did all the time as a boy). Or how about the women who was denied boarding a plane because her purse had two guns decorating it and “there is a zero tolerance policy on guns”. You can’t make this stuff up!
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The English-speaking world is where this foolishness rules the roost. Do Latinos fixate on this silliness? I live in Mexico, and I can assure you they do not. Nor Asia, Africa, the Middle East, hardly anywhere. Just those of us who speak English. What’s up with that?
Observation: We have now for the very first time a U.S. president who actually believes this nonsense. Previous presidents have paid lip service to PC for political reasons, but Obama is the first PC president, a true believer.
Hmmm, …..these children were playing ‘cowboys and indians’ as opposed to ‘islamo-facists and infidels’. We definately have our priorities mixed up when we disallow the common childsplay but yet allow what children are being taught in madrassas throughout the world to include both the U.K. and the U.S.A.!
I think this tops the U.K.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ntu06MRLUpQ
Sounds fishy to me–the article looks like a fairly transparent spin piece based on the children being chastised for disruptive behaviour in the classroom during a lesson. Unfortunately, the UK press has a habit of producing this kind of article; anything published by the Daily Mail is particularly suspect: see http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/. Though I’m not saying this incident was necessarily reported inaccurately, it’s worth being cautious about believing anything you read from UK newspapers… I note that you’ve quoted quite a few articles from the Daily Mail in this post, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they were all fabricated.
good article and great examples. However I’d say the one about Geronimo doesnt fit with the others, Everything is about kids and then the OBL/Geronimo reference seems out of place.
My girlfriends little brothers school, in the United States, has banned making any shape with your hands that resembles a gun. Land of the controlled, home of the overlord elitists should be our new slogan.
wow that’s a toughie. lol We just had a judge in Corpus Christie tell a mother we are not allowed to swat our children anymore. So I’m not sure which set of liberals is more ignorant. lol.