Students in New York City will be required to take sex education classes that include lessons on how to use a condom – a curriculum that the head of the school system said is long overdue.
It’s the first time in nearly two decades that middle and high school students will be forced to take the mandatory classes, according to a report first published in The New York Times.
One of the lessons includes instruction on how to properly use a condom.
“We must be committed to ensuring that both middle school and high school students are exposed to this valuable information so they can learn to keep themselves safe before, and when, they decide to have sex,” NYC Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott wrote in a letter to principals and obtained by Fox News Radio.
Children as young as 11 years old will take part in discussions on a variety of topics ranging from the risks of unprotected sex to the appropriate age for sexual activity, the newspaper reported.
“I believe the school system has an important role to play with regard to educating our children about sex and the potential consequences of engaging in risky behavior,” he said. But there are concerns about the mandatory classes among New York City’s religious community.
[…]Until now, sex education classes had been left to the discretion of local principals, but Family Research Council senior fellow Peter Sprigg said now the city is trying to “impose a mandatory, top-down curriculum.”
“I think there’s a lot of virtue in allowing the local principals to make decisions based on the needs of their students,” Sprigg told Fox News Radio, noting that parents would have a lot of concern about the “explicit nature” of the lessons.
It’s a shame that taxpayers have to pay for a failing system that sexualizes children. If you want to opt out, you have to come up with the money for homeschooling or private schools. How is that fair?
If the UK is so secular and socialist, then why are young people rioting? Don’t young people like secularism and socialism? I thought that the enlightened Labour Party would have fixed all the problems of society with their progressive fiscal and social policies over the last decade.
People who are protesting are by nature angry, or at least solemn. They have upraised fists and homemade signs.
But young Britons haven’t even bothered to come up with a slogan or a decent chant. They are blissfully happy as they destroy other people’s property. They are without guilt.
It can be seen in the images of giddy youths hauling flat-screen televisions out of plundered shops. It can be read in the reports where, as one witness described, a young woman looted so many sweaters from a high-end London store she tottered under their weight.
And it can be heard, starkly, in the conversation between a BBC Radio reporter and two women in Croydon who were, at 9: 30 a.m. Tuesday, drinking from a bottle of stolen rosé and talking about their night of adventure.
“Everyone was chucking things, chucking bottles, breaking into stuff,” one said.
“It was good, though; it was madness,” her friend chimed in, giggling about the craziness of it all. The first girl agreed, it was “good fun.”
The reporter asked if they had been drinking all night. “Free alcohol,” one said. Then she caught herself. “It’s the government’s fault, though. The Conservatives. It’s not even a riot. It’s showing the police we can do what we want.”
The reporter gamely tried to crack through the cognitive dissonance she was hearing. These are local people whose shops are being torched, she said. “Why are you targeting your own people?”
“It’s the rich people,” came the explanation. “It’s the people who have all got businesses. That’s why all this is happening, because of the rich people.”
Tell that to the kid, captured on video, who was sitting on the ground with a bleeding nose when someone came to his aid. He was helped up, then had his backpack emptied.
Tell that to the shop owners whose only asset was their inventory and who have lost it all to self-centred, marauding thugs. If only they had known they were “rich,” they might have taken time to enjoy their vast wealth. Instead of, you know, working.
[…]They have convinced themselves someone else is to blame, even if they identify a different culprit in consecutive breaths, and therefore they are off to pillage, loot and burn. If homes are lost to the fires? Blame the rich. Or the police. They started it all, you see.
Does that view sound familiar? Why yes – it’s the view of mainstream Democrats, including Obama and his allies in the news media.
And here’s an article that Mary and Dina sent to me explaining where these amoral children came from.
Excerpt:
An underclass has existed throughout history, which once endured appalling privation. Its spasmodic outbreaks of violence, especially in the early 19th century, frightened the ruling classes.
Its frustrations and passions were kept at bay by force and draconian legal sanctions, foremost among them capital punishment and transportation to the colonies.
Today, those at the bottom of society behave no better than their forebears, but the welfare state has relieved them from hunger and real want.
When social surveys speak of “deprivation” and “poverty”, this is entirely relative. Meanwhile, sanctions for wrongdoing have largely vanished.
[…]But it will not do for a moment to claim the rioters’ behaviour reflects deprived circumstances or police persecution.
Of course it is true that few have jobs, learn anything useful at school, live in decent homes, eat meals at regular hours or feel loyalty to anything beyond their local gang.
This is not, however, because they are victims of mistreatment or neglect.
It is because it is fantastically hard to help such people, young or old, without imposing a measure of compulsion which modern society finds unacceptable. These kids are what they are because nobody makes them be anything different or better.
A key factor in delinquency is lack of effective sanctions to deter it. From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.
Anyone who reproaches a child, far less an adult, for discarding rubbish, making a racket, committing vandalism or driving unsociably will receive in return a torrent of obscenities, if not violence.
So who is to blame? The breakdown of families, the pernicious promotion of single motherhood as a desirable state, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals are a rarity, have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass.
The social engineering industry unites to claim that the conventional template of family life is no longer valid.
[…]This has ultimately been sanctioned by Parliament, which refuses to accept, for instance, that children are more likely to prosper with two parents than with one, and that the dependency culture is a tragedy for those who receive something for nothing.
The judiciary colludes with social services and infinitely ingenious lawyers to assert the primacy of the rights of the criminal and aggressor over those of law-abiding citizens, especially if a young offender is involved.
The police, in recent years, have developed a reputation for ignoring yobbery and bullying, or even for taking the yobs’ side against complainants.
“The problem,” said Bill Pitt, the former head of Manchester’s Nuisance Strategy Unit, “is that the law appears to be there to protect the rights of the perpetrator, and does not support the victim.”
Police regularly arrest householders who are deemed to have taken “disproportionate” action to protect themselves and their property from burglars or intruders. The message goes out that criminals have little to fear from “the feds”.
Figures published earlier this month show that a majority of “lesser” crimes – which include burglary and car theft, and which cause acute distress to their victims – are never investigated, because forces think it so unlikely they will catch the perpetrators.
[…]A teacher, Francis Gilbert, wrote five years ago in his book Yob Nation: “The public feels it no longer has the right to interfere.”
Discussing the difficulties of imposing sanctions for misbehaviour or idleness at school, he described the case of a girl pupil he scolded for missing all her homework deadlines.
The youngster’s mother, a social worker, telephoned him and said: “Threatening to throw my daughter off the A-level course because she hasn’t done some work is tantamount to psychological abuse, and there is legislation which prevents these sorts of threats.
“I believe you are trying to harm my child’s mental well-being, and may well take steps… if you are not careful.”
That story rings horribly true. It reflects a society in which teachers have been deprived of their traditional right to arbitrate pupils’ behaviour. Denied power, most find it hard to sustain respect, never mind control.
I think that last example explains the root of the problem.
Here’s the chain of causation. First, people get annoyed with the talk of moral values and moral duties that comes from religious people. They don’t want anyone telling them to set boundaries on their pursuit of pleasure.
Agnostic evolutionist Aldous Huxley explains:
I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.
The secular left government is only too happy to push this philosophy of meaninglessness in the public schools. It makes the secular left elites feel good when they undermine the moral standard that religious people use when making judgments. Judgments are bad because they make bad people feel bad about behaving badly. Judgments have to go. And if religion is the ground for moral judgments, then religion has to go. And the public schools can be used to make sure that it does go.
This new view of morality is called “moral relativism”, and it is the official view of the secular left. Basically, if there is no designer of the universe, then there is no way we ought to be. If there is no way we ought to be, then no one has a right to tell anyone how they ought to be. This is the view that the Labour Party enshrined into law, using all the power of the public schools and the state-run media. The position of the secular left is that making people feel bad by judging them is the only real evil left in the world. Just let people do whatever they want, they say – we can always tax the rich and the corporations more to make everyone come out equal in the end.
You may have noticed that my post about Theodore Dalrymple’s book “Life at the Bottom” is back in the top 10 popular posts today. Check out the post – it has links to all the chapters of a free book that explains exactly what the rioters believe, and why. The thesis of the book is that the secular left elites deliberately cause the poor to avoid taking responsibility for their actions, and to prevent anyone from holding them accountable for their own choices. It’s a must-read.
When it comes to piloting, Barack Obama seems to think he’s the political equivalent of Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Yeager and—in a “Fly Me to the Moon” sort of way—Nat King Cole rolled into one. “I think I’m a better speech writer than my speech writers,” he reportedly told an aide in 2008. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m . . . a better political director than my political director.”
On another occasion—at the 2004 Democratic convention—Mr. Obama explained to a Chicago Tribune reporter that “I’m LeBron, baby. I can play at this level. I got game.”
[…]Then there is Mr. Obama as political tactician. He makes predictions that prove false. He makes promises he cannot honor. He raises expectations he cannot meet. He reneges on commitments made in private. He surrenders positions staked in public. He is absent from issues in which he has a duty to be involved. He is overbearing when he ought to be absent. At the height of the financial panic of 1907, Teddy Roosevelt, who had done much to bring the panic about by inveighing against big business, at least had the good sense to stick to his bear hunt and let J.P. Morgan sort things out. Not so this president, who puts a new twist on an old put-down: Every time he opens his mouth, he subtracts from the sum total of financial capital.
Then there’s his habit of never trimming his sails, much less tacking to the prevailing wind. When Bill Clinton got hammered on health care, he reverted to centrist course and passed welfare reform. When it looked like the Iraq war was going to be lost, George Bush fired Don Rumsfeld and ordered the surge.
Mr. Obama, by contrast, appears to consider himself immune from error. Perhaps this explains why he has now doubled down on Heckuva Job Geithner. It also explains his insulting and politically inept habit of suggesting—whether the issue is health care, or Arab-Israeli peace, or change we can believe in at some point in God’s good time—that the fault always lies in the failure of his audiences to listen attentively. It doesn’t. In politics, a failure of communication is always the fault of the communicator.
Much of the media has spent the past decade obsessing about the malapropisms of George W. Bush, the ignorance of Sarah Palin, and perhaps soon the stupidity of Rick Perry. Nothing is so typical of middling minds than to harp on the intellectual deficiencies of the slightly less smart and considerably more successful.
Obviously, you can’t really measure a person’s intelligence using their statements about their own intelligence in speeches read from a teleprompter. And it’s hard to assess the intelligence of someone who refuses to release any of his university transcripts. The WSJ article is right to imply that a more important way to measure intelligence is by measuring success. And we certainly are capable of looking at raw numbers to measure Obama’s success – like the unemployment rate:
The Five Worst Job Creation Presidents
And the budget deficit:
Obama Budget Deficit 2011
It’s pretty easy to assess someone’s intelligence from those two numbers alone. Obviously, none of these numbers are going to matter to people who get their news by watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Obama is the Comedy Channel president. If provoking laughter is your standard for measuring intelligence, then Obama is very smart indeed.
What are Obama’s smart policies?
Who voted for Obama?
I notice that some people in the mainstream media have begun to pick on Texas Governor Rick Perry. It turns out that Perry is also a dastardly Darwin-doubter. (H/T Mary) For the mainstream media, if you believe in traditional Christian views on theology and morality and free market capitalism, it doesn’t matter that you created more jobs than all the other states combined. You’re still “stupid” because you value prayer and doubt materialist explanations of the origins of life.
But the mainstream media thinks that secular leftists are smart regardless of practical measures like job creation. If you are a secular leftist, and you support abortion and same-sex marriage, and you spend 864 billion taxpayer dollars on things like building underground turtle tunnels, and you actually raise the unemployment rate instead of lowering it, then you are are “smart”. Understand?
So who is smart?
Thomas Sowell is smart in the traditional sense of understanding how things work in the real world.
Thomas Sowell is smart: he understands economics
If you want to understand the realities of economic policy, why not pick up some books by an actual economist?
Disclaimer: I have only read the first editions of Applied Economics, Economic Facts and Fallacies, A Conflict of Visions, and The Housing Boom and Bust. And I’ve only read the second edition of Basic Economics.
I have male and female friends who go through multiple Thomas Sowell books per month. It’s impossible to read just one. The first Thomas Sowell book you should read is Intellectuals and Society. That one is an introduction to his thought over a wide range of topics.
