First it was no more dodge ball because it’s disrespectful to throw a ball at someone. Then games as benign as tag got the axe, after all, touching someone that doesn’t want you to touch them is technically assault. Eventually an even more ludicrous notion gradually crept in to playtime at public schools: sports and games of any kind should not have winners and losers because losing is bad for a child’s self-esteem. Eventually some schools just abandoned recess and Phys Ed altogether mostly because that time was seen better spent trying to raise our abysmal academic test scores but also perhaps because any incentive to actually perform any physical activity well had been replaced with punishment for hurting someone else’s feelings.

Alas, even math and science curriculums weren’t immune from this insanity as the “feel good” approach of the poorly titled Outcome Based Education philosophy of  “education” took hold. Failing grades and red marks on tests make kids feel bad, don’t cha know, so it really shouldn’t matter that 7 times 3 equals 21 because a good education should focus more on how “7 times 3” makes you feel, and there’s no wrong response to that.

From there we banned hugging, high-fiving, pats on the back and hand shaking for reasons to insipid to even bother going into - something about safety and orderliness. (And I very deliberately say “WE” as a stern reminder that these are our schools that we pay for with our wages earned with our labor.)

But our race toward the bottom doesn’t stop there. Now, if your kids are still lucky enough to be allowed to participate in sports programs, you soon won’t be able to take pictures of them at school sponsored sporting events? Why, you so innocently pine? Because photos of kids playing sports are potentially pornographic and the schools don’t want these pictures ending up on child porn sites, the first place most parents rush home to publish these photos too. You can’t make this stuff up, folks. Take a couple Tylenol and read about this here.

I imagine that things such as school yearbooks will eventually become relics of the past also for similar reasons.  After all, what’s to stop some child obsessed pedophile from buying a yearbook at a garage sale then taking it home to whack off to it? Clearly we need to outlaw all photos of all children to protect them from such vulgar exploitation. Children should be raised in incubators with tubes piping knowledge and faux experiences into their brains - how could we not have realized this sooner? Then if we could all just stop breathing since everyone that breaths eventually dies which makes breathing 100% fatal.

When did we, as a society, become seemingly incapable of performing ANY cost/benefit analysis on security related measures? If all you want out of life is for you and your children to be safe, not get your feelings hurt, nor experience failure or disappointment of any kind then why bother being born at all? The real solution for your ilk is suicide because it’s a given that corpses aren’t burdened with any of those annoyances ever. Nor do they have to constantly harass their local school boards or city council members to get this level of buffering between themselves and reality. All they have to do is lay there and let the maggots convert their flesh back into dirt. Maximum security with minimal effort.

Of course none of these modern lapses of common sense are without their good side. I often wonder, for example, what sort of advantages I’ll have in the  latter half of my life living amongst a population of completely sissified, pantywaists that see harm lurking behind every molecule in the universe. What great fortune it might be to find that I’m the only person left in the “developed” world who isn’t afraid to go outside. I could charge people a million dollars for taking their garbage to the curb, watering their grass, and picking up their anxiety meds at the pharmacy. Simple tasks such as these could warrant congressional medals of honor or at least a purple heart for breaking a sweat while braving the elements. Hordes of authors barricaded in their suburban tombs will right novels about my legendary cojones - that is if they haven’t become too afraid of disease ridden keyboards and the innate dangers of forming sentences out of words and insights out of sentences.

Then, as I always point out when reporting on the latest follies of public school, such absurd shenanigans fuel the ongoing exodus from these brain-rotting institutions, a retreat away from big government, nanny statism that should have started and completed long ago. As I spew my venom in these anti-public education rants part of me is simultaneously doing a celebratory jig and breathing sighs of relief as the absurdity becomes more apparent to all with each bit of outrageousness this system oozes forth and insultingly asks us to accept as necessary because it’s for our own good.

Anything that makes more wholesome alternatives to raising children more attractive are to be embraced, perhaps even encouraged. Ultimately, what could serve home schooling, unschooling, and private schooling better than zealously rallying behind every horrible idea local school boards put on the table. No touching allowed? Hell yes! We don’t even want students looking at or talking to each other in the halls or during breaks! And we want this wrapped in a zero tolerance policy too. Expel all 70 million of those misbehaving little fucks for holding hands or accidentally brushing up against each other in crowded hallways. Send them home and free up a hundred billion dollars per year in tax revenue, balance the god damned state and federal budgets, and let’s become human again. Where do I sign?