The high costs of risk aversion are coming home to roost with a Helmet Generation long on self-importance and short on leadership;
Teachers who refuse to let children take risks are undermining the economy, a former director general of the Confederation of British Industry says today.
In a savage attack on the health and safety culture in schools, Sir Digby Jones says that a generation of “cotton wool kids” are applying for jobs without any leadership or entrepreneurial skills.
[…]
In the report, he says there have been numerous examples of “excessive risk aversion” in schools which must be stamped out if children are to develop properly. Head teachers have forced children to wear goggles when playing conkers and outlawed the backstroke in case pupils hit each other in the swimming pool, he says.
A survey of science teachers recently revealed that 87 per cent had not allowed students to take part in experiments in case they were injured.
Sir Digby says: “We hear of school sports days where there are no winners for fear of causing permanent damage to the self-esteem and emotional development of the ‘losers’. One of my colleagues at the CBI told me that when his eight-year-old was winning a race he was instructed to hold back to give his fellow competitors the chance to catch up.
“There have even been reports of schools banning ball games and teachers refusing to referee matches for fear of the consequences of injury.”
According to Sir Digby, the prevailing culture of risk aversion “is potentially fatal to our economics and social wellbeing”.
CBI research revealed a third of employers had to train 16-year-olds up to an acceptable standard of literacy and numeracy in their first year of employment. Two thirds said the teenagers lacked self-management skills and three quarters said they did not have a basic understanding of business and finance.
Last week, a report by the Association of Graduate Recruiters said that many vacancies were being left unfilled because even academically bright students did not have the necessary “soft skills”, such as communication and leadership.
“If we never took a risk our children would not learn to walk, climb stairs, ride a bicycle or swim; business would not develop innovative new products, move into new markets and create wealth for all; scientists would not experiment and discover; we would not have great art, literature, music and architecture,” says Sir Digby.
He adds that by attempting to remove risk, “all adults are colluding in a shameful deceit; not only are we regulating the lifeblood of enterprise out of people, we are also teaching the next generation of wealth creators that risk, failure and competition do not exist.”
Via Peaktalk.
SDA Flashback – The Risk Takers.
socialism, when combined with political correctness results in a fundamentally dangerous social pathology
That’s pretty scary.
All socialism has created is a society of cream puffs that can’t stand up to pressure, risk and other factors that make life more productive. As I said in a previous post, its getting to the point where older kids can’t play outside after a rainstorm because they might drown in a two-inch deep puddle.
I’ve been calling them styrofoam kids.
We have all gone nuts.
If it kills one child then is it not just for all the other children to pay the consequences? I think so.
I also think the earth is flat and Hillary Clinton will go down as the greatest african-american male president of all time.
There are a couple of things going on here.
1) Is the political mindset of all are equal and none must be harmed in anyway.
But what drives it is the underlying structural problem.
2) Fear of a lawsuit by this in charge.
A schoolboard takes no chances, a municipality takes no chances becasue of the fear of the catastrophic lawsuit that causes MILIIONS to be paid and permanently raises insurance costs, a deadweight on the budget, by definition non productive.
Even if you want to let children do certain things you cant because it isnt that you are taking a risk it is that you are taking a that if you fail is catastrophic for your organization, or career etc.
This only changes when there is proper direction from legislatures to courts that these lawsuits will not go anywhwere.
Shoot if we can have no fault insurance on cars and a subsequent “meat list” why can we not have te smae for municipalities and school boards and any other public institution.
As long as due and proper care are exercised then the instituion shouldnt be at survival risk.
As for fixing competition in school sports…well that is 100% a politicial thing. All politicians were dweebs in High School so this is their revenge….can you name one who was the head of their class or voted most popular etc etc etc
“You’re ALL winners! YAY! Now watch out for those cotton balls, they’re pretty sharp.”
Call it what you will it’s still the result of the nanny state propensity to “nag” its young in state indoctrination centers ( public education) Th young are conditioned not to question authority, to trust bureaucracy, to not be civilly outraged, that violence is bad ( even defensive violence) to not take risks….all part of “pacifying” the next gen of nanny state sheeple.
While I’m no fan of teachers’ unions, I do sympathize with at least one part of their dilemma and that is the overbearing and overprotective or overly scapegoat-seeking parent.
It might help feed the anti-socialist here to blame everything you don’t like on socialism, but if you want to fix a problem then you have to address it truthfully. And the truth is that it is the litigation that has driven the overprotectiveness by teachers, both from a top down direction (principals and school boards banning things to avoid law suites) or bottom up (teachers wanting to become personally liable for school yard injury).
And without some, I hate to say it, MORE regulation, there is no way to win that battle. No jury is ever going to find against a grieving parent when their kid, under someone else’s supervision, is injured or killed. Especially when that someone else is the government with all its cash so who is harmed anyway if we just give the parent a million bucks, right?
Ted
“We hear of school sports days where there are no winners for fear of causing permanent damage to the self-esteem and emotional development of the ‘losers’.”
It’s surprising how few people understand how Self Esteem is built … Self Esteem is (essentially) the knowledge that you can accomplish what you set out to do; it is built by setting goals (for lack of a better word) and doing the necessary work in order to accomplish these goals.
I can understand a focus on improving rather than winning, but eliminating competition to “protect self esteem” is foolish
I’m still waiting for steps and tables to be banned from my home by the risk adverse crowd.
Soon we’ll be living in a big box like structure without walls to bump into or a roof too fall on you. (camping under the stars) so long as you use an approved sleeping bag guaranteed not to suffocate you.
Those who can afford it will go for private school. Parrents are glad to get their kids in so they don’t pester schools to make stupid policies. The administrations what a school that will atract other parents so they will not want to alienate 15 families because one parent has a bug up his wazoo.
But then you need to put off having kids until you can afford both the taxes for the failed public system and the education your child needs. Population drops amoung those who are willing to work hard and who care about the education of their kids while those who don’t have a few extra kids, the next generation is less well educated, more risk averse and better voters (i.e. less questioning). Why do you think they haven’t taught logic in schools for decades now?
Ordinarily, I would just laugh this stuff off and forget about it.
When I was a kid, we did some pretty stupid things on the toboggan hill. There was this one hill that was super steep and, at the bottom (before the slope even leveled off), there was a very thick and dense forest. The entrance to this forest was shrouded in fir branches that, from the top of the hill, gave the illusion that you were heading into a cave. We were between 6 and 9 years old and all of us – boys and girls alike would see who could make “the coolest stop” upon entering this cave…which we usually scored by seeing how far you could go before hitting a tree. I had more than a few cuts and scrapes.
Now, while I wouldn’t condone children doing something like that…and while I look back on those activities as the actions of young fools, I can’t help but think that stuff like that helped “toughen” us up. It sure as hell helped me to learn to deal with fear.
Today, I have a small child who is just learning to walk. I watch her carefully so as to safeguard her from the “really bad stuff” – such as poisons, pot handles on the stove, things dangling from the counter or table that are attached to something heavy that she might try to pull down…and onto herself.
But, when she tries to stand or walk…she sometimes falls down. She’s gotten two bruises on her forehead from this – and quite a few knee bruises. I don’t like it when that happens…and I always rush to console her. But, I just take it as something that kids have to go through so as to always be pushing their limits, finding them, and learning to break them. You’ve gotta take your knocks. BTW: She only had to bump her head twice before she learned how to lower herself slowly to the ground from the standing position.
What scares the hell out of me is that the “risk aversion” movement might have my attitude / behaviour as criminal. I don’t think I’m going overboard when I say that we are coming to a point where parents who want to teach their kids about reasonable risks and learning to face the consequences stoically (something that was considered a virtue not long ago) might themselves be risking losing their children.
“If it saves one child” is a crap argument. And I say that with the full knowledge that it may be my or a friend’s child who pays the price for my libertarian view. But it is better to face that risk than it is to raise a generation that has no concept of risk.
The mindset of safety, or as you say Kate, ‘if it saves one child’, is boring and stifling. Children and adults of the helmet generation do not develop instincts for survival and are therefore useless in any emergency situation. We have had years of ‘nanny state’ in this country, people protecting their offspring from individual achievement and tantalizing danger – danger when faced and defeated leaves a person feeling pretty good and gives all of us momentary ego boosts (can’t have that!).
Boys are much more inclined than girls to take risks – the feminizing of boys (and the control of their masculine primal instincts) has long been the goal of radical feminists. Many feminists are single moms and school teachers. And msm is disgraceful in the ridicule of men and boys. Commercials belittle boys and men to the point of cruelty. Some men, of course, shrug off the ridicule but others try to fit into the stereo-type.
When I was little, my brothers were expected to drive vehicles, round up cattle on their bike or on their horse, handle tools like saws, hammers etc. We jumped off the roof of our barn for dare and for fun, we walked the poles of nine foot fences, we rode double on the bike because we only had two bikes and four kids – without helmets! – my brothers rode the bikes fast down steep hills on unpaved prairie trails avoiding rocks and pot hole for fun. My brothers all became excellent hockey players because of their quick reactions. They are also excellent drivers.
I feel sorry for the coddled, boring life that children today are forced to endure. Stephen is correct about the lawsuits though – I blame women’s libbers, the Liberanos and the dippers types (unions) for creating the environment for the production of hot house kids/adult kids.
Ted:
I have taken action…when my kids were young My wife and I had to take an active part in “deprogramming” the PC messaging they were reciving daily in public school. It hit critical mass when my daughter was publicly chided by teachers for her blefe in abstanece over condoms and my son was actually being punished for disagreeing with “opinions” that his teachers repropagagted that essentially demeaned his parents for being Conservative, practicing Christians and both gun owners and active hunters.
To make a long story short, after much back and forth trying to make these “educators” understand the difference between the curriclium and their personal opinion, My wife and I were “threatened” by these commissars of politically correct indoctrination, with childrens services and child abuse charges because we fundamentally differ in lifestyle and opinion with these teachers…we took him out of the systenm for a year and home schooled then when the wife had to work again, we put him in a parent-directed public school out of the city school board jurisdiction and the kid has blossomed into a A-grade student and given us no trouble with any social integration problems….once he shed his political/ideological persecutors in the other school.
There is nothing you can say to convince me that the politically correct opinion being spewed at students is anything but gladly and naturally given and is no more a matter of legal liability than being a parent is in these days of state intervention in the family.
PPS: speaking of the legal liabilities of child rearing in the nanny state, this same state aggressiveness to intrude and see child abuse everywhere is what has ruined some of the better volunteer youth development movements like Boy Scouts and Girl guides as well as church run youth programs.
Hard to find volunteers with the stigma of fear surrounding being in charge of a group of adolesent kids…it’s a rotten world and Socialist PC has made it a dangerous rotten world.
WL:
Maybe. And if you want to change the topic of Kate’s post and talk about that, I suppose we can.
I was merely referring to the overprotectiveness of schools and teachers when it comes to safety issues, the topic of this thread. Given that it is as likely to be found coming from “conservative” teachers and private schools, I think the “helmet generation” is more a result of our litigious society than any particular ideology.
In other words, they aren’t telling kids to wear helmets because they hate god.
Ted
“In other words, they aren’t telling kids to wear helmets because they hate god.”
But Ted, consider for a moment the person who hates God and why, and their belief system. Need I elaborate?
Doug:
Yes. Please elaborate.
The people behind helmet laws and banning snowball fights and dodgeball and science experiments are not overprotective because they hate god. In fact, teachers of all kinds, religious or otherwise, are behaving the same way because, regarless of their faith or lack of it, a pissed off parent or a grieving parent is going to look for someone to blame when their kid gets hurt and they come with a lawyer.
I’m far more prone to praise things American, but the American litigation culture that we have inherited is what drives safety rules, reacting to it first and then a mindset of avoiding lawsuits in the first place after than, far more than anything else.
Ted
I am seeing this kind of student appearing in the work place now,In general, they don’t want to work with any “risky” art materials even with full safety measures in place.They enjoy the process of safety more than productivity.Nobody moves,Nobody gets hurt.
Unfortunatly this also means Nothing gets produced,Nobody gets paid.
The whole point of the meddling nurse nanny socialists is to create pliable conformist hive mentality drones who will swallow their doctrine and do where they are told.
You can see them at work on left wing web sites swarming any unfamiliar smelling visitor.
Ted: “In other words, they aren’t telling kids to wear helmets because they hate god.”
Ya sure ,…your assumption not mine 8-/
Although I didn’t think I’d ever say it, I’m with Ted on this one.
The nannies of our society are merely reacting to the ominous sight of approaching parents accompanied by their dream team of lawyers.
Lay the blame where it belongs!
I agree with Bryceman. “If it saves one child” is indeed a crap argument. If, by saving one child, you are harming countless others, where’s the logic?
Society is being conditioned for total enslavement by a new elite that is coming.
England is one of the main test grounds for this ‘new system.’
Orwell knew exactly what he was talking about.
I know too many unionized beauracrats and unionized teachers to believe they are just afraid of lawyers as Ted claims. The ones I know make that claim laughable. They are not afraid of anybody.
IMHO, Liberals are very often passive aggressive.
I’m with BCer. Wouldn’t want it to become a habit but I have to side with Ted. It’s fear of litigation that drives school boards to make up a lot of stupid rules and policies. This, of course, would only explain the “helmet” type rules.
What about, “We’re ALL winners equally!”
And, “Little Johnny is NOT failing. He’s just taking a little longer to EXCEL than some of the other children” ?????
Every generation it seems, the method of teaching children needs to change so leagues of educational experts can have an opportunity to justify their existance. Learning phonics and memorizing multiplication tables may be passe but it isn’t because they weren’t effective.
I agree with Ted – that the current safety ideology is heavily connected to the escaliting litigation practices.
But, isn’t that in itself also connected to a deeper perspective, which absolves the individual of responsibility and insists on someone else taking responsibility?
And isn’t that rejection of responsibility connected to a perspective of conformity and anti-individualism – that is, to a lifestyle of groupism and homogeneity? Socialism?
And isn’t that the antithesis of the mindset required for innovation, entrepreneurship, questions, discoveries , ie, the basic results of reason? Isn’t risk-taking all about asking questions, moving the old barriers, discovering new horizons? Without risks of any kind – we are dommed to being a nation-of-followers, following those who do take risks, ask questions, push horizons – and dare.
At my child’s school, they are no longer allowed to play tag at recess (could lead to inappropriate touching); red rover (one child broke their finger); building snowforts (it could collapse and hurt them). They also aren’t allowed to throw a ball against the school and jump over it because the ball could hit another student by accident. They also aren’t allowed to bring a skipping rope to school. So, what do the kids do at recess? They stand around and talk. How sad! I remember recess being a time where we went crazy and had so much fun. How times have changed.
ET,
I hate to disagree when you are agreeing with me, but… the litigiousness of our society comes from just the opposite I think. Tort law is based upon the allocation of resposibility to the proper source, not “we all share the risk” mentality. Individuals, thinking they have been individually wronged or damaged, going after the alleged wrong-doer however shaky the grounds. The basic principles of tort law are not at fault for an overprotective society. Indeed, they are part of the foundation of our society and a critical part in ensuring that people bear responsibility for their own actions. A country ruled by laws not not just economic or physical might.
That people exploit a system that attempts to force people to be responsible for their own actions is likewise a sign of our individualistic me society. Don’t ever mistake me for a socialist when it comes to the economy, but just because I believe in a capitalist, market, entrepreneurial society doesn’t me that I can’t also identify some of the problems it leaves in its wake, like making individuals more selfish and money driven.
The environment of mythical yesteryear demanded and rewarded people who were followers far more than today. There was far more widespread backlash on dissenters and non-conformists in Canada and the US before the 1960s. There was a far more severe reaction to those who “asked questions, pushed horizons, dared” then than now.
Which is why I started my comments on this thread saying that to correct this problem we need to see beyond our desire to see everything in left and right, capitalist and socialist terms. The litigiousness of our society is neither a left nor a right issue, even though the solutions to it sometimes are.
The problem of grading a kid based on their self-esteem, which I abhor, is a different matter than what pushes the teachers into overprotectiveness and I readily concede the “active learning” approach to education is one of the attributes of my fellow progressives and it is anything but progressive.
But the rough and tumble of the school yard – bullies and basic safety aside – is part of learning as much as what the kids learn in the classroom.
Ted
Learning how to deal with bullies is part of growing up too. That’s where I learned how to make effective counter-threats based on my strengths, not theirs. You would be amazed how effective threatening to burn down someone’s house is when it comes from someone all the kids know likes to play with fire. Gee, that’s a nice house you’ve got there Bully, it sure would be a shame if something were to happen to it.
I agree that insisting on physical protection against absolutely everything is bad, and that refusing to measure performance is even worse, but some of the statements in the article are just plain ridiculous:
Two thirds said the [16-year-olds] . . . did not have a basic understanding of business and finance.
I didn’t, either, when I was sixteen. That was in 1968. That had changed by, say, 1972, at which point I had taken a bachelor’s degree in accounting.
[E]ven academically bright students did not have the necessary “soft skills”, such as communication and leadership.
This one rings a bell. I remember reading an article in 1977 or so about us baby-boomers. It said “You don’t want to be the horses that pull the wagon. Some of you want to feed the horse. Some of you want to design the wagon. But none of you want to be the horse that pulls it.” This was about the generation that includes Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
My point is that every generation says this sort of thing about the generation(s) that follow it.
One could persue this topic down many avenues of thought and therefore draw many valid conclusions.
As stephen was the first to point out litigation is a very large part of the fear factor colouring the this arguement. As is Polical Correctness.
It is also the “crowd mentality” of those “correct” people who feel their own personal values ;call it lack of sense of adventure OWHU ,challenged by those with a propensity to take risk/physical risk.
Case in point being yours truly,who never wears a bike helmet being,at a stoplight ,rudly tapped on the back by some pedestrian who felt it her duty to admonish me for not wearing a helmet.
When asked reasonably politely as to how my not wearing the prescribed headgear affected her day ,the response was only a lame reply of “well everyone should… its the law”.
Now I don’t wish to get off topic but this does bring up the aspect of unquestioning allegience to the nanny state/masses as mindless drones mentality which yes in my belief is what the public school sytem at present is pushing under the guise of meaningful education.
One also has to realize that if society is so hellbent on being nurtured with gov’t programs including universal health care etc., then that society must be prepared to be told what is in their best interests.
I don’t think we can take any one particular part of the problem out on a critical test drive without looking at the nanny state/cradle to grave induced syndrome on the whole.That however is something that most learned posters to this site already have a handle on.
As for the ‘god’ factor which has managed to find its way into this discussion,I feel there is a valid point there in that mankind can’t possibly hope to stand on his own laurels as he just plain doesn’t have the wisdom to do so.
It naturally follows that as our social order has become less god believing and more ‘Me’ oriented ,it has in turn become more fearful of death and hence the art of dying which is of course the inevitable end for all of us on this plane at the least.
Perhaps what we all need to do is treat ourselves to a few more calculated risks in life,and to reap the benefits of having some real fun.
Lord knows I took many chances as a child;some were foolish but I always felt so good afterwards and looked forward to the next one.
Also as a footnote,as a kid I participated in many track sports and rarely did I come in first,mostly second.
My best buddy Ricky Newton usually beat me out and good naturedly we laughed about it.
As for competition? Let ‘er rip.
It’s not just teachers or liberanos or dippers (a new term for me), it’s parents. In the end it is the parents that create the atmosphere and the attitude and the morals that their children have and will have.
Unfortunately, its the parents that are risk adverse in many cases. They are afraid (and sometimes rightly so) to let there kids explore and maybe make a mistake or two or suffer a hurt of two – but ultimately children learn from their parents.
Strong parents who really love and care for their children can override any assault.
Barbara…At my child’s school, they are no longer allowed to play tag at recess (could lead to inappropriate touching); red rover (one child broke their finger); building snowforts (it could collapse and hurt them).
That’s all so funny. When I was in elementary school (early 80’s) we played tag every second we had during recess and lunch. I remember everyone cramming down their lunches so that they could get out on the kick-ass playground (which was torn down in the 90’s because it was way too dangerous).
Breaking bones was part of it too. I think that one out of three of the kids I went to school with broke their collar-bone at some point. For them, it was a badge of honor…I never broke any bones personally…and I always felt like I wasn’t as cool as the others because of it.
And snowforts…the purpose of that exercise was to build yours better than the others. The winner would be proven by explicitly trying to make the other’s collapse…preferably with them in it.
Thanks for the memories. Sad to think that our parents were tantamount to child abusers by today’s standard.
From kindergarten to high school, these kids have never had to face failure of any kind. They have never had to face responsibility, and parents allowed or encouraged this, with threatening lawsuits if their perfect kid didn’t get top marks, awards or whatever. Some go on to university or other higher learning. They eventually get out in the real world and discover that if you are late for work, sluff off, don’t conform, come in if you feel like it, mouth off to the boss, there are consequences (theres hollands word again) like getting fired.
Some get union jobs where they can’t be fired, and continue their horrible ways. And we wonder why we are becoming a country of poor workmanship, poor values, bad choices, and able to be led by the media.
OT but what will be the fallout of the Blocs questions today questioning a firefighters being on a committee. Especially with the deaths of two of them last week. Conservatives come back with the fact firefighters put their life on the line for us and are honest law abiding people, and we object to the members attempt to denigrade firefighters. or words to that effect. Wait for the ads showing the Bloc to not respect firement.
Newman suggested the writ could be dropped Friday.
I have two kids. one is in under 6 soccer and the other in umder eight.
I get that they do not keep score in the under six, as there is a hude disparity in skill level of the kids. What drives me crazy is, in the under eight there is absolutly no desire from anyone to try to get the kids to even “try”.
All that anyone cares about is participaction, having fun and making sure the game ends on time so everyone can go home.
What the parents do not see is the kids keeping score, asking the coach if the “good” kids can go on for the last minute of the game to try to get a tying goal and being receptive to competitive caoching, ie stratagy and/or set plays.
Kids have an inherit desire to win/excel/survive.
Adults are killing it so their little angel does not get hurt.
I can see why. It is way better for little Johnny to be told no or that he is not good enough when he is twentysomething, after he had his free ride as opposed to when he is pre-teen, in his parents care, and from loosing, getting hurt, rejected, comming in last he can actually learn from these experiances and become a better stronger person.
Oh right, I forgot, that would not be FAIR!!!
Part and parcel of a risk-averse, responsibility fearing society. I say we take the warning labels off of everything (except things like contraindications on meds), and the problem will eventually take care of itself.
Lets face it, folks: the herd could use some thinning.
My elementary-school-aged daughter calls the ubiquitous awards given out at the end-of-the-year field day activities “pity ribbons”, because everyone gets one regardless of their achievements. She held hers in such high regard that she cut it into several pieces to pin up separately, as decorations, on a corkboard at home.
“No jury is ever going to find against a grieving parent when their kid, under someone else’s supervision, is injured or killed”…and your other comments, yada, yada, yada…
Give me a break. Just how many kid’s are killed on the playground, Ted? Not strapped into a seat belt, I can understand.
As with everything else that the girlie boys on the left can do to damage a culture, the bottomline is that we are looking at the terminal end of the feminization of males, school curriculum that places self-esteem higher than competition and the discouragement of individual effort versus the collective.
Boys are more gross motor, less attentive in grade school, we’ll fix that with Ritalin. The losing team has hurt feelings, we’ll fix that with no scoring. Guns are bad, bad, bad, can’t play soldier or hunter, the wiring that males, thank God, hunters not gatherers and bread winners…..it’s all so culturally driven by the feminazis and metrosexual lefties that have had the high ground for far too long.
I taught boxing and hand-to-hand combat for a while.
One of the weird phenomena I dealt with in younger guys was that it was hard to get them to hit me. They would fall short, pull their punches, and and I would have to psychologically re-condition them to actually try to follow through with striking me. (Something that I normally have some expertise at avoiding.)
Our fathers and grandfathers regularly learned to box and wrestle as an ordinary part of growing up. But when I started to teach boxing there was hardly one instruction manual on the market in the US. Political correctness had inserted itself into one of the most existential activities that one can engage.
There were millions of books on various oriental systems of combat, many of which involved learning to fight air. And of course here was old, reliable boxing that didn’t even have a non-contact component. To box at all, you have to be prepared to hit and be hit.
This has actually entered the arena of military combat. American rangers have gotten hold of the champion Gracie jiu-jitsu system. And they have developed a field manual that would cause an expert to be at about an intermediate level of accomplishment in the system.
However, it is primarily concerned with ground fighting (grappling), and Gracie’s idea is that most fights go to the ground anyway, and as a consequence the superior ground performer will win.
This is completely contrary to all the old-timers in the Army and Marine Corps. This puts the soldier in the position of trying to get a submission hold on someone who is trying to kill them. Additionally, if one is on the ground wrestling around, other enemy combatants can rain down kicks and blows and stabs to the one who is trying to overpower his opponent and get him into a submission hold (provided it’s not a case where our solder is performing the “bear-kill,” one of the Marine Corps’ words for killing without weapons).
Also some of the other hand-to-hand combat field manuals have really adopted a policing, defensive- tactic orientation, and a lot of the old-timers like the people in Gung-ho-chun (an old association of Marine Corps hand-to-hand combat instructors) don’t think this is the way to go. This is because in the old days, while defensive tactics were a part of hand-to-hand combat, the idea was to close with the enemy with devastating strikes and kicks to sensitive areas of the body, fueled by a totally physically-fit, all-out committed warrior not taking no for an answer.
This whole subject is very complex and would require too much space to do more than indicate the debate. Suffice it to say that whatever motiviates this politically correct environment is also a factor that has influenced a lot of military programs in respect to training combatants who might find it necessary to fight hand to hand. And when you start trying to be politically correct about as grisly a subject as hand-to-hand combat, you know you have really reached the dark side of the moon.
Risk aversion and eliminating competitiveness are two different issues. Not allowing kids to compete is social engineering and just plain dumb. Wait till these kids grow up and have to deal with the real world.
Risk aversion…well, you can thank all the lawsuit happy people for for that.
Greg, in the above comments Jeff wrote “What the parents do not see is the kids keeping score”. To what degree are our armed forces “keeping score” in their own way, even while the field manual advises fighting air?
This is something like the mentality that makes a house “kid-proof”, for example having the hot water taps tempered so that they cannot be scalded. What a surprise when they go into the world and discover what real hot water is.
With regard to entreprenurial risk taking, William F. Buckley had an interesting bit of writing on university education and its effects in his book “God and Man At Yale.”
All the times that I lost were more than made up for by the one time that I won.
Hi Vitruvius,
I didn’t mean to imply that the Ranger’s system is ineffective. My reference to fighting air was to martial arts systems that have non-contact sparring and practice a lot of katas.
You know, you can become very expert at performing katas and never have someone try to punch you in the nose.
The Gracie system is very effective, because it involves real grappling. And anything that actually forces the combatant to compete and struggle to overcome is more realistic than some abstract presentation of self-defense moves where people walk through it all without any real jeopardy.
You understand, this is why one really has to crawl live fire infiltration ranges with actual bullets. It has to be real after a certain point to achieve the desired effect.
The problem is simply that a wrestling system is much more designed to control rather than eliminate. And regrettably, political correctness has forced a lot of people whose job is military training to find more humane practices that have a good potential of controlling the enemy rather than wiping him out.
The problem with the system in question (there are others) is simply that other members of the enemy unit can be trying to kill our guy while he’s rolling around on the ground trying to control someone. Some systems never put our guy in a position of being off his feet, unable to survey the circumference for other attacks and threats while doing in the person he is standing over.
I’m not sure what you mean about keeping score. To the best of my knowledge, so far our forces have killed about 50,000 terrorists. If we include Canadian totals it probabaly kicks it up considerable. These terrorists will never haunt us again, and I regard that as a pretty good score so far.
Ah, understood, thanks for the follow-up Greg. We had better leave it at that, we’re getting off topic here.
The fact we have a higher illiteracy rate than at the beginning of the 20th century say’s it all. That it took billions to get there. Even more!
Think of the billions spent on Education & what we have gotten from it? Compared to our ancestors who spent a mite? Wounded birds instead of eagles. Children who have no clue as to even how to pick a team for baseball or hockey. Kids who have been told what to do all their lives. Now can’t function socially. In the zeal to protect, to level the field. They have rendered lives asunder in timidity. As was mentioned boy’s can’t play with gun’s but all the girls on TV are black belt heroines. The guys just so much waste on two legs
Than the drugs with all the male prejudice & with its ever-present feminization. In Europe they consider underwear with an opening for men sexist. Germans men are forced to take a wiz sitting down. These are the hero’s that will save their civilization?
To truly have an education I believe you must have Latin which encompasses law, biology, math, medicine. No more using faux terms to befuddle the populace which I believe is why they stopped teaching it.
History is a must. Particularly western writers. Math should be front & center. Logic is almost a lost discipline today. Superstition has replaced rational thinking.
Theology is important as well. If you don’t get an inoculation any belief could take sway. This is that ward.
Debate with spelling bee’s should be reintroduced. Chuck the self esteem. Teach civics with Natural law. One has to be taught ethics, its does not come in the manual. Civics is indispensable for understanding ones responsibilities as well as rights.
Ethics was one of the most important subjects as was oratory in both Christian & pre Christian education. Why has the secular system abandoned this?
Teach all political viewpoints with the attendant results of each system in real life. Not socialism &with a condescending nod to liberal not social democracy with nothing else.
Playgrounds have become plastic eyesores. Monkey bars have disappeared. Where is the adventure of youth in this cocooned atmosphere? The drug issue is plain evil by lazy people who are deviants of the mind.
The lack of phonics in a phonic system is asinine. As was the “new Math”. It just confused people.
Time to clean up the schools as well. They are as corrupt in their way as is the politicians who degraded our civilization with nonsense. They are the real polluters of not only our minds but souls.
1. Army Cadets
2. Navy Cadets
3. Air Cadets
Cheers
The proof is in the pudding? Here’s an excerpt from Edmund S. Phelp’s essay Entrepreneurial Culture in the Wall Street Journal – opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009657
“Of course, people may at bottom all want the same things. Yet not all people may have the instinct to demand and seek the things that best serve their ultimate goals. There is evidence from University of Michigan “values surveys” that working-age people in the [European] Continent’s Big Three differ somewhat from those in the U.S. and the other comparator countries in the number of them expressing various “values” in the workplace.
“The values that might impact dynamism are of special interest here. Relatively few in the Big Three report that they want jobs offering opportunities for achievement (42% in France and 54% in Italy, versus an average of 73% in Canada and the U.S.); chances for initiative in the job (38% in France and 47% in Italy, as against an average of 53% in Canada and the U.S.), and even interesting work (59% in France and Italy, versus an average of 71.5% in Canada and the U.K). Relatively few are keen on taking responsibility, or freedom (57% in Germany and 58% in France as against 61% in the U.S. and 65% in Canada), and relatively few are happy about taking orders (Italy 1.03, of a possible 3.0, and Germany 1.13, as against 1.34 in Canada and 1.47 in the U.S.).
“Perhaps many would be willing to take it for granted that the spirit of stimulation, problem-solving, mastery and discovery has impacts on a country’s dynamism and thus on its economic performance. In countries where that spirit is weak, an entrepreneurial type contemplating a start-up might be scared off by the prospect of having employees with little zest for any of those experiences. And there might be few entrepreneurial types to begin with. As luck would have it, a study of 18 advanced countries I conducted last summer found that inter-country differences in each of the performance indicators are significantly explained by the intercountry differences in the above cultural values. (Nearly all those values have significant influence on most of the indicators.)
“The weakness of these values on the Continent is not the only impediment to a revival of dynamism there. There is the solidarist aim of protecting the “social partners”–communities and regions, business owners, organized labor and the professions–from disruptive market forces. There is also the consensualist aim of blocking business initiatives that lack the consent of the “stakeholders”–those, such as employees, customers and rival companies, thought to have a stake besides the owners. There is an intellectual current elevating community and society over individual engagement and personal growth, which springs from antimaterialist and egalitarian strains in Western culture. There is also the “scientism” that holds that state-directed research is the key to higher productivity. Equally, there is the tradition of hierarchical organization in Continental countries. Lastly, there a strain of anti-commercialism. “A German would rather say he had inherited his fortune than say he made it himself,” the economist Hans-Werner Sinn once remarked to me.”
Let kids take risks, I say. It is better to fail sometimes than it is to never succeed.