We are creating a generation of precious spoiled brats who think that the whole world owes them everything, and on a silver platter. They must be protected from every unpleasant reality in life, and must be taught that they are the centre of the universe, and nothing amiss or untoward must ever come their way.
The curse of Political Correctness has ensured that we now have pampered zombies walking our streets, who think that they must be immune from anything and everything negative, distressing or difficult. They want assurances that they can float through life untouched, unscathed and uncontaminated by any unpleasantries the world might throw their way.
As one American discussion of this problem said, “School authorities punish kids for hugging a friend, pointing a finger as a pretend gun, or starting a game of tag on the playground. Congress bans starter bikes on the chance that some 12-year-old might chew on a brass valve. Police arrest parents for leaving a sleepy kid alone in the back seat of a car for a few minutes. Yet overprotectiveness creates perils of its own. It robs kids not only of fun and sociability but of the joy of learning independence and adult skills, whether it be walking a city street by themselves or using a knife to cut their own sandwich.”
Examples of this are all around us, and two recent ones which caught my eye are worth mentioning. The first has to do with a medical student in Australia who is afraid of exams. But the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal sided with her against the medical school. As one news item reports:
A medical student who suffers an “extreme” fear of exams has won the right to continue her degree after a tribunal ruled the university discriminated against her because of her mental health disability. The woman, who has a borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder, had failed to sit written exams and avoided some clinical assessments, particularly in paediatrics and surgery, because of ‘‘extreme anxiety in relation to sitting exams [and] performance assessments’’. The University of Newcastle declined to grant the woman an extension of time to complete her Bachelor of Medicine after she had only completed three-and-a-half years of course work in an eight-year period, the maximum time allowed.
Hey, what about me? I have extreme fear of going to a hospital or clinic where medical practitioners might not be up to scratch, and could even be dangerous to my health, because they have refused to be properly tested, and could be utterly inept and unqualified. Doesn’t my phobia count for anything here?
Or consider another moonbat example of this, also from Australia. Now kids cannot win or lose at sport. Really:
Children will be banned from playing to win, keeping score and best and fairest awards under Australia-wide changes to junior football developed by the AFL. Thousands of junior footballers in up to 150 leagues will be forced to play with no scoreboard, ladders or match results under the shake-up designed to promote participation rather than competition…. AFL national development manager Josh Vanderloo said the new rules had been drafted in consultation with leagues to give children “an enjoyment philosophy rather than a winning philosophy’’.
Yeah right. The article ends this way: “Laurimar Junior Football Club tried the changes on Sunday, putting under-10 player’s through their paces with revised rules. Club vice president Andrew Jamieson said children were ‘not very happy’. The AFL drafted the new guidelines in conjunction with Deakin University research.”
Of course they wouldn’t have been very happy. What a joke. And all so typical here: some eggheads at a university dreamed all this foolishness up. Guess they were having a quiet day. The good news is, not everyone was thrilled with this PC moonbattery.
Many spoke against it. Lauren Rosewarne for example wrote this: “God forbid that we allow a ball game to subtly teach kids anything about the pain of loss, the thrill of victory or the necessity for improvement. Adults, as they get ever-close to the grave, have a tendency to idealise their childhoods to the point of farce. I have an uncle, for example, whose own youth apparently involved nothing other than cheap lollies, yabbying and whittling cricket bats out of old planks of wood.”
Or as Wendy Touhy said:
There is one inescapable fact about sport—as about many aspects of life, like it or not. It is a competition in which you play to win. And while the new AFL codes for junior footballers are no doubt aimed at getting more kids to have a go, stripping the competitive element from the game is just another version of cotton-wooling…. But the point is this: losing is a healthy and normal part of life and it’s a huge mistake to rob children of the chance to experience it. Kids absolutely have to learn to lose in order to learn to recover, it leads to that most over-exposed of qualities that every parent will have heard a hundred times at school pastoral care talks: resilience. We can’t shield kids from a necessary reality like disappointment.
She concludes, “If you remove the competitive aspect of footy, then you take away one of the key things it can teach you about participation and about life: things don’t always go your way. You just have to learn to live with it.”
But since when has Political Correctness ever been concerned about real life, or reality? It is all about creating a world of un-reality. And we all suffer as a result.
http://www.cato.org/multimedia/events/quit-bubble-wrapping-our-kids
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/university-discriminated-against-medical-student-with-extreme-fear-of-exams-20140401-35vty.html
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/no-scoreboard-ladder-or-match-results-for-junior-footballers-under-changes-to-be-unveiled-by-afl/story-fni0fit3-1226869120535
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-01/rosewarne-bubble-wrapping-childhood-footy-style/5357356
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/theperch/index.php/heraldsun/comments/of_course_kids_should_play_to_win/
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