Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Update to “Not in my day”

A couple weeks ago I posted about some 12 year olds who had sex during class in my local school system; I had been surprized that A. They had the nerve, B. The teacher never noticed. Well, after seeing this story , my school system appears to be just average. I quote from the story: “Four students - two 11-year-old girls, a 12-year-old boy and a 13-year-old boy - were arrested on charges of obscenity, a felony... The investigation showed that two males and two females had sex in the classroom while the 11-year-old boy acted as a lookout, Buckley said.”

What makes this story more interesting, though, is that the kids had a perfect diversion- they were screwing during a special school assembly. The purpose of the assembly was to discuss a stabbing death involving one of their students... I guess the school officials were under the illusion that the kids might have been upset. Evidently, they were more resilient than the school administration imagined.

Write me off as an old fogey if you will- I just don’t remember grade school being like that forty years ago.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree that there are problems with kids having sex in school on many levels. But for me, the problem is not even so much that a teacher doesn't notice or that the kids "have the nerve" (although certainly, there are issues here, too). But for me, there is something deeper and more problematic going on here. Why is it so important for kids who are not yet even in their teens to be having sex? And in school nonetheless. I just don't want to trivialize it as, "Oh, kids these days have such nerve," but rather there is something very very worrisome about this, at least for me, that goes beyond "Kids these days" or "teachers these days." But I can't name exactly what the problem is (other than the obvious that this is clearly problematic) - why is this happening? And can anything be done about it?

Joel Monka said...

There is a reason- two reasons, in fact: 1. The Religious Right is correct; our culture is sick. 2. The liberal faiths have abdicated all discussion of right and wrong to the RR, and no longer have the courage to tell anyone “No, that is wrong”.

I’m serious. When was the last time the UUA or the UCC or any other liberal church issued a press release, open letter, or position paper on any non-political issue? When was the last time Rev Sinkford took a moral stance on anything that wasn’t up for a vote in Congress? Oh, we’re really big on “speaking truth to power”, but are utterly silent on speaking truth to our fellow man. We’re so terrified of being called “judgmental” that we no longer make necessary judgments. We’re so terrified of being called “puritan” that we allow preteens to listen to raps that adults shouldn’t have recorded, watch videos that are soft-to-medium core porn, idolize sluts- and are then shocked when they behave like their idols. We are more shocked over the use of the word “sin” than the comission of one.

If we, as a denomination, are incapable of discussing right and wrong, why should we be surprized when kids don’t know the difference? We are so schizophrenic on the issue- if it’s Joe Camel and smoking on television, we know they must be banned, because kids are so impressionable... but if it’s TV or movie characters doing things a mink breeder wouldn’t allow, we won’t denounce that- sudenly those impressionable kids are sophisticated consumers who aren’t affected by such things.

We cannot afford to have the RR being the only arbiters of right and wrong- but by our silence, this is the case.