Likelihood of Success

The AP has a very long story about improprieties (to say the least) between teachers and students in the schools (also picked up with some skepticism by Protein Wisdom). The consensus seems to be that it’s an intractable problem, and an old one, and that given the mobility of people it’s hard to keep predators out of the schools.

What the AP ignores, probably due to its own well-documented cultural leanings, is an obvious if un-politically correct possible solution: single-sex schools with single-sex faculties above a certain grade.

It’s not that there are no homosexual predators; we know that’s not true. But what if you could cut the incidence of the problem by two-thirds or more — probably a lot more? The main pattern, after all, is — surprise! — male teachers going after young girls. Well, maybe male teachers shouldn’t be anywhere near young girls, especially in a time when the latter are taught by Madison Avenue and their indulgent and equally morally confused parents that looking and acting like strumpets is the stairway to consumer heaven and self-actualization. Even “nice girls” are hard pressed to understand that there’s such a thing as right and wrong in today’s moral environment, much less what right and wrong are. Then you put males as authority figures in their lives, and are surprised when some percentage of them act like males (if not like “men”) and make the most of opportunities to take impressionable girls and impress them a lot more?

Pace the real problem with the casting of males as predators, why not take them out of the majority of potentially predatory situations? It would be a radical change to cancel these emotional chemistry classes, but as the article documents, there’s a radical problem out there — especially if, God forbid, it’s your kid.The problem is not confined to predatory males, either. The reverse of the classic “Lolita” scenario is a growing phenomenon as well, and while it’s a big yuck in the popular media when an adult woman teacher is caught misbehaving with a teenage charge, the truth of it is deplorable. It’s one thing such couplings to occupy adolescent fantasies, and that alone might be reason enough, as it is in many religious schools, for pubescent and older males not to be expected to stare at a grown woman for hours a day in school. But when the so-called adults, adrift in a society that mocks moral boundaries, act like adolescents themselves and start “hooking up” with their male students, you are watching a society come apart at the seams.

The schools don’t have the moral will to stitch those seams back together; the education establishment, in fact, as much to blame as any other segment of society for the rips. But socialized education is to the standard in this country, as it has been for over a century and probably will be for the foreseeable future. Parents, and those of us whose taxes support these institutions, have both a political and a moral obligation to prevent further damage. The teachers’ unions will shriek and threaten, and the D-word — “diversity” — which has been elevated to the level of a quasi-constitutional value, will be bandied about in editorials, school board meetings and legal pleadings. But if the teachers’ unions are against an idea, that’s usually a pretty good clue that you’re onto something. Let’s try it and see!

Cross-posted on Right-Wing News.