Posted by
Gene on Sunday, August 24, 2008 6:07:04 PM
There once was a time when campus highjinx referred to the antics of college kids engaged in such harmless stunts as conducting late night panty raids, swallowing goldfish, or stuffing twenty human beings into a Volkswagen. Those college days are long gone.
Many of today’s college students are so hungover from last night’s binging and with heads so clouded with marijuana that they wouldn’t know how to conduct a panty raid or they would confuse a goldfish with a bong. As for stuffing twenty of themselves into a Volkswagen, they’re far too busy stuffing themselves into coeds.
The trickle down has trickled into high schools, middle schools, and even elementary schools and whereas in olden days when the chief issues teachers had were kids chewing gum and talking in class, contemporary problems often involve sex and drugs and rocking and rolling in ways their grandparents could never have imagined.
The Guttmacher Institute, a “research arm” for Planned Parenthood and a purveyor of abortion, (see http://www.pop.org/main.cfm?EID=628, and http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=10643) reports that almost half of 15-19 year olds have had sex, by 15 “only” 13 % have had sex, but by age 19 some 70% have gone all the way, as we elders euphemistically called intercourse. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_ATSRH.html.
The recent scandal that rocked Gloucester High School in Massachusetts, which caters to kids bearing kids, may have been an aberration to a degree since teenies there actually planned their pregnancies, but sex in all its variations has clearly become one of the most popular indoor–and sometimes outdoor–sport in and out of America’s public schools. (See previous articles on this website on Gloucester High and teen sex.)
Many teachers have adapted to this new educational environment in less than pedagogically-sound ways as seen especially in Parts One and Two of this series and, again those incidents were not exceptional.
Others included a senior field trip to Washington D.C. when a science teacher chaperone seemed to forget the purpose of his presence in the hotel–to chaperone, protect, and guide those in his charge. Mr. D. was a married man whose excuse was that he was trashed when he broke into a girls’ room and attempted to rape one of them. He was summarily not discharged and sent packing although a letter of reprimand may have been placed in his personnel file. Police were not summoned; they rarely are since police reports and publicity were anathema to school administrators.
Then there was the sordid case of Mr. J....