I was involved in the occasional fight in middle and high school, but it never involved more than one other person. When a fight broke out, a circle would gather to watch it, but it never occurred any of us to wade in and join the melee. Widespread brawls with multiple combatants just never happened.
Well, that was then, and this was now. Every year, people post videos of large brawls to social media, and not all of them of them happen at Waffle House. On March 8, a huge brawl broke out at EBR Readiness Alternative School in Baton Rouge, which happens to be a middle school.
How huge? 200 people (including parents) were involved, and multiple cars of policemen had to break up the fight:
I can honestly say that I never considered “brawling with police” to be a viable life strategy in middle school. (Or any time.)
I know very little about “Alternative” schools in Louisiana, but this one appears to be majority black.
Oh, they also practice “Social Emotional Learning.”
Remember, “Social Emotional Learning” is a codephrase for “Critical Race Theory.”
Yet more evidence that “social justice” (no matter the disguise) destroys the bonds that hold society together rather than strengthening them.
Tags: Baton Rouge, Crime, EBR Readiness Alternative School, Louisiana, riot, video
Scott Adams, right now like Pat Buchanan 50 years ago.
Act accordingly, but never say it. Like an Episcopalian.
Dysfunctional parents of dysfunctional kids. Who all wonder why their kids have to go to “alternative” high school. And, why all of their lives are so f*cked up.
No doubt, it’s all due to “structural racism”.
I went to Deady in Houston in the 1970 timeframe. Each year there was a fight that ended up with HPD surrounding the school. Tangentally involved in them (smacked somebody and got the H outa Dodge).
Parents and police never were involved except to take kids home.
By the time we got to HS, which was Milby, the rule was “Let’s not get the the law involved in this”.
(Kids these days…)
[…] SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Huge Brawl At Social Justice Warrior Middle School. “How huge? 200 people (including parents) were involved, and multiple cars of policemen had […]
WORLDSTAR!!
There’s been a huge sea-change in things since I was a kid. I’d like to know why it happened, because it snuck up on me.
When I was a child, had I done something that warranted the attention of an authority figure, any authority figure, my parents would absolutely NOT have taken my side. I’d have been in the wrong, no matter what. I’m pretty sure that if I’d presented incontrovertible evidence that said authority figure was wrong or lying their asses off, I’d have been ignored. It was a f*cking conspiracy; adult world against kid world, and the assumption was always “The adult is right”.
Nowadays? What the hell happened? If a kid is caught breaking the law, vandalizing property, stealing, whatever… The person catching said kid is the one who’s going down. The parents will attack; the cops will attack, and you’re even going to have trouble convincing people you weren’t the bad guy if yo present video evidence. It’s gotten that bad; my Mom’s final years teaching were filled with incidents of kids behaving badly, acting out in school in ways not even our worst offenders would have dreamed of, when I was a kid… And, the parents always, always took their kid’s side in anything that happened. There was a clear-cut case where a football player did everything but penetrate a cheerleader in the back of the school bus, with her fighting him all the way. It should have been a rape charge, with multiple offenders being charged because they were helping him. Parents swooped in with expensive lawyers, and the whole thing went away for all the involved parties, except the victim that had to move across the country and finish high school at her aunt’s.
Where the hell did this start happening, and why? I have some theories, but I’d love to hear everyone else on this.
Think that was more Social Emotional Practice
@Kirk I suspect it’s because the “authority figures” are often manipulative dumbasses representing leftist factory institutions that really, in the end, don’t give a hang about our kids. They are far more concerned about their labor contracts.
Were my kids infallible angels? Nope. Did a significant number of the adults around them in schools have significant character flaws, like withholding critical information and flat out lying about a given situation? Yup.
After defending my kids from these people, did I afterwards have serious conversations, breaking down what had just occurred, about ethics and how the world we live in operates? Also, what was expected of them? Yup.
ed in texas:
I also attended Deady 7th grade in Fall Semester 1970. It was a shock after “wholesome” Southmayd Elementary. There was a protest by the Hispanic students that broke into a fight one afternoon, which did bring a big policy presence.
My mother heard about it and told my father, “We moving NOW!” So we broke of our lease and moved to Clear Lake City. I went to Webster Intermediate and the Clear Lake High School. There was some drugs at Clear Lake, but no fights, and no police ever. There were lots of STEM nerds, including me, so I’m glad my mother intervened.
Kirk;
I’ve seen the same. Additionally there’s the disappearance of acceptance of generic adult discipline. If I acted up like that and some other parent smacked me for it, *my* parents (presuming I even mentioned it) would have said “then you should have behaved yourself”. This meant reasonable control over any group of kids as long as parents were around. Now, if you tried that on some one’s kid, you’d be lucky to not end up in jail.
We are in the end times.
Sorry to be “that guy” but this isn’t a middle school. Whatever it is now, it’s at the site of a former middle school. But as far as I know (and I’m a middle school teacher), 17-year-olds are not middle schoolers.
Also, not all SEL is a cover for CRT. Especially after the pandemic, a lot of kids have zero emotional resilience or social skills, and there are some good curricula out there that help teachers instill them in their students. Check out Disicipline with Purpose, and Teach for Transformation.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Ultimately, people will tend to behave better if they believe that they will be judged by an omniscient and omnipotent power at the end of their life, with eternal joy–or eternal agony–at stake. Remove that threat, and many will become hedonistic and selfish in nature. Ever wonder how the ancient Israelites kept messing up, time after time, despite being punished every few generations? This is how.
But they told our ancestors that they were too straight-laced, that there was no harm in loosening up a little, that it wasn’t *fair* that there should be so many social restrictions on one’s freedom. And certainly there was some degree of justification, at first (see: Puritans, the). But that wasn’t enough, especially for the upper classes, who seemed to believe that they had inherited a license to misbehave, and that any discouragement towards their libertinism should be fought vigorously. Note the behavior of the ruling classes of the Victorians, or the French (both before *and* after the Revolution: the names and titles changed, but the desire for personal power and utter disregard for one’s fellow man did not). So too did the same thing take root in the US. It was always there, from the very beginning (see: Hall, Tammany). But it took a couple centuries to truly take over.
Politics is not *always* downstream from culture–there are certainly times and places where powerful individuals or cliques have dominated others against their will–but, culture is a very strong determinant in the character of a people or nation. And American culture has been actively under attack from within for most of a century, now. Tyranny can be resisted, but the only way to defeat it (at least for a few generations) is to repair the Gramscian damage wrought to the culture.
The notion of ‘my kid, wrong or right…’ has definite potential for going seriously wrong.
I think that someone, somewhere along the line, needs to establish a legal precedent that if you’re going to assert ‘defensive rights’ over your kids, then you assume legal liability for their conduct as well.
There was a case near me a few years back, where mommy and daddy bought their precious little f*ck-trophy a very powerful little sports car, one that was more engine than car. Said trophy-child then went out and ran it into a mini-van while underage drinking, and killed a family of illegal aliens who were on their way in to work after dropping the kids off at relatives. I think one little girl survived out of the five, or something…?
In any event, the whole thing was slid well under the carpet by the cops. Daddy ‘knew people’, see?
What they didn’t calculate on was one of the local attorneys deciding that he’d take on the family’s case pro bono. He proceeded to wreck that family financially, winning millions for the (legal) relatives that they’d been going to drop off the kids with. Wiped out the insurance on the car, the family’s household insurance, and took about 90% of their assets. I think one of the points he made was that they’d provided the kid with a car that the dealer recommended professional driver’s training for, before it be picked up and driven, and the kid was given the car on their 16th birthday, before even getting their license. Nothing past high school driver’s ed.
I honestly think that you ought to have to make a declaration of either ‘yeah, let the village involve itself in raising my kids’, or ‘I take full and utter responsibility for their conduct’ until they’re living on their own as non-dependents.
Vibrants gotta vibrate.
Kirk — I think day care is part of the answer. It emphasizes get along/go along and conformity when children are at a very formative pre-school age. It also emphasizes peer group more than individuality. These things work out in later years and we see some of the results in colleges today. So ultimately it goes back to two income households whether we admit it or not.
As to the parents Mr Swarm mentioned I think the good answer is partly complete distrust of the ed system. Defend your kid right or wrong to keep him out of the social service/education cycle of abuse. Why should he get punished when no one else will? The system is just too big and the teachers and administrators are just too crazy. The bad answer is the general moral failing in our culture that generally no longer believes in God. My parents were like yours, but if I had a kid today — first off, no public school. Problem solved.
In the school districts near me, alternative schools are generally where the students that have been expelled out of regular public schools.
It’s the parents, I think.
They all think their little darlings can do no wrong, and do whatever it takes to “stand up for them”, not caring about anything else.
The rest of society reflects this self-entitlement and self-involvement. You see it in all the “Karens” we have wandering around and screaming for “the manager” to intervene on their behalf.
I think the two things are connected. The kids get used to this ability to appeal to outside authority in every situation, and they continue on the same course in adult life, demanding that “the Manager” come save them from whatever it is they’re whinging about.
It’s a society-wide psychosis, and I’ll be damned if I know what the source is. I wasn’t raised like this; none of my friends raised their kids like this, and it’s bizarre to see everywhere around me.
Good grief… If I got spanked at school? I got it twice as hard, twice as fast, and twice as much when I got home. No questions asked, no defense possible. Even if I’d been in the right for whatever attracted the disciplining, I’d have gotten my ass beaten in for drawing attention. That’s just the way it was.
Kinda surprising I didn’t wind up with a damn persecution complex, TBH.
I see these kids getting instant and total unquestioning support from Mommy and Daddy out in the world, and I’m like “Really? And, you wonder why they’re feral little brats?”
I wager that there are a lot of those kids in that high school that are going to have terminal contact with people that won’t put up with their BS, and who will likely shoot them dead in real life. Whereupon, Mommy and Daddy will be all waily-waily-woe ‘cos their little darling that they never taught limits to will be DOA at the local hospital. Supposing they even wind up being taken to one, which I don’t think is necessarily a given.
A moment’s googling shows: “The school … is an alternative school that is home to students in grades 9-12 who have been suspended or expelled from other East Baton Rouge Parish public schools.”
In other words, this school was juvie. Doesn’t make the brawl acceptable, but it is a lot more understandable.
@Kirk,
The answer to “what the Hell happened” is easy. Corporal punishment died. Schools now fear being sued as the prevailing attitude and litigation is “you touch my kids and I’ll sue”.
Two true stories from my middles school days (mid 70s) in a really small town in southern MN.
1) School bully tries to beat up a boy almost twice his size who was a gentle giant. Big kid manages to get bully on the ground and lay on him. Let’s him up after bully concedes its over. Bully immediately cold cocks the kid and now has the upper hand – literally kicking and punching him while he is in the fetal position. Out comes a male history teacher. Picks the bully up and body slams him to the ground. Bully is in pain and stunned. End of incident (other than bully got in trouble).
2) we had desks where the top could be flat, set to about 20 degrees or set to about 40 degrees. Chairs were set up in a square looking in so you could “hook” the corner of another desk and raise it up. Another student did that to me and (bad timing) my desk top slammed down hard and loud. The teacher (Mr. Bennet LOL) called both of to his desk where we had to lower our heads over his desk. He then hit each of us hard on top of with an infamously large ring. To this day I remember that. We didn’t do it again.
My Dad was the principal at the time but I dared not say anything. Many, many years later I told that story to him. He said “sounds like you had it coming” LOL.
Today no one can physically do anything to kids and they know it. That’s the problem!
Social and Emotional Learning for sure includes CRT but it is broader and more harmful. With brief training, teachers use manipulative therapeutic techniques in the classroom to exploit emotions to change behavior and beliefs and undermine the parent-child relationship. It has spread nationwide through programs such as Second Step and is very difficult to stop. SEL repackages similar programs from the past few decades and claims it is backed by research. When you look at the research on the Second Step website you see that such research as has been done finds little to no progress toward the claimed benefits and is not replicable like most social science research.
It also collects data about the student that follows the student throughout his education and can effect college admission and employment. Where is this data stored, is it shared or sold to other entities, do parents have the opportunity to see it and correct the record if it contains errors?
Plus, it takes up a lot of class time – time that could more effectively be spent teaching standard disciplines to correct dismal test scores.
Part of the problem is the culture the kids are being raised in. When I was a kid, if you got in a fight it was you and the kid you were fighting and that’s it. Whoever lost took their lumps and learned how to fight better next time.
Now if a kid gets beat in a fight he might go home, get a gun, come back and shoot the kid who beat them and all his buddies. And when a fight starts everyone joins in.
Juvey Hall, what do you expect? Baton Rouge is a dung heap, with a violent crime rate that compares with Chicago, and an even greater amount of property crime. Avoid.
What can you expect from people who laud the law of the jungle and believe they are masters of the jungle? Avoid concentrations of such savages. Ignore the labotomized wh bray about racism, oppression, and equity.
Good people display the universal traits of the civilized. Bad people dress badly, speak poorly, have music that hasn’t existed for 3,000 years. They tear down the monuments of great people and erect statutes to Lenin, Satan, and St Floyd of the recreational pharmaceutical.