How About Some Good Old Fashioned Discipline? A Response

As John Donne would have it, no man is an island, and so too, it seems, neither is Hawaii.

Today's New York Times tells of Hawaii going off the deep end as the wave of social spending comes crashing down. (Discount, of course, for progressive hyperbole that the poor will die, and everything will go to hell once welfare payments are reduced.)

Public schools in Hawaii are closed most Fridays, rats scurry across bananas in an uninspected market, and there may not be enough money to run a Congressional election.

. . .

Hawaii now has the shortest school year in the nation after the state and the teachers’ union agreed to shutter schools for 17 days a year, leaving 171,000 students without class on most Fridays. Negotiations to reopen them collapsed last week.

. . .

Homelessness is on the rise, and mental health, child abuse, welfare and day care programs are short on cash.

And next year may be even worse because tax revenues continue to plunge with the economy.

And yet, Hawaii honored CMC's own Scot Matayoshi '06, in its annual peace day. The former TFA, CMC alum, and current University of Hawaii Law school student formed a Peacemakers Club to get his students to pledge to stop fighting with one another and has a nice room, replete with video games and chairs for students to hang out and avoid the violence brought on by bullies. The most vicious fights, are apparently on Fridays! You can read all about it here. President Gann, incidentally, mentioned Mr. Matayoshi in her latest holiday email and mentioned how he won a peace award from the state government.

Of course the proper protocol for dealing with students who fight is to throw them out of school or to train their victims to fight back, but hey, that's a little too politically incorrect nowadays and doesn't seem the sort of thing that our alum would agree to, especially given his essay the inefficacy of such punishments as grounding he wrote while attending one of Hawaii's most prestigious preparatory schools. And hey, maybe instead of using foundation money to create a recreational room, Hawaiian public school students who wanted to learn, could get an opportunity scholarship to do just that? Maybe they could even go to Punahou, the very place Matayoshi and Barack Obama, attended...

Fortunately, though, Hawaii may be keeping its's schools safe anyways, with its mandatory shut down of schools on Fridays now that the teachers' unions are agitating for bigger budgets as the state experiences the worst recession ever. Never mind, of course, that Hawaii's average public school teacher is paid nearly $50,000.

Note to Hawaii: If you really want peaceful public schools, have no public schools at all! Of course, a better way, would be to enforce discipline and make it so that the bullies fear for themselves and not their victims.