There is a program on television right now called “The Voice” and it is top rated by the viewing audience. One of the judges on this show is named C- Lo Green, who is a recording artist. Currently, Mr. Green has a #1 hit entitled “F*#K” (fill in the blanks). I don’t watch “The Voice”, so I really don’t know if the show is any good. I certainly won’t buy anything recorded by Mr. Green, as I find his choice of language very offensive to me. In Mr. Green’s genre of music, profanity and violent innuendo seem to be the norm; perhaps that is why many of the people who listen to music like his choose to use vile and disgusting language, rather than intelligent English. I’m sure the music that Mr. Green and his contemporaries make is quite prevalent in many American school hallways, before school and after school, with little or no consequence from the school toward students who listen to this questionable art-form. I would be willing to wager there are some students in each school who find this type of music quite offensive.
Not long ago, I wrote about a school that was using a math class to make statements about slavery in test questions; a ridiculous thing to do. I could understand a discussion of this issue in a history class, not math; in history it is germane, in math it is not.
Our public schools have many different ethnic students, some black, some white, some Jewish, some Christian, some Muslim and some atheist; some are Latino and some are Italian or German, or Polish, or Russian; the list is nearly endless. I guarantee that every day things are said in public schools that will offend somebody, on some level. We now live in a society that practically lives in constant fear of offending some person or group with the words we say.
Growing up, we called black people “colored”; suddenly that became offensive and then we stopped using that term. I won’t even say what people called those in the “gay community”, as those terms were offensive from the start. I often heard the words “Dago” and “Wop” and I never took too well to that. Words and terms can cut and hurt easily, but we cannot insulate ourselves from the world in an attempt to keep from offending everyone.
Our children must learn about the entire world, even things that are not so good. We can carry political correctness to a foolish degree if we fail to use a little common sense.
New York City, that bastion of cosmopolitan culture and tolerance has just done something I find ridiculous; it is almost laughable. In a move reminiscent of a backwoods ban on the teaching of science, the New York School System has banned certain words from tests given to students.
Here are some of the words and topics which have been “banned”: dinosaur, Halloween, birthday, dancing and computers; all for various reasons over offensive connotations that could be taken by one or more groups or minorities. They are also “forbidden” to use terms like divorce, disease and poverty. Those words also could be offensive to somebody. I guess those tests will not have too many words that they actually can use. Can you tell me what those children are actually learning, if they are learning anything at all!
I have a word that offends me “STUPIDITY!”; YES THAT WORD! How stupid is this idea? In a place that one is supposed to learn about society, the words in that society are being edited out. I’m glad I live in the good old Midwest, you know “the gun toten” and "Bible carryin”” folks who are so intolerant; at least, our children will have some idea of what the world they live in is actually like. If you don’t say something, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist!!
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