Tyranny of the Majority
Katherine Mangu-Ward | May 29, 2008, 3:16pm
One more reminder, in this election season, that democracy has a dark side:
Melissa Barton said she is considering legal action after her son's kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class.
After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn't like about Barton's 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher said they were going to take a vote, Barton said. By a 14 to 2 margin, the class voted him out of the class.
Apparently, the poor kid has Aspergers, a less severe form of autism, and his classmates found him "disgusting."
Alex's response to the vote:
"I feel sad."
And speaking of skepticism of the rule by the masses, take a minute to enjoy some of these defenses of elitism, a word that has taken a beating recent days of the campaign.
Via Instapundit
isildur | May 29, 2008, 7:52pm | #
Fluffy, are you being deliberately obtuse? There is a difference between 'other kids let him know how they feel' and 'other kids are invited, under color of authority from the teacher, to inventory everything they don't like about him'.
They're really not comparable situations at all.
First, there's the authority thing. It's one thing to have a kid be mean to you. It's quite another to have a kid be mean to you with the approval of the only present authority figure.
Second, there's the public thing. One of the creepiest and most stifling innovations of the Puritans was the notion of the public confession. Individuals are capable of compassion and understanding. People, collectively, are a herd waiting to stampede. And kindergarteners are even more herd-like, because they already live under unquestionable authority. If the authority figure says 'hate this person', they do so. Or do you really think there are 5-year-old John Galts out there nobly standing against a classroom full of their peers, declaring it's morally wrong to hate the teacher's chosen target?
You can try to dress this up in terms like 'community', but the truth is, a teacher invited kids who were too young to know any better to humiliate and shame another kid.
Tangent: Every time you say 'the class is a community' it gives me heartburn. Because it's not a fucking community -- it's supposed to be a learning environment, and whether or not I fit into the social structure of the classroom should be irrelevant. I don't want to send my kid to become part of some arbitrary community of strangers. I went through that myself, I know who those people are, and my life is enriched greatly by my ability, as an adult, to choose the people I include in my own personal community -- and exclude the douchebags who comprised that community for most of my childhood. The only thing I ever learned from that supposed 'community' was a well-honed hatred for most other human beings.
