Prickly City by Scott Stantis for March 27, 2014

Oh no, is this the end of story-line focusing on the awful teachers unions? Have any of you heartless liberals seen the movie Waiting for Superman? The left is terrible and has no interest in helping poor people. Heartless.

Nice job on the stand-ins Carmen!

Ha! Excellent, Stantis.

Winslow and Carmen, together again. It doesn’t get any better than this… Thanks, Eric! Thanks, Scott!

Uh-huh, “…this week’s self-esteemers.” Many years ago, I was appointed to instruct a group of young women in our office about some new technology being introduced. Somehow the meeting turned into a grievance airing of the harassment they were receiving from the men in the office. I organized a course of action, the upshot of which was a detailed list of grievances delivered by myself and one other girl with the coffee (yes; the girls in the office rotated in fetching the coffee for the managers’ meeting) to the next managers’ meeting. There was a long silence from the conference room after we left, then the yelling began. Our branch manager was as straight arrow as they come and he was outraged. We got the results we wanted, including an “Employee of the Month” recognition, which we had not asked for. Guess who was the first EooM"? Guess whose boss asked her to write it herself? Guess whose boss said, “Oh. Never mind. I’ll write it” after I presented my version to him (chowder head). This week’s Self-esteemers indeed!

Or not.

This kind of stuff is so tired. Yes, we’ve heard it before. “‘Self-esteem’ blather has ruined our kids!” “If everyone is ‘special,’ no one is!” “Darn those liberals n’ junk!”

Yes, the self-esteem thing IS ludicrous at its extreme. Trouble is, like the fictional “War On Christmas,” it’s blown way out proportion in terms of how pervasive it is.

As the son of a public school principal, it’s hard to stomach the anti-teacher fever that’s sweeping the country these days, especially on the right. Yesterday’s strip was particularly acute. Stantis has it backwards. It doesn’t matter HOW great a teacher is——it is often impossible to compete with the dysfunctional forces in a child’s life, and/or the wider anti-intellectual culture in this country.

We conservatives are not anti-intellectual, merely anti-elite. An intellectual is someone like Sowell, who understands and appreciates the market, and explains it so simply that even leftists have to agree with him. An “elite” is someone who thinks the rabble is too stupid to come in out of the rain, so they pass laws to punish for rain-standing.