Monday, February 21, 2005

Another Reason Not To Send Your Kid To Public School

(Via DougPetch.com) SOLDIER STUNNED BY LETTER KIDS' RANTS

An American soldier overseas is fuming over letters he received from Brooklyn middle-school children accusing GIs of destroying mosques and killing civilians in Iraq.

Pfc. Rob Jacobs of New Jersey said he was initially ecstatic to get a package of letters from sixth-graders at JHS 51 in Park Slope last month at his base 10 miles from the North Korea border.

That changed when he opened the envelope and found missives strewn with politically charged rhetoric, vicious accusations and demoralizing predictions that only a handful of soldiers would leave the Iraq war alive.

"It's hard enough for soldiers to deal with being away from their families, they don't need to be getting letters like this," Jacobs, 20, said in a phone interview from his base at Camp Casey.

The take of the school principal was that the kids came up with this stuff on their own. What a crock. My middle school years may have been a long time ago, but you cannot tell me that things have changed so much that teachers are no longer looking at what kids write in these sorts of assignments. The fact that the teacher in this case would not respond to inquiries is telling.

What's worse is some idiot (ok, ok that idiot will be Bill O'Reilly) will make a federal case out of this. Disapproval should be voiced, but there is no need to blow this out of proportion.

I disapprove. Now I'll go on to more important matters.

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