After all the bad news we see on the education front coming from the nation’s college campuses and the outrageous behavior of the teachers unions, it’s about time for us to run across a potentially hopeful story. In North Carolina there is one school where teachers are engaging in what’s being referred to as “No-Nonsense Nurturing.” Under this theory, the teacher is the one who is in charge (a shocking idea, I know) and the students are in class because they need structure and direction as well as learning reading, writing and arithmetic. And along that line of thinking, teachers are encouraged not to say “please” to the kids. This from Yahoo News.

Though many young kids are taught “please” is “the magic word,” one school in Charlotte, North Carolina, actually asks its teachers to use the word as little as possible. The practice is part of Druid Hills Academy’s newly implemented “No-Nonsense Nurturing Program.” …

The program aims to create a structured and consistent environment for students where teachers give them clear and specific directions about movement, volume and participation, Watts said.

“When a teacher is giving an expectation, the word please is not necessary,” Watts told ABC News. “The best analogy I can use to describe my thinking about it is no one would say, ‘Would you come to work today, please?'”

This is some really shocking thinking, isn’t it? (/sarcasm) The idea that children should actually follow the instructions of adults who are placed in supervisory positions of authority will come as a tremendous shock to the Time Out Generation, but there was a time when this worked quite well.

There’s a part of even my cold, dark soul which pushes back a bit and tells me that words such as please and thank you have a place in all polite conversation and that using them with children might instill such values. Sadly, the results in modern society don’t seem to validate that belief in too many cases. It would be wonderful if every child came out of a household where they were raised to respect the authority of adults (with additional training to be on guard against monsters) and carried over that responsibility to a sense of mutual respect in their classrooms. That’s not the case, though, and kids these days might benefit from a bit of “spare the rod” mentality when their parents drop them off to their five day a week baby sitters in the public school system.

Once word of this gets out on a wide scale, I assume that the forces of the Social Justice Warriors will come crashing down on Druid Hills Academy. How they keep their heads above water after that will be an instructive chapter in American educational history.