The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
May 14th
SCHOOLS DAZED!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
This ol' candidate for Guv’nor of Texas
as wound up runnin' for President some years back…
not the drunk, the used-to-be drunk motorcycle lady or the oops man or the
crazy person, I’m talkin’ way way
back… figured Americans just might elect him if'n he raised
standardized test scores, so teachers were commanded to turn li'l Texans into veritable data-spouting fonts... as might someday
reap beacoup bucks on quiz shows. Well, voters with an unearthly respect for
charts and graphs duly crowned Dubya as George III, Pretender to the Lone Star Republic,
then crowned him agin' (legitimately, this time) for
the whole nation.
Sometimes I get these
bad dreams of about twenty years down the road when I'm a toothless old codger
driving amongst Texas... down a dirt road toward Crawford, of course, still
unpaved... and there's the flashing lights behind and state trooper, as asks: "Sir...
you were doing twenty-seven in a twenty-five mile zone. What is the capital of Chechnya?
I do a Perry… uh, uhm…
he says no, sir, it's Groznia. Put your hands behind
your head, get out of your vehicle slowly, or I'll be forced to ventilate
you." Then, after he's writ me up for "spedding",
I stop for ice cream to wash the dust out'n my throat
and the thirty-somethin’ gender studies graduate behind the counter asks: "Chocolate
or vanilla, but first… and in order to be served... to make four trillion
dollars, a stack of tightly packed hundred dollar bills would extend a) 2,700;
b) 3,200 or c) 4,400 miles into space?" I realize I'm going
to have to answer, and correctly, in order to wet my tonsils... not to mention
knowing what the dollar will be worth by then… which is why I say it's a bad
dream.
Seems to me some
might want educated children, not human dictionaries, but what I think's really
going on is that most downsized, disgruntled and imitation principling Americans...
many as who've seen their jobs shipped off to China... see the teachers and firemen,
the garbagemen and those state cops, as still have
union jobs, and get envious, dog-in-the-manger envious. "One
trend that bothers me is the glorification of stupidity..." astronomer
Carl Sagan said before shuffling off to his own private cosmos – and that before the last election, "...that
the media is reassuring people it's all right not to know anything - that, in a
way, it's cool."
I guess I grew up in
a deprived (maybe, even, depraved) household... the Senator wouldn't let me
come to DeeCee full-time 'til I was old enough to enroll
as a junior in that private high school in Georgetown. So I had to come up
through the local system, including two years at Dan Boone Consolidated Middle...
with textbooks as taught two and two makes four, Napoleon lost
the battle of Waterloo, and that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves.
Missed out on that
post-modern Common Core-age curricula as has replaced the violent, Eurocentric
Iliad and Odyssey with the adventures of "Respect, the Frog" and "Dignity,
the Turtle". I also missed out learning that "curriculum of caring"
as holds one gets ahead in life by ordering hot coffee from the Klown for a morning's commute, spilling it in your lap and hiring
some big-hair, big-teeth TV lawyer to sue the company.
David Slavitt, a foe of post-modern French pedagogues as Derrida
and Paul deMan, even voices the ultimate political incorrectum: "The whole point of a university
education used to be to teach discrimination." Maybe, had we
not demonized said concept (as held sway in the days when reading, 'riting and 'rithmatic were taught
to the tune of a hick’ry stick), we'd be able to
perceive the oaks of discipline from that scrub forest of Squeamishness and the politically correct, as leads, straightly or not, to the attorney's door.
The voucher and
charter people have their agenda, too, but most are their own worst enemies.
Too many scammers as, for example; Gap-financed Channel One (financed by The
Gap and hostile takeover mavens Kohlberg-Kravitz-Roberts)...
shoveling kids into classrooms to watch television with a teaspoon of lite
literature, math and history and plenty of commercials. Too many
crazies and worse wantin' to get their Mitts on
America's children, force-feed 'em with propaganda and get paid for the doin'. Some'll fall back on faith
and values, but now as Mister Trump’s Supremes have let the self-proclaimed Christians
belly up to the taxpayers' buffet, we’ll also either double down on declaring
America a Christian (or, if them AIPAC lobbyists do their jobs, a
Judeo-Christian-only) nation or else throw the door wide open to the Buddhists,
the nudists, the Scientologists and Osama death-deniers, that Jew-hatin’ Mickey
Mouse knockoff from Hamas and your friendly, local Satanist.
I wouldn't go banning
or burning those Harry Potter books and DVDs, but I don't want my tax
dollars paying to set up Hogwarts Academies in Raleigh or Denver, or even
Duluth... that one magic word as pops vouchercrats like
puffballs bein' "madrassas"!
So we pass our kids,
like oat-bran muffins, through the system and out... and then into the colleges
and universities where "freshmen are herded into fifty thousand yearly,
500-seat lecture halls, with little chance of interacting with the sage on the stage,"
according to Murray Sperber, author of "Beer and
Circus". The "circuses", as replace real education, are trivial
elective seminars (like that on gambling, at the University of Wisconsin),
collegiate sports and so-called "business curricula" where students
learn to "make things happen by pushing paper around," complained financial
writer Milton Moskowitz back in the day. Once they
take over, we won't "...have any steel or coal or cars or food or houses
or clothing. I guess the assumption is we'll just import those products."
Old Miltie got that one.
Ken Jennings, that
Jeopardy guy, says that nearly ten percent of University of Miami students were
unable to find Miami on a map.
No wonder, as the Don Jones people say,
So, what, you ask,
might Catfish elementary education look like? Well... elementary, for a start. Youngsters, as have been already schooled
on gun safety, would walk to neighborhood schools, burnin'
off them junk food calories and poppin’ caps on any
dirty old man as tried to offer them rides, instead of bein'
bused to huge, dilapidated warehouses. Those in middle and highschools
could ride bicycles and, once impris… uh, enrolled…
learn at least a few useful skills like auto repair, computer coding and
dealing with corporate and gumment bureaucracies. Those private enterprises as wanted to keep their Trumpolistic
tax cuts would be invited in for mentoring and the such.
We can fix our
schools... if the parents, teachers, bureaucrats, private sector and taxpayers
all understand nothing comes for free. Come to think of it... we cannot afford not
to fix them. The alternative is unacceptable. Maybe George Will and Mike Barone
would rather do without schools, as have become "emblematic of Soft (i.e.
gay) America", but it's gonna take more than
armies of steroid-swilling illiterates with heads full of Marvel Comics cotton
candy to combat the geeks of Beijing and Bangalore, let alone the hardasses still spilling out of ISIS madrassas.
"Fighting crime
begins with the early years of the neglected child, when there is still a
chance," retired Miami juvenile judge Seymour Gelber
states in his memoir, "Hard Core Delinquents". "The longer we
wait the harder it will get. There are no assurances of success, but there is
guarantee of failure - unquestioned failure if we try any other route."
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