The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
May 11th
SCHOOLS DAZED!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
This ol' candidate
for Guvnor of Texas as wound up runnin'
for President some years back not the drunk, the used-to-be drunk motorcycle
lady, the cripple or the oops man who failed upwards to become Secretary of
something awhile or the crazy person
Im 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 those 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, sort of) for the whole freakin nation.
Sometimes I get these
bad dreams of about twenty years down the road when I'm a toothless old Kentucky
codger driving amongst Texans... down a dirt road toward Crawford, of course,
still unpaved... and along comes the flashing lights behind and state trooper,
as asks: "Sir... you were doing twenty-seven in a twenty-five mile zone,
so tell me, boy: 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 not 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 et up by the plague or shipped off to China... see
the teachers and firemen, the garbagemen and those state cops, as still have
respect from the public and union jobs, and get envious dog-in-the-manger
envious! Those days of clapping and
banging on pots and pans at sundown to thank the gumment
workers, the hospital nurses and first responders those days are over. "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) populist 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 trudge
up through the local system up on Millers Ridge, including two years at Dan
Boone Consolidated Middle... with textbooks as taught two and two makes four,
Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo (and got sent off to write angry
letters to people who didnt care, just like Mister
Trump), and that the Civil War was
fought to free the slaves even though there were good people on both sides.
Missed out on that
post-modern Common Core-age curricula as has replaced the violent and
Eurocentric Iliad and Odyssey with tales of "Respect, the Frog" and "Dignity,
the Turtle". Missed
out on the critical race race to the flagpole of wokeness as taught black people were good and white people
bad. (Texicans
just shrugged.) 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 Wacky Jacky Derrida and the Paul deMan Man, 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 verbiage (as held sway in the days when reading, 'riting and 'rithmatic were taught
to the tune of a hickry 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 fake news on television with a teaspoon of lite, white
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 Trumps Supremes have let those self-proclaimed
Christians belly up to the taxpayers' buffet, well also either double down on
declaring America a Christian (or, if them AIPAC lobbyists do their jobs,
alongside of Jared the K. and the Second Man), a Judeo-Christian-only nation or
else throw the door wide open to the Buddhists, the nudists, the
Scientologists, Appliantologists and Osama
death-deniers, that Jew-hatin Mickey Mouse knockoff from Hamas and your
friendly, local Satanist. (See more in
this here Don
Jones Index a year ago).
May work during a
plague, but in elsewherenow no.
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 univirulursuaries 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." And pay for them?... with what? IOUs? Guns and poses? No matter, were Americans!
Old Miltie he aced that one.
Lets tip the old chapeau
or MAGA cap to the late Alex Trebek by citing one of
his bestKen Jennings, that old Jeopardy guy before becoming that new Jeopardy
half-a-host (the, go figure! online gambler) who said that nearly ten percent
of University of Miami students were unable to find Miami on a map.
No wonder, as another
Don Jones lesson
explained: people said, moren a decade back, America
ranks in the lower quartiles of most indices as fit developed nations and the
dead bottom, in some. And that was before the Man from Monkey Largo.
So, what, you ask,
might Catfish elementary education look like? Well... elementary, for a start. Youngsters over the age of seven having,
by that time, already been schooled on gun safety by their baby mamas
boyfriends 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 or candy, 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 welding, planting corn, auto repair,
computer coding and dealing with corporate and gumment
disnerveoucracies. Those private enterprises as wanted to keep
their Trumpastolistic tax cuts would be invited in for
the mentoring and the such.
We can fix our
schools... if the parents, teachers, bureaucrats, private sector and taxpayers
all understand continuity (as opposed to freedom) doesnt fly for free not in
these post Coronavirii stimulating
days of national debts nearly doubling our GDP. 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, like
wearing masks to visit grandma during the pandemic, have become "emblematic
of Soft (i.e. gay) America", but it's gonna take more than armies of steroid-swilling
illiterates with hands full of assault weapons and pipe wrenches, spleens full
of hate and heads full of social media swill and Marvel Comix
cotton candy to combat the Soviet darkside hackers, the
geeks of Beijing and Bangalore, let alone the hardasses
still spilling out of ISIS and Iranian madrassas and Sergei
Lavrov, if he ever stops lying about his promises to
blow up the world.
"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."
CLICK the CATFISH to go
to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |