The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
November 12th
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 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 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)
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 the Don Jones people
said, near onto 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 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 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."
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