Hide Your Children!
_ The School Year is Fast Approaching, Unfortunately. _
by Shelton Hull
Parents all over Duval County and the nation at large may be paralyzed with fear to know that their children will soon be forced to submit to the essentially abusive process of public education. The only thing that saves today’s student from the systematic propagation of lies in history and political science is the student’s own inability to process information. For decades students have been used as pawns in the grand chess game unfolding between the federal government and local authorities, who can now look back and claim with relative certitude that they were Right in a sense beyond the ideological.
Tuitions are up by an average of 18% nationwide (38% in California), and most incoming freshmen can’t even calculate how much more debt they’ll be taking on in pursuit of a degree that may or may not be worth anything in four years. The smart students, once in, will stay as long as possible, going the “professional student” route and hoping this country’s lending institutions collapse under the mountain of unserviceable debt they’ve cultivated on the blood of Americans and poorer countries all over the world.
No one seems willing to admit in public that the nation’s failure to properly educate its youth is indeed a failure of the most profound and inexcusable kind. It has contributed to the broader perception of American ineptitude and intellectual decay that helped inspire both the vicious attacks of 9/11/2001 and the heavy-handed and counterproductive response set in motion by the federal government. In that sense, we are all complicit in the deaths of our countrymen in New York, DC, Afghanistan and Iraq.
We delude ourselves by thinking that the World Trade Center was targeted for its “symbolic” value; this country has no conception of what symbolism means in theory or in practice. Any symbolism we detect comes through hindsight, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s just not quite on point. The terrorist infrastructure includes lots of poorly-educated, wildly angry young men who will kill themselves for the joy of killing us, but its leaders are among the cream of the crop. Osama bin Laden and his ilk got much of their schooling in Europe and the United States, often because their parents understood that sending their kids over here would give them an advantage in life. And boy, did it!
Likewise, Western-educated Arabs of Mohammed Atta’s generation came here from a region of the world that is today famous for the quality of its education thousands of years ago. Such people would be acutely aware of the collapse of American education over the past 20-30 years, and would construct their plans to destroy this country around this and other weaknesses. Just as the method of attack was designed to exploit weak airline security, I have said from that very day that the target was selected for one reason only: personnel. The 3,000 men and women who died that day will be impossible to replace on a one-for-one basis, and all sorts of specified knowledge died that day. The major loss of economic infrastructure came not from computer systems or office space; it came from the minds of the victims. (For example, WTC security chief John O’Neill, who died on his first day of work after a career in the FBI, was far more qualified to speak about “terrorism!” than anyone who’s been put on TV in the last two years, except perhaps for Henry Kissinger.)
A question: How many of our current School Board members are willing to put their jobs on the line to do their jobs? How many would say in public that they will resign immediately if student performance does not improve over last year? We never hear from these people until it’s too late, after the test scores are out, after another class of graduating seniors has learned the hard way that they didn’t learn a lick of functional knowledge in 12 years. It would be a breath of fresh air for just one SB member to question the existence of that body, to say that there is something deeply dishonorable about drawing checks from helping to make your neighbors’ children stupid. Superintendant Fryer should be a leader this year, and stipulate his resignation as a condition of the next round of FCAT scores, and stick to it even though we’ll have all forgotten by then. I’m not yet convinced that the trends are deliberate, but it doesn’t really matter anymore. Failure is failure, as any child can tell you.
(Originally run August, 2003)
