Learning Our Lessons

Dubya wants to invade Iraq. Didn't he learn anything from his dad's presidency? After all, wasn't George the First called the Education President because of that lesson he taught Saddam Hussein in 1991? Actually I think I got that wrong, George the First was George Washington. That makes Dubya George the Third!

I said that makes Dubya GEORGE THE THIRD! C'mon, that's a great joke! George the Third was the king our forefathers revolted against. He was also the one who went nuts! Still nothing? Guess you guys need to go back to school for a history refresher.

Now there's a scary thought. Seems like the one thing that almost everyone agrees on in America is that our public schools suck. But I don't blame teachers. I think it's got a lot more to do with how school budgets are first on the chopping block every time there's a budget crisis. Isn't it strange that our government can always find a few extra billion for military? They fund toys like the YF-35 Advanced Strike Fighter or my favorite black hole, nuclear missile defense, and certainly there's always plenty of money for the CIA and the NSA. When they needed to send troops to Afghanistan last year, billions of dollars magically appeared! But when we try to get a few billion to repair the schools, buy a few books or hire some new teachers, the money is nowhere to be found. Ho hum.

Twenty years ago Howard Jarvis's Proposition 13 initiative gutted the property tax funding for California's schools. They went from first to nearly the worst in the country. It was a long, slow withering that went under the public radar and no politician has had the guts to fix. Oh, they posture enough. Back in the 80's they promised folks that lottery profits would go to the schools. And the net increase in school budgets? ZERO. The money from the lottery does fund schools, but in true Arthur Andersen School Of Bookkeeping fashion, they took an equal amount of regular tax dollars out. So the net effect is really that the lottery is funding other state programs, not schools. These guys love their smoke and mirrors. Over the last decade they've started things like corporate sponsorship of instructional videos, so that the sponsors can sneak in a commercial to a captive audience. C'mon, the kids' lives are already saturated with advertising; a public school should be a sanctuary from all that. And don't get me started on these wacko ideas that privatizing schools and vouchers are the answer. Some cities have tried vouchers and guess what? The results are just as mixed as they are with public schools. There are some good private schools run by education professionals, but there are also religious schools run by superstitious evangelists and charter schools run by incompetent profiteers that are utter failures.

I have this theory that the reason we're having so much trouble funding education is because our leaders LIKE a dummied-down population; they don't have as many control problems that way. What, you think that's pretty far fetched? I come from the Baby Boom generation, which may have been the best educated group that America ever produced. Many of our parents went to college on the GI Bill, so we came from pretty well educated stock, plus they spent a lot on our schools. They made us pretty smart and what did it get our leaders? An entire generation that loved questioning authority. We were troublemakers.

Ignorant people are easier to deal with. Just give them a steady supply of Budweiser, nachos and shoot-em-up movies and they'll never figure out your schemes. I can just see some Harvard MBA calculating the number of mystery-filling squirters Taco Pump expects to employ and adjusting school budgets to efficiently produce the right amount of dummies to keep them well supplied. Actually, that's probably giving the government too much credit. I don't think they're competent enough to pull that scenario off. But it remains that schools aren't functioning very well except for the moneyed elite.

Starting earlier would help. Ray Bradbury used to say that if you lost the kids by the first grade, you'll never get them back. Maybe we just need to rethink some of the stuff we're teaching to get their interest up. Why couldn't we give kids classes in things they care about, like pop music and lyric analysis! Imagine a lecture on the sexual implications of the song "My Boy Lollipop." Hmm, that's probably still too racy after 40 years, forget that.

For sure along with the basics we should teach stuff in school that kids can really use. In the 21st Century we should be training kids how to do things like how to use money from credit cards to home mortgages, how to start and run a small business and how to touch-type. Computers are here to stay; we need to invest enough in them so even poor kids have a chance to get used to them. Too many schools have busted up old Apple II's if they have anything at all. That reminds me about another thing I'd like to change -- the "Querty" keyboard. The letter layout is idiotic. And as if that wasn't bad enough, what genius decided that the Caps Lock key should be right next to the "A" so that you're constantly hitting Caps Lock by mistake. I'm a lousy enough typist without the keyboard messing me up further!

There's a lot to be said for the traditional core courses of course. Math is always important; I hear there are lots of newly opened accounting jobs for people who can add correctly. Too many kids couldn't figure out correct change if the cash register at the Burger Pit didn't tell them. History always has lessons too. I'm sure our George the First could teach the Second and Third a thing or two about proper removal of tyrants. And certainly we need to do a better job training our children how to use their most important tool -- The English Language.

Is it too obvious to say that reading is the key to all knowledge? We fail far too many times in teaching kids reading. There's no excuse, especially when non-readers get socially promoted. Self-esteem be damned, keep them in first grade or some special tutoring program until they learn. You think adults who can't read feel good about themselves? After they've struggled and succeeded in reading, then they'll have plenty of self-esteem.

Teaching speaking and writing, the bedrock of communication, is just as important. Maybe kids would get better in school if they overhauled our more obscure grammar rules a bit. I think it's time to boldly go where no split infinitive has gone before, don't you? Lose that stupid rule. And then there's spelling. You gotta, sorry, you have got to admit that English spellings often have no rhyme or reason. Isn't it time for us to retire some of our most atrocious ones? Who arrived at these spellings anyway? A bunch of aristocrats about 400 years ago. Long before George the Third, back when they thought a good way to spell the "f" sound was not only "f" but also "gh" and "ph" of all things. They liked "gh" so much that they even made it stand silent sometimes. By the way, how do you pronounce "ghoti?" In English one of the ways to pronounce it is "fish." That's right -- the "gh" is from "tough" the "o" is from "women" and the "ti" is from any of a couple hundred words that end in "tion." It's no wonder our kids can't spell. Maybe we should start spelling "through" like "true." That would make it "thrue" but a lot of people have already started to spell it "thru." I don't know about that tho.

My other favorite spelling rule is the venerable old axiom, "I" before "E" except after "C." That one is violated so many times it's RIDICULOUS. The word "receipt" follows it but what about "chief?" There's a "c" before the "ie" there. Worse, one of the most common pronouns, "their" doesn't follow the rule. Want more? There's "foreign," "freight," and "reign." Maybe the rule should be "i" before "e" except after "c" and "r." Oh wait, what about "friend?" I guess we have just as many violations by putting "r" into the rule. And friend should be spelled "frend." Those fiends, spelling friend with an "ie" like that. And I propose another rule: if it sounds like a double "e" spell it with one! Those feends!

Blame it on the rich heritage of English. Our language is this way because the Saxons of Southern England were conquered by the Normans about a thousand years ago. I think that event also caused the British to drive on the wrong side of the road, eat kidney pie and invent the game of cricket, but I digress. Present day English is complicated because the Norman nobility spoke French with its strong Latin influence and the Saxon peasants they conquered used an archaic form of German. It took a couple hundred years to melt together and become the English that Shakespeare used, a kind of dual language that has both a high way and a low way to express things. It's still that way today. For example, most languages only have one word for a farm animal and it's meat. In English there's a different word for each. The words for the animal are all Germanic because the Saxon peasants raised them, while the words for the meat are all French because it was the Norman nobility who ate them. Think about it. "Cow" and "beef." In French cow is "beouf." Then there's "pig" and "pork," "sheep" and "mutton," right on down the line. The same thing happens in our swearing. What we consider offensive language is all old Germanic roots, because the nobles were too high and mighty for the peasants' gutter talk. So we have the unacceptable "shit" and the perfectly acceptable "feces.

Oops! My quote key fell off. Guess I used it too much; that's what I get for starting a rant about language itself. Coitus!

Fat chance we'll ever officially change English spellings. Academics will protest that we'll lose our rich cultural roots if we simplify spellings. Well, I've got news for them. Simplified spellings are coming anyway because language is an organic thing. Email and chat rooms are reviving the nearly lost art of letter writing and their spellings and acronyms will become accepted just by force of use. LOL!

Anyway, don't hold your breath waiting for the Son Of The Education President to make changes at your school. He's too busy preparing new lessons for Saddam and doing remedial work in Afghanistan with the Taliban and Al Qaida delinquents. It's a shame Hussein didn't learn the lesson that George the Second administered the first time. I have this funny feeling that he's going to be a lot harder to teach now, but that's another problem. If you have kids, take your own action on education. A recent study says you can do a very simple thing right away that will guarantee better grades. Turn off your TV. That's right, don't let your kids watch any TV or play video games. The study showed a dramatic improvement. I should know, it was a study we did on our twelve year old! He was struggling with several subjects last January, even headed toward failing math. We turned off the Sponge Bob and Mario Party during the weekdays and by June he had all A's and B's. And yes, we also went over all his assignments with him and explained things whenever he needed help. Bottom line is, even if it's a lousy public school like our venerable LAUSD system, kids can still learn. Schools are not a public babysitting service, and real education is never automatic. There's no substitute for doing the work.

When school starts again next month, the TV is going off again. Hell, we're even talking about saving $45 a month by dumping cable completely. We'll just go back to the local broadcast channels and rent videos. I'm already renting one or two a week anyway, so we'll be way ahead.

That reminds me, I want to see The Madness Of King George again, l so I guess it's time to head for the Video Dump. Thanks for reading and until next month the Closet is closed.

(C) 2002 - Rusty Pipes

Official Disclaimer: We editors and publishers think he might be making fun of us. We went to school. For a while, like almost three fours of everybody. Forths. Fourths. 3/4ths. We're educateed. He doesn't need to act all soopere... all soop... all superer he's not so big. And we like cows. We like tipping 'em at night because they're dum! LOL! Oh, yeah, and anything he said that might get us sued is hereby said not to have happened, bippity boppity boo - poof! gone. Amen.