At least one legislator in the State of Utah thinks it is a good idea to abolish the 12th grade. Some schools are implementing a plan to allow students to "test out" of 11th and 12th grade. And the Texas School Board is doing its utmost to ram conservative dogma down the throats of students, and if science or the facts at hand differ from conservative dogma, don't count on any kid using Texas-approved textbooks to learn about it.
I suspect that the 10th grade graduation exams will be made easy enough that the kids who take them and then quit school will be little more than dropouts with a frameable piece of paper. Which leads to this question: Why the push to get teenagers out of school and to work early? As a nation, are we really that concerned about churning out more fast-food workers and Wal-Mart shelve-restockers? Are we going to give up on the idea that it is best to have a well-educated population? Or have the people behind it (who I suspect are mainly of the conservative persuasion) concluded that they are better with a population of undereducated drones who can be more easily cowed?
(On the other end of the age scale, tens of thousands of retirees are bartering labor for free rent at campgrounds and parks.)
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I have said it before, it is easier to control an uneducated and sickly populace than an educated and healthy one. You guys are in for a world of hurt in a generation or two.
The labor-for-free-rent deal has been happening for years. I was on a Jeep expedition around this time last year where we visited a large number of historical mines and mining camps on BLM lands. The ones that had not been looted to the bare dirt were the ones where the BLM allowed a camp host to stay, and the camp host was invariably a retiree living out of an RV on the site. Most of them had been doing that for years, rotating from site to site following the weather or in some cases simply setting up shop and never moving if they especially liked a particular spot.
As for the education thing, conservatives in the South have been trying to destroy public education ever since it was implemented by Reconstruction governors in the aftermath of the American Civil War, at first because it educated blacks (heresy!), and then because ignorance was in their best interests in keeping the white trash poor and focused on blacks rather than on the entitled class who ran their states. They did not succeed in totally eliminating public education, but they did succeed in largely crippling it until a Populist revolt in the late 1920's and early 1930's ran most of the old entrenched elite out of office, and even then they did everything in their power to make public education function less well in their states. It is no surprise, for example, that the South is solid in its utter hostility to teacher unions -- states with strong teacher unions have better educational outcomes than states which basically outlaw teacher unions as bargaining units, and we can't have that. And underfunding of education in the South is a feature, not a flaw, in their opinion.
The only difference between now and 50 years ago is that now they're trying to export their public education system to the rest of the Nation -- and to a certain extent succeeding, thanks to programs like Every Child Left Behind and so forth.
-- Badtux the Educated Penguin
If you hear of a really stupid idea from a Utah legislator, 99% of the time it will be from Chris Buttars. That guy is amazingly stupid and yet always seems to get elected in his area. He is an embarrassment to the whole state.
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