State of the Union - Rebuttal from the Real World

“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” –Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the U.S.

Here, we continue discussion of POTUS' fatuous "State of the Union" address. We were at:

4. Last time, discussing the cancerous effect of taxation necessary to support a Brobdingnagian military, I included that having to do with our youth. Of the president’s entire address, probably, no part was more deliberately dissimulating than his remarks concerning “No Child Left Behind.” It typifies the society as a whole, and its government as a factor in what has become our national decline.

In fact, the nation's decline has uniformly paralleled the concomitant decline in its educational system. If you're surprised, you don't know a hell of a lot about the importance of intellect to any nation. "If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization," Thomas Jefferson observed, "it expects what never was and never will be."

They're related, all right.

It happens that in keeping with an investigatory practice that has been mine for a lifetime, I recently taught school for two years. You see, I’ve suspected long since that education is still another example of a system within a system that is a microcosm of the society and its government. Just as a mathematician or statistician can learn of the workings of an equation by factoring, the investigator can often learn about what’s happening in a society or nation by studying – becoming a part of - one its parts.

What, I wondered, was going on in education? I found out, I can tell you that. And – guess what? - the disease the honest investigator will find in our school system is one found everywhere within the societal system that is the United States. It’s socialism, all right; socialism that has been overcome by socialism, politically correct by our political correctness.

In the increasingly spastic U.S. system of education, “no child left behind” means that everyone in the class must wait while the slowest learns what the rest have already learned. Like the fact of physics and mathematics that says nothing within a system can be done alone – i.e., -have effect only on itself – “no child left behind” means inevitably that like an army impeded by women in its ranks must slow its march, the nation must wait while the handicapped learn.

Of course, WE decided this. It sounds so democratic, so humane, so good, so “loving.” It sounds, in fact, so much so that one may not think further. Here, in fact, the truth – be its demonstration or proof as overwhelming in size and scope as continents, nations, language groups, or cultures - is held to be odious – illegal, even. Spoken aloud, or written for publication, in fact, it is “hate speech.” Inasmuch as all races, cultures, creeds, sexes and sexual preferences must be treated as equals, all must also be treated as mental equals. No exceptions. “No child left behind.”

Of course, it is utter nonsense logically, an invented campaign “issue” created by politicians and intended for use in base demagoguery. It is nonsense that foretells and explains the decline of our nation, too. Like the “analysts” who either awarded with kudos or brickbats the president’s maddeningly oblivious - can you believe he ignored New Orleans? - State of the Union speech, all concerned with “no child left behind” have their special – racial, cultural, religious, political interests, interests that are, to them, of paramount importance.

Like the feminists of a few decades ago, none of those “issues” include the welfare or future of the children. Need I remind us all that the future of our children IS the future of the nation?

I don’t suppose – that’s another way of saying all the same things, isn’t it? That’s okay, it’s apropos. When I left the teaching profession, you see, it was under fire. Assigned an eight grade class suddenly abandoned by a teacher who quit a few weeks into the school year, I learned the reason for his departure immediately. That’s the first day. Arriving at the class room, I found the place in shambles. That’s literally. The walls, for instance, had been kicked in; in fact, holes had in several place been kicked through into the next classroom.

The class - twenty-one pupils, all but four of whom were Hispanic – simply could not be brought to order. That’s any kind of order. Few of the students could be silenced, even by yelling over them. NO school work was possible – none. Everyone in the room ignored me completely. Only by means of a tape recorder purchased during my lunch period was I able to establish any kind of order – and that didn’t amount to much. The students – and it’s on the recorder’s tape – were willing to state that they simply had no fear of being held responsible for their actions.

“Nobody,” one young woman – she and four of the boys in the class were fifteen (one sixteen) years of age – said archly, “cares.” I would soon have no doubt that she must be right.

The second day, still hoping to establish some semblance of order, I went to the rear of the room where the young woman I just mentioned and one of the young men were engaged in apparently passionate sexual foreplay. That, incidentally, included his hand inserted down the front of her unbuttoned jeans. The class, of course, was understandably distracted.

When I had separated the two, then ordered the youth to the front of the room and approached him, he suddenly flicked out a clenched fist in the old tactic commonly known as a “sucker punch.” It’s nasty, a street-fighter tactic intended to at once inflict stunning injury and permit the administering of a fearsome beating to a victim rendered no longer able to respond.

His punch caught, my would-be assailant was armlocked and delivered to the door, where he was ordered to report to the school administration office. When I had followed him there after calling assistance, I found myself “on the carpet.” “Violence,” I was instructed, would not be tolerated. I said I agreed. Wholeheartedly. I said good-bye, too. You could say that I left that child, and those children, behind, and I relate the experience because it tells us much about the U.S. system of education today. It tells us a great deal – perhaps everything that’s necessary – about the nation itself. It tells us, you see, not only about the municipal and country consolidated system where I taught, it tells us about the Texas School system of which it is a part.

And it tells us about parents of our children. It tells us that these same parents care so little, being too busy to bother, about their children that they refuse them discipline. It tells us also that they care in the same manner so little about their society and nation – being likewise too busy to bother - that they tolerate not only the cynical pronouncements of politicians, politicians like their inexorably determined and murderous president, but the relentlessly sinking condition of their country.

The state of the union is that its public – just like parents of children in Texas’ Schools - doesn’t care enough to do what is required to restore and maintain order. There are too many excuses, too many distractions, too many “issues.” There are too many politically correct ideas and ideologies to be served – nitwit nostrums cynically served by programs like “no child left behind.”

The sickness, born of racial, cultural, and gender-related political factionalism, has effects everywhere. In a way similar to the way factors in an equation relate, increase or diminish, one another, factions in a society and nation have their effect on it. You don't, for instance, rescue your soldiers from the impossible quagmire the government has delivered them into in Iraq for the same reason you don't rescue your children from the bedlam you've made for them in our schools. You don't care that much.

You don't care, and that is the one failing nature never fails to punish decisively.

Recently, my wife, a master teacher of forty years experience, was obliged by the state education system to attend classes - classes in which she was taught (extremely poorly; you’d expect that, wouldn’t you?) how to fend off violent assault by her pupils (think about the microcosm that represents).

How on god’s green earth have we come to such a state?! Why, it’s the “State of the Union.” And we got there because of things like “no child left behind.”

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”