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A state senate committee has just approved an expansion of Colorado's school-attendance law. Under the current law, a child does not have to start school until he is 7. With the proposed new law, truancy starts at age 5, which makes kindergarten mandatory.
On the same day that this Colorado bill moved forward, the U.S. Department of Education released yet another set of dismal statistics, taken from a random and widespread sampling of American high-school seniors.
Most of them could not find Southeast Asia on a map. Half did not know that the Panama Canal shortens the nautical distance between New York and San Francisco. A third did not know that the Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of Mexico. The cause of the earth's seasons is an abiding cosmic mystery to 32 percent, and so forth.
Here we have a federal agency with unassailable evidence that school attendance produces not knowledge, but ignorance: those surveyed, were seniors, not drop-outs, which means they have been attending class.
Here we also have our own tight-fisted state legislature wanting children to spend more time in school, even though it will cost Colorado taxpayers an additional $13 million a year.
This didn't make since at first, but I think I've discovered the connection -- why everybody in the American power structure wants kids to spend more time in school, even when they come out ignorant.
For instance, young men recently graduated from high
school will not know the difference between Nicaragua and
National Security. The next time President Bush runs into
domestic hot water and decides to divert attention with a
Just Cause
invasion of some banana republic, these
ignorant young men will not protest. Instead, they'll rush
to enlist.
Governor Romer must be for it, since this is an election
year. People who didn't spend much time in school might be
aware that Colorado's unemployment rate remains
considerably above the national average, and they might be
dubious about claims of economic development
during
the past four years.
But those who benefited from 13 years of American education probably won't know that 5.6 percent is greater than 5.3 percent, and they'll figure that Romer has been doing a great job and deserves another term.
American industry will also benefit from more schooling. As a Denver Public Schools administrator explained, early childhood education (that is, starting school at 5) helps youngsters develop habits needed for later school success.
As I recall, such habits include standing quietly in line, believing everything you are told by someone in authority, brown-nosing the teacher, and memorizing approved printed material.
Those also represent the habits of dutiful and docile workers who won't ever join unions, complain about workplace hazards, file lawsuits about pay inequity, or wonder why the CEO is pulling down $5 million a year even when the company is downsizing and losing money.
It all comes together. Kids that stay home might acquire bad attitudes from their parents (the parent at home obviously has an attitude problem -- if the parent were a normal American, the career would come first, not the child).
So make sure the kids spend even more time in school, where they won't learn any useful facts, nor any systematic way to organize and deploy information. But they will learn to stand in line and to accept whatever they are told as gospel. Thus presidents will have armies, governors will keep their jobs and industry will enjoy a pliant workforce.
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