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One of the few blessings of age is that I no longer need to pay much attention to the latest fads of our public schools. There was a time, before my daughters were graduated from high school, that I attended nearly every meeting of the District R-32J Board of Education, and afterwards Kirby Perschbacher and I would convene a more pleasant session: our own meeting of the Salida School Board Monitoring Commission at the Victoria Tavern.
Now the younger daughter, Abby, is at the University of Colorado at Denver and of legal age so that she can assist one of her professors, a Dr. Tom Noel, in explicating the lore of Centennial State taprooms. Her older sister, Columbine, received a college degree this spring; thanks to Colorado's booming economy, she has enjoyed the opportunity to fill a part-time position waiting tables.
So my limited civic attention has focused on other matters, like suing the city council for violating the state open-meetings law. That's probably just as well, because I'm really confused by the start of this school year.
We can start at Mancos, a small town in the Four Corners area near Mesa Verde. For more than a dozen years, the local Lions Club has raised money by sponsoring a summer gun show, held at the school because it's one of the few buildings in Mancos big enough to accommodate the event.
In rural Colorado, you can probably find more people opposed to dances in school gyms than opposed to gun shows, but this year, the alarms went out.
An area resident named Frank Lister wrote to the school
board. You can't imagine my shock, dismay and disgust
at such a total reckless disregard for the well-being of
children.
The question arises: Is it the gun show in and of itself that endangers children, or is it merely the location that is the problem?
Lister continued that A gun show held in a public
school is absolutely wrong in this day and age,
and he
was joined by one Nancy Johansen of Durango, who said
Connecting schools and guns is the wrong message to give
a kid.
So it's the location. Apparently, school represents all that is good and noble, guns signify unvarnished evil, and if a gun show is held in a school building, then the wholesome aura of the school will cloak the malign patina of the guns, and children will grow up to -- to do what?
Try as I might, I find it difficult to imagine a
scenario where some violent felon offers this defense: I
was able to control my youthful lust for firearms when they
held the gun show out at the county fairgrounds, but then
when they held one at the school, I figured they were
telling me that it was be okay to buy guns and go out and
maim and kill people.
The Mancos fuss is one facet of the bigger problem: Adults take school much more seriously than kids do.
For instance, my fellow Baby Boomers and I received heavy doses of propaganda in our early school years: America was a peace-loving nation which fought only virtuous defensive wars, marijuana was a guaranteed route to heroin addiction, and J. Edgar Hoover represented the pinnacle of virtue.
The result: A bunch of anti-war protesters who experimented with drugs while opposing the FBI. If you'd been trying to produce something for generations of Republicans to run against, you couldn't have done better than our wholesome and patriotic curriculum.
Further, we played with guns (squirt guns, cap pistols,
BB guns) when we were kids and watched violent TV programs
(Tom and Jerry
cartoons, The Untouchables
)
whenever we could. If the modern theorists are right, none
of us should have ever sprouted love beads or peace
signs.
On that account, I'm not alarmed by a recent decision by the Kansas state board of education which pretty much eliminates the teaching of evolution in that state's public schools.
Creationists may hail it as a victory in their battle to inflict their religious doctrines on the entire public. But if experience is any guide, the next world-class evolutionary biologist will emerge from the public schools of the Sunshine State.
Or we can ponder the D.A.R.E. program. Despite the
millions of dollars and hours devoted to indoctrinating
schoolchildren with holistic refusal skills,
the
federal government still feels compelled to wage secret
wars in Colombia against the drug supply side, obvious
evidence that the school-based campaign against the demand
side hasn't worked.
So as another school year starts, I'm glad to be out of it. Given how our schools really work, whatever I agitated for would doubtless produce the precise opposite of what I wanted.
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