P.J. O'Rourke: Dangerous Extremist
End Them, Don’t Mend Them | The Weekly Standard:America’s public schools have served their purpose. Free and compulsory education was good for a somewhat unpromising young nation. The country was half turnip-head hillbilly and half slum trash from foreign refuse heaps. Public schools were supposed to take this mob of no-account pea pickers and bumbling greaseballs and turn them into a half-bright national citizenry. It worked, causing six or eight generations of public school kids to rush home to their shanties or tenements shouting, “Everything’s up-to-date in Kansas City!” or “Mom, Dad, this is America, quit boiling cabbage!”
Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by that very American item, the Internet, a few rudiments is all anyone cares to have. As for the idea of America, everybody’s got it now, all over the world. I’ve had a cab driver in New York who got the idea of America in a country so remote that not only had I never heard of it, neither had he. I don’t know if this cab driver’s reading level was at or above proficient, but his math skills were well-displayed on the taxi meter after he took me from JFK to Manhattan by way of the Brooklyn Belt Parkway. I’ll bet he sends his kids to private school.
A cogent argument for closing all the schools, firing all the teachers & administrators, and giving people the $15 grand they're pissing away on the foregoing. Couched in humor, of course, this being P.J.
Kinda-sorta related: Comic Sans Has Had Enough Of Your Attitude.
(h/t GVDL, who moonlights as The Most Interesting Man in the World.)
Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by that very American item, the Internet, a few rudiments is all anyone cares to have. As for the idea of America, everybody’s got it now, all over the world. I’ve had a cab driver in New York who got the idea of America in a country so remote that not only had I never heard of it, neither had he. I don’t know if this cab driver’s reading level was at or above proficient, but his math skills were well-displayed on the taxi meter after he took me from JFK to Manhattan by way of the Brooklyn Belt Parkway. I’ll bet he sends his kids to private school.
A cogent argument for closing all the schools, firing all the teachers & administrators, and giving people the $15 grand they're pissing away on the foregoing. Couched in humor, of course, this being P.J.
Kinda-sorta related: Comic Sans Has Had Enough Of Your Attitude.
(h/t GVDL, who moonlights as The Most Interesting Man in the World.)