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The Clinton administration began with Hillary Ramrod Clinton and the National Health Care Crisis. Eighteen months and a $50 million expense account later, White House spin doctors stuffed a sock in Hillary Ramrod Clinton's mouth and the National Health Care Crisis vanished like a puff of smoke in a mirror. President Bubba Clinton fought the War on Drugs with twice the budget of all US medical research combined. Drugs won. Drugs are still winning.
When not dallying with Monica Lewinsky, Clinton fancied himself the Education President. 30% of high school students drop out. Teenage pregnancy is at an all time high. The average high school graduate cannot read its diploma. International academic competition among nations' best high schoolers quantitatively ranks the best US product along with that of Sierra Leone.
30% of the population cannot be educated, unchanged from 1823 and McGuffy's Eclectic Primer. Ask your English teacher what (giggle, snort) "eclectic" means. Does your English teacher even speak English? Unlimited resources are directed toward idiots. This is "compassion" and "diversity." The Gifted are starved, hunted, drugged, and destroyed. This is "equality" and "nondiscrimination." The end result of all this, like the fall of Rome, is "bad luck."
The solution to the results of American zero-goal education easing adolescence into obsolescence is obvious. I support a total delegalization of primary and secondary education - the War on Education. It is the only thing that might save it.
We start by declaring pornography. Porn preys upon young minds, turning them into loose pudding and their owners into ravenous animals obsessed with meeting Monica Lewinsky. All pornography comes from the Internet. As a matter of national security, the Internet is declared to be 100% pornography. State censors may now shut up and go home. Queer Nation may recruit elsewhere as a glut of heterosexual satiety fills adolescent minds at through a Cable modem. This will adversely impact sales of printed porn and get untold numbers of sexual deviates off the streets and in front of their computers where they belong. Vice Squads will be reassigned to bothering dangerous criminals. Kids in high school and college can get their rocks off and get back to studying.
The second goal is to recruit a few million National Education Militia from Black and Brown homeboys and the homeless - which is all of them. They will be heavily armed (or bring their own toys for a wage credit), be given an hour of video instruction, fitted with tailored uniforms rich with gold braid and colored insignia, and assigned to all schools. Once there they will do something or other (and be bored and take drugs). What good is an obscene Federal outlay unless it is overspent?
The third goal is to rework all standardized testing so that the heinous discrimination of demanding objective knowledge is supplanted by the kinder and gentler inquiry about subjective skills empowerment. Everybody gets an A! In a bold stroke all education problems will be remediated. Former dropouts earn life experience credit and graduate on time - zero dropout rate! US students' participation in international academic competitions will be legislated as a munition - export will be treason punishable by a firing squad (and no Death Row 30 years of appeals crap, either. Try, convict, execute; next case).
All post-secondary education will be declared college. All empowered scholars (it takes a village to have village idiots) will get full Federal scholarships that will be forgiven on graduation day. Everybody goes to college!
Almost everybody. There will be that recalcitrant 10% with IQs exceeding 132 who endanger the entirety of Liberally enlightened, reconstructed social engineering. The Gifted and the Severely Gifted, despite 45 years of relentless Great Society culling, stubbornly resist extermination. If they cannot be drugged into fitness (Ritalin, Adderall, Atenolol, Zoloft), they shall be set aside in special education camps. Their Social Security numbers will be disempowered. They will be ineligible for all Federal aid. They will be worked to death, their body fat rendered to lubricate the gears of a fair and generous society. This is to say, "nothing will change, and at tremendous additional expense."
The War on Education will with 21st century political propinquity replay the US panic of the late 1950s re Sputnik. Federally deputized Education Tiger Teams will infiltrate every school, institute, academy, lyceum, and coven of literates. The Gifted and the Severely Gifted will be identified and confiscated. Formidable desert education camps ringed with high fences, razor wire, and mine fields will be constructed of recycled wall board. Those who would by their intellectual prowess set themselves above others will be allowed muted citizenship as they work off their debt to society throughout their lives. The War on Education will be won!
It is nothing we don't do now, really. All we require is the will to attach a bigger price tag, a "no return" policy, and the foresight to clear our prisons of basically harmless murderers, rapists, and the like to make room for truly dangerous political prisoners.
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